Twelve Ways to Read Books Like a Bird Podcast

Why do so many of us still read? After all, there are now dozens of alternative ways to entertain or improve ourselves. Can a good book still compete with a blockbuster movie or an addictive computer game? Finding the time to sit down to read alone feels harder than ever, and too often we gradually lose our cherished habit.
That would be a mistake. In this essay, I’ll argue for more books and share twelve different ways to read them. Some of these may seem obvious, but a few of them might make you feel hungry to devour your next pile of books. I’ve also written a recommended reading list, with over 200 books across twenty genres, each with a ten-word review.
Read with total freedom.
There are too few areas of our lives that we genuinely get to control. Most of us wake up earlier than we’d like to, then race to hit deadlines and appointments and make hundreds of daily compromises to keep others happy. Sometimes, we don’t even get to choose the movies or music we need to match our shifting mood.
But nobody gets to control what we read.
The books we choose and how we decide to read them are an oasis of pure, indulgent freedom. Books uniquely put us in charge, allowing us to slow down and dwell on new truths or to speed past or skip tired ideas. This rare freedom is what we need more of in our lives.
Nobody can judge us for keeping five or ten different books on the go at the same time. Like tapas on a Mediterranean break, we can endlessly snack on a diet of fiction and non-fiction—Yeats on the park bench, Amis before dinner, Austen in bed. Libraries are free, and all are now online, so everyone has access to an unlimited stream of fresh books. And if you don’t like your local selection, you can even ask a friend in a fancier zip code to lend you their login details.
Life is too short to continue with a dull book. If you find a book opaque or challenging to get through, it’s the author’s fault, not yours, so please move on. If they could think clearly, they would write more clearly, but alarmingly few do. Reading a different chapter of ten books is often more rewarding than reading ten chapters of one book. 
Modern life rarely offers us pure freedom, so we must indulge in the serendipity of reading books.
Richard Powers captured this freedom wistfully in this passage from Bewilderment:
“My son loved the library. He loved putting books on hold online and having them waiting, bundled up with his name, when he came for them. He loved the benevolence that the stacks held out, their map of the known world. He loved the all-you-can-eat buffet of borrowing. He loved the lending histories stamped into the front of each book, the record of strangers who checked them out before him. The library was the best dungeon crawl imaginable: free loot for the finding, combined with the joy of leveling up.”
Read to be alone.
We can only know ourselves once we deliberately carve out space to spend time alone. Books are perhaps the best way to be alone. They provide just enough company to keep the wolf of loneliness from the door yet still demand our active introspection. A good book gently pulls our attention between the characters, the author, and inevitably ourselves at a pace that creates space for self-compassion. Do we sometimes act like this? Are we also, perhaps, too jealous or too forgiving? Possibly. Read on.
With a day of solitude and a pile of books, we can enjoy aloneness, the happy cousin of loneliness. In his 1905 essay “On Reading,” Marcel Proust captured it well:
 “With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends—books—it’s because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: ‘What did they think of us?’—‘Did we make a mistake and say something tactless?’—‘Did they like us?’—nor is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement by s