This is seemingly the sort of productivity non-content that I’ve been avoiding since I can remember: from early days of Lifehacker and other shovelblogs (12 posts a day about organising your Hipster PDA) through to the low-value self-Taylorism that comprises half of all Medium posts today.
Happy to be wrong. There’s no magic bullet here that’s going to help you read more. Nor is it a prescriptive list of
you should reads. Instead it stands as a counter-point to the ‘read what you fancy, when you fancy it’ approach advocated by the likes of
Alan Jacobs.
Slava Akhmechet talks about reading books in clusters of five on a single topic, or heavily overlapping topics, layering each book on top of the other as a sort of subtractive venn diagram for you to develop a lens or instrument through which to view the world. The idea is that you’ve picked something by you’re fascinated and delved further into it than you ordinarily might; incredibly few people will have read those same five books, especially in such a short space of time, which gives you a (truly) unique insight. If you’re a regular, consistent reader then this quickly multiplies over time.