The Forge Guide to Reading Better
How to Read
Humans have only been reading for 5,000 years, and we’re not that good at it yet
Congratulations, humanity, on learning how to read! It took a long time — about 300,000 years — but it finally clicked. In the last 5,000 years that we’ve been reading, we haven’t missed a single year! It’s been one long reading fest.
Who wants a pizza party?!
When it comes to reading, we are, all of us, the evolutionary equivalent of a six-year-old. The timeline would suggest we have a lot of potential for improvement. We at Forge have been exploring how to get even better at reading: How to read more, and how to enjoy it more. How to remember what we read. How to pick a book out of the hundreds of thousands that are published each year.
We’re not talking about reading hacks, like playing your audio book at double speed or cleaving your books in two to make them easier to transport, although I’ve personally done both of these things. (A learning: Don’t play George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo at double speed. It loses a certain something.) We’re more interested in ways to enrich our reading, to get more out of what we read.
We think becoming a stronger reader comes down to four steps:
