Three Types of Reading (And Suggested Books for Each)

It’s a question I encounter often: How can I read more? Or in a similar vein, how can I come to enjoy reading enough that I do more of it? How can I become a committed reader?

There is nothing intrinsically valuable in reading, of course. There is no innate benefit in simply picking up any book and working your way through it. Yet there is tremendous benefit in reading good books and a lot of pleasure to be found in reading interesting ones. While my reading habits tend to ebb and flow, varying between moderate and voracious, I have been a committed reader from my youngest days. And to maintain my interest, I have found it helpful to divide books into three broad categories: slow, fast, and fun.

The first category is books to read slowly. These are the books that we want to retain so they make a long-term impact on our lives. This means we need to read them carefully. We need to linger over them, ponder them, and apply them. We probably need to read them slowly and even repeatedly, capture some highlights, and jot down some notes. We need to apply the good reading habits we encounter in books like Adler’s How to Read a Book or Reinke’s Lit!. Most readers develop their own system for marking up their books, capturing the key ideas, and reviewing them on an ongoing basis. (Here’s mine)

The third category is books to read for fun. These are the books we read for pleasure, curiosity, or interest. We don’t read them because we expect them to make a long-term impact on our lives and we don’t care how much we remember about them in the future. We don’t take notes or even bother to take the cap off the highlighter. We read for the sake of reading them, for the sake of entertainment, relaxation, or inquisitiveness. Of course, it’s possible that we find something important in them or something we mean to remember and apply. But even if we don’t, the book has not been a waste.

The second category sits between them: books to read quickly. These are the books that may have a good bit of value, but they are either not as good as some of the books you have already labored over or they fall into a category that is already plenty familiar to you. If you have read one foundational book on the Trinity, and then followed it with two or three other solid titles, you may still have some interest in the topic, but it may not be worth laboring over yet another one. Hence, you may read that new book quickly, looking mostly to see how the author expresses the same ideas in different ways. Or perhaps, since you have read an academic-level study of a topic, you understand that it makes sense to read the popular-level treatments at a brisker pace. Well and good. It is fine to read quickly.

One of the keys to reading well and reading more is to determine how much attention to give a book. There are many books, even Christian books, that are worth only a relatively quick read. I have often found that people who struggle to read tend to mix these three categories or neglect the second. They assume that every book is worth the same amount of effort and then linger over books that aren’t worth lingering over. They often also fail to read for the simple pleasure of reading—to find books that require little of their minds and can be read for the sheer delight of reading.

Let me then suggest 10 books to read slowly and then 10 to read quickly. The other category will depend a fair bit on your prior reading, so I will leave it to you to find those.

Here are 10 books to read slowly: