My 2019 Book Experiment

Published in

It's Your Turn

4 min readDec 5, 2019

Books are, hands down, one of the best investments of your time you can find. When you think about it, it’s the distilled knowledge of one person’s (usually significant) time and energy on a subject, designed to help you understand something better (in the case of non-fiction). To get really logical on it, you are paying cents per page for someone’s wisdom.

I’m a book nut. I realised in the winter of 2018 that if I was to spend a week reading each book on my Kindle it would take me 6 straight years. And that doesn’t include my physical books, articles, esssays…

So I have started trying different strategies for reading. For example, in 2018 I read all of Seth Godins books and in 2019 I decided to break down a selection of books that had been on my Kindle into 3–4 categories and to read one from each category per month. I did pretty well, reading 30 books, listening to 4 audiobooks, and watching my system sometimes fail me when there something irresistible that came my way (I’m looking at you Three Body Problem and Wise Mans Fear).

The full is list is below, but a few standout books I would highly recommend include:

Flatland was written by an English schoolmaster, Edwin A. Abbott. It tells the story of “A Square”, who is an inhabitant of “Flatland”, a two-dimensional world where women are portrayed as simple line-segments and men are represented as polygons whose social status is determined by the number and regularity of their sides.

I know. Super nerdy. But this framing introduces all kinds of wonderful thought experiments.

Abbott’s goal was to satirize the arbitrary hierarchy of the Victorian era and ended up examining the bounds of physical space. Lots of fun and strange things happen and it definitely activated my thinking face.

Factfulness by Hans Rosling, which has the subtitle “Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About The World — And Why Things Are Better Than You Think” not only filled me full of hope about the state of the world, but it made me realise how easily statistics can be misunderstood, or worse, used against, us. It’s a funny book that helps the reader understand the numbers we see everyday with a light touch.

A Job to Love by The School of Life (created by Alain de Botton) is a truthful and caring book that looks at the modern travails of those looking for fulfilling and meaningful work. It helpfully reframes the search and offers ways that we might rethink how we fill the work-shaped hole in our lives.

Here is the list of books and audiobooks I read for reference. I haven’t included any notes, to keep this post short (and also, most of these books have great free Kindle highlights)

Atomic Habits by James Clear surpasses Charles Duhiggs The Power of Habit by a country mile. It forces you to look closer at your “default settings” in areas of your life such as work and health and to consider what it might look like if you upgraded these habits. Every page is densely packed with actionable information. This will be referenced for years to come.

Here is the full list:

Personal Development

General Interest

Spirituality/Philosophy

Business

Audiobooks:

So that’s it! Was my experiment a success? It certainly helped to know which book I was picking up next and stopped me from ditching books on a whim, never to return. However, it did mean that I had little of the book-serendipity that I’ve enjoyed in years past.

I have a few ideas for reading experiments to run this year, and please do let me know in the comments if you have any of your own!

Originally published at http://conormccarthy.me on December 5, 2019.

My 2019 Book Experiment

Written by Conor McCarthy