The Making of The Art of the Read

The Art of the Read did not begin with an outline. It began with a pressure.

I had spent years reading in fragments - on flights, in waiting rooms, late at night, under circumstances that were rarely ideal and sometimes deeply unsettling. Reading wasn’t something I did for pleasure alone; it was something I leaned on. Gradually, a question kept returning: what exactly is reading doing to us - when it works?

That question refused to stay quiet.

I didn’t sit down to “write a book about reading.” I started writing notes to myself. Then longer reflections. Then arguments that demanded to be tested. By the time I realized this was becoming a manuscript, it had already chosen its temperament: reflective, unruly, resistant to neat packaging.

The opening chapters - especially the one that looks backward at books through history - were written less like research and more like excavation.

Before talking about how we read, I felt compelled to talk about books themselves: clay tablets, palm leaves, parchment, monasteries, libraries burned and rebuilt. I wasn’t chasing academic completeness. I was chasing a feeling - what it must have meant, across centuries, to entrust thought to an object.

Sources piled up chaotically: fragments of JSTOR papers, digital museum archives, half-remembered UNESCO exhibits, even the occasional travel video watched at an unreasonable hour. I rewrote the story of Alexandria several times, not because the facts changed, but because the tone didn’t feel worthy yet.

I wasn’t trying to be scholarly. I was trying to be reverent.

I assumed the chapter on the science of reading would be straightforward. I was wrong.

Trying to explain how reading works - neuronally, cognitively, emotionally - without drowning the reader in jargon turned out to be one of the hardest tasks in the book. I read more neuroscience primers than novels for a while. I wrestled with how to talk about saccades, memory encoding, and theory of mind without sounding like a textbook.

Somewhere between Maryanne Wolf and Haruki Murakami, between diagrams of the angular gyrus and margin notes scribbled years ago, the chapter found its footing.

Other chapters resisted in different ways. Writing for engineers required structure without rigidity. Writing for artists demanded openness without indulgence. Writing for professionals meant respecting their time without diluting complexity. Each section pushed back, insisting on its own language.

That resistance was a gift. It forced me to slow down and listen.

Some chapters were written under conditions I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

There were periods when reading - and writing about reading - was not an intellectual exercise, but a way of staying oriented. Jail cells. Hospital waiting rooms. Long nights after loss. Quiet mornings when the house hadn’t yet woken up, and the only company was a book and a chipped cup of tea.

I didn’t set out to write a book shaped by these moments. But they shaped it anyway.

They taught me that reading is not always about learning. Sometimes it is about endurance. Sometimes it is about company. And sometimes it is simply about having something steady to return to when the rest of life feels unsteady.

If the book feels sprawling at times, that is not an accident.

I struggled with the temptation to over-optimize - to turn reading into a system, a checklist, a productivity protocol. The chapters on habit, speed, and retention were especially dangerous territory. It took multiple rewrites to keep them from becoming technocratic.

Even the index tells this story. I didn’t tag references diligently as I wrote. When the time came to build concordances across hundreds of pages, I improvised. Some names were missed. Some beloved books slipped through the cracks. I noticed too late that The Catcher in the Rye had disappeared entirely.

I decided to leave the imperfection visible.

Reading, after all, resists total order. And pretending otherwise would have betrayed the book’s core argument.

I know now that reading is not a skill we acquire once and for all. It is a practice we renegotiate across phases of life.

I know that rereading is often more important than finishing. That pleasure is not the enemy of seriousness. That attention cannot be bullied into existence - it must be invited.

And I know that the most important reading habit is not discipline, but return.

This book is finished, but the work it points to is not.

If you’ve found your way here, you’re likely someone who reads not to accumulate, but to steady yourself - to think more clearly, feel more deeply, or simply stay present in a noisy world.

If this book keeps you company for a while, that is more than enough.

A longer, more unruly version of this reflection appears at the end of the book itself. This page is just a doorway.

Thank you for stepping through.