PILLAR
Books That Changed My Thinking
I’m not here to hand you a “best books of the year” list. Those lists never helped me — they just made my to-read pile longer and my actual reading slower.
What I write about instead is narrower and more useful: the specific books that made me stop and reread a sentence, the ideas that quietly changed how I work or live, and the reading habits that finally stuck after years of starting books I never finished.
Sometimes one line from a book stays with me for months. Those are the ones I write about here — not summaries, not chapter rundowns, just the parts that actually mattered and why.
These aren’t book reviews. They’re about the messy part — how I actually read, forget, quit, and start again:
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Is Readwise Worth It If You’re Not a Power User?
A few mornings ago I opened my daily review and stopped on this: “Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster.” — Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks Here’s the strange part. I didn’t highlight that line. I’ve been…
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The Book to Get Out of a Reading Slump Is Smaller Than You Think
The two books that pushed me into my reading slump are still on my shelf. Deep Work and Atomic Habits — both abandoned somewhere around the first-quarter mark, both with bookmarks I’m too honest to remove. So when I finally went looking for a book to get out of a reading slump, I almost made…
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How to Focus While Reading (When Your Brain Has Nothing Left)
Last night I read the same paragraph four times. Not a difficult paragraph. A novel I actually like. Somewhere between the second and third attempt, my hand had already picked up my phone. I don’t remember deciding to. If you’ve searched “how to focus while reading,” you’ve probably already read the standard advice. Put your…
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How to Remember What You Read (When You’ve Given Up on Remembering Everything)
I once owned a whole set of colored highlighters, marked up every book I read, and remembered almost none of it. Half the time, the remembering problem starts earlier — I couldn’t even stay focused on the page long enough to have something worth keeping. The system was supposed to be foolproof. Highlight the good…
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I Haven’t Finished the Two Books That Were Supposed to Fix Me. I’m Not Giving Up on Them Either.
There are two books on my shelf with a bookmark stuck around the one-quarter mark, and they’ve been sitting like that for a long time. Atomic Habits. Deep Work. I didn’t abandon them because they were bad. That’s the part that took me a while to understand. Bad books are easy to quit — you…
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I’m in a Reading Slump. I’ve Stopped Trying to Fix It.
Half a year has gone by and I haven’t finished a single book the way I’d hoped to. Not for lack of trying. There’s a stack on my nightstand — three started, none past the halfway mark. I pick one up, read a page, realize I’ve absorbed nothing, and put it back down. Some nights…
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I’m a Slow Reader Trying to Read More. So I Did Something a Little Embarrassing.
I read slowly. Not “I wish I read more” slowly. I mean I can sit with a book for thirty minutes and realize I’ve read the same paragraph three times because my mind wandered off to something I forgot to reply to. I’ve been like this for more than two years. Long enough that I…
Want the short version?
See the three things I’m actually using right now — one for thinking, one for reading, one for the space I work in.