Expand Your Horizons: Why You Should Read More in 2022 – and How to Build a Reading Habit

How (and Why) I Read 61 Books Last Year

Blue tinted photograph of a small marquee board that says "Stay Curious." In the background is a tower of books.

I love to read. Truly.

It’s one of the great pleasures in my life.

Reading allows me access to ideas and opinions from writers across the globe – and across time. It expands my mind, helps me empathize with folks different from me, and feeds my soul. Professionally, a good book accelerates my business, helping me try out new strategies and tactics and avoid others’ mistakes.

I could wax poetic about reading – and in fact, I’ve already started. Before I bore you too, too much with my own relationship to literature, let me make a case for why I think you should read more this year. Then, if you’ll indulge me, I can help you build your own reading habit. Finally, in an act of both narcissism and building on my own records, I’ll share with you the books I read this year – and which ones particularly stuck out to me.


“Books allowed me to see a world beyond the front porch of my grandmother’s shotgun house…[and] the power to see possibilities beyond what was allowed at the time.” - Oprah Winfrey


Why Reading is Leading: Read “Moar” Books

Did anyone else have a “Read and Lead” program in school? Over the summer, we were asked to catalog the books we read. With an adults’ signature, we would receive rewards – pencils, stickers, and the coveted personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut.

I was a fastidious child – and an avid reader. My poor mother would have to request extra reading slips so that I could write down everything I read. (Clearly, this has been an obsession for quite some time.) But beyond my love of reading and quantifying what I read, there are real benefits to picking up a book (see footnotes for the relevant studies).

  1. Reading Makes You More Open-Minded

    Books help you live more lives than the one you’re given. These new experiences help develop an open mind, which ties into empathy below.

  2. Reading is Associated with Living Longer

    Multiple studies show a correlation between longevity and reading (an example below). Not only does reading reduce stress, but it slows cognitive decline and appears to protect against diseases like Alzheimer’s.

  3. Readers are Better Leaders

    Reading helps you understand others’ minds. It allows you to “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.” Verbal intelligence, empathy, and knowledge are all associated with being a better leader. Harvard Business Review has a great, short piece on leadership and literacy.

Healthline shares some more benefits, including lowered stress, improved brain connectivity, lower blood pressure, and reduced risk of cognitive decline as you age.


How to Build a Reading Habit

The most successful among us seem to read the most:

  • Warren Buffett spends as much as five or six hours a day reading

  • Bill Gates reads 50 books a year

  • Mark Cuban reads for 3+ hours every day

Of course, these folks aren’t just reading books. They’re reading newspapers, corporate reports, research papers, and more. But, books are a great place to start.

So how do you build a reading habit around your busy life? Start small.

Perhaps it’s just 2 pages with your morning coffee. Or 15 minutes before you go to bed.

Or listening to an audiobook on your commute.

I personally like to build my habits daily. Doing something every day is easier for me to do than, say, every other day. Or only on the weekends. I started a great book this year by one of my favorite authors and speakers, Jen Sincero: Badass Habits: Cultivate the Awareness, Boundaries, and Daily Upgrades You Need to Make Them Stick. I was in a funk and felt like I couldn’t accomplish anything worthwhile. Those feelings faded, and I remembered how to build a habit that had fallen to the wayside during COVID: eating well. I no longer needed Jen’s badass support, but I still have the book for those times when I’m feeling powerless to affect change in my life.

For more tips on how to read more, check out my post “How to Read More.”


In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you. - Mortimer J. Adler


The Books of 2022

With so many things to read (and watch and listen to), it’s important that you enjoy the media that you’re consuming. This year, I tried to be more intentional with the books that I finished. This year, more than any other, I started many books that I didn’t complete. Some of them bored me. But with most of them, I found that I was reading them at the wrong time. Trying to read something heavy when Delta was surging. Or trying something light when I needed something deep and intellectual to occupy my mind.

Thus, my biggest piece of advice is to quit.

Just quit. If you’re not finding joy in what you’re reading, you should simply stop.

Life is too short.

Now, there have been some books that were difficult for me. A Swim in the Pond in the Rain was challenging. It’s a collection of Russian short stories from the 1800s followed by an analysis of each piece by a writer and professor. I found I could only read one short story and analysis per day. Each story was so weighty and each analysis was so in-depth that I needed time to process. I could read one a day – max. Yet, I found joy in reading them.

So, with that caveat out of the way, my top 3 business books of the year:

  1. A Swim in the Pond in the Rain - George Saunders

  2. Daring Greatly - Brené Brown

  3. Rich Dad, Poor Dad - Robert T. Kiyosaki, Sharon L. Lechter


My top 3 personal books of the year:

  1. Under the Whispering Door - T.J. Clune

  2. The Tyrant Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson

  3. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms - N.K. Jemisin


And here are all of the books that I finished in 2021:

A Swim in the Pond in the Rain - George Saunders

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything - Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

Scar - China Miéville

Iron Council - China Miéville

The Witness for the Dead - Katherine Addison

The Goblin Emperor - Katherine Addison

Witchmark - C.L. Polk

Flash Fire - T.J. Clune

The Extraordinaries - T.J. Clune

Under the Whispering Door - T.J. Clune

The House on the Cerulean Sea - T.J. Clune

A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians - H.G. Parry

The Engineer - C.S. Poe

The Gangster - C.S. Poe

Infinity Son - Adam Silvera

The People of Sparks - Jeanne DuPrau

The City of Ember - Jeanne DuPrau

Murder on the Orient Express - Agatha Christie

Rich Dad, Poor Dad - Robert T. Kiyosaki, Sharon L. Lechter

Ruin and Rising - Leigh Bardugo

Siege and Storm - Leigh Bardugo

Shadow and Bone - Leigh Bardugo

Rhythm of War - Brandon Sanderson

Dawnshard - Brandon Sanderson

Oathbringer - Brandon Sanderson

Words of Radiance - Brandon Sanderson

The Way of Kings - Brandon Sanderson

The Hero of Ages - Brandon Sanderson

The Well of Ascension - Brandon Sanderson

Mistborn - Brandon Sanderson

Circe - Madeline Miller

A Discovery of Witches - Deborah Harkness

X-men: God Loves, Man Kills - Chris Claremont, Brent Anderson

Daring Greatly - Brené Brown

Piranesi - Susanna Clarke

Black Sun - Rebecca Roanhorse

One Million Followers: How I Built a Massive Social Following in 30 Days - Brendan Kane

Presuasian: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade - Robert Cialdini

Before They Are Hanged - Joe Abercrombie

Last Argument of Kings - Joe Abercrombie

The Blade Itself - Joe Abercrombie

The Impossible Contract - K.A. Doore

The Unconquered City - K.A. Doore

The Perfect Assassin - K.A. Doore

Dragonflight - Anne McCaffrey

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms - N.K. Jemisin

The Broken Kingdoms - N.K. Jemisin

The Kingdom of Gods - N.K. Jemisin

The Mask Falling - Samantha Shannon

The Dawn Chorus - Samantha Shannon

On the Merits of Unnaturalness - Samantha Shannon

The Song Rising - Samantha Shannon

The Mime Order - Samantha Shannon

The Bone Season - Samantha Shannon

Children of Virtue and Vengeance - Tomi Adeyemi

The Tyrant Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson

Ascension - Jacqueline Koyanagi

The Truth - Terry Pratchett

The Last Continent - Terry Pratchett

Harrow the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir

The Empire of Gold - S.A. Chakraborty


Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. - Fernando Pessoa


How will you build a reading habit in 2022? Hit me up on Twitter, and let’s talk about it – chatting about books is almost as much fun as reading them.

More Reading:
The Books of 2020
The Books of 2019
The Books of 2018

Footnotes:

  1. Maja Djikic, Keith Oatley, & Mihnea C. Moldoveanu, 2013)

  2. Avni Bavishi, Martin D. Slade, & Becca R. Levy, 2016)

  3. David Comer Kidd & Emanuele Castano, 2013)

Tom Basgil