One of the best interview questions I ever got was the first question of an AMA, and it was: what do you read?

I don’t talk about my reading much, but I probably should, because I think it’s low-key becoming a superpower of mine. I say this because I’m currently writing to you from a jurisdiction where people very obviously read. There are multiple bookstores in every neighborhood; there’s a magazine newsstand at the end of my block. Cafés dot the parks with people quietly reading.

Every time you read, you’re not looking at your phone, which makes reading both a victory and an act of resistance. But reading is always more than that, because it has always been more than that. Reading is how you make sense of the world – and it’s maybe the most important thing you can do as a consultant.

It is cliché to say this. If your education was anything like mine, you were told, in no uncertain terms, to read, often & well. You don’t need me to tell you that, right? And yet I couldn’t help but notice that people aren’t reading much anymore, at least in America. And so there is urgency, and exhortations, etc.

Tooling-wise:

• I read fewer books now, which is to say that the usual 100 books a year is down to only 60: mostly nonfiction, almost entirely paper. I try to buy books in person, and I use the library; that failing, there is Bookshop.
• I use Instapaper, the finest software, for saving web articles. If the article displays busted I try archive.today. If that doesn’t work I don’t read it.
• For ebooks I use PDF Expert & KyBook on my iPad.
• I use RSS, of course. Still alive & kicking!

As far as what I read, that changes a lot, and I don’t know quite how relevant it is. I don’t read much design anymore because only a tiny handful of people are writing about design correctly, which is through a lens of leveraged power. There’s nothing to read about in tech anymore because there’s nothing to be said about tech anymore, but I do still read a fair amount of classic, evergreen texts. There’s still a lot to read about business & consulting, but I breeze through those books fast because they are mostly psychic cocaine, kind of hollow but full of little useful tactics.

Probably around 70% of the books I read are relevant to my personal life, not my professional life. That used to be something like 20%. I think this is a good thing.

In short, I don’t think it matters what you read as much as you read a lot. Oh, and get off the internet. It’s bad here.