Ten rules for reading better from Ryan Holiday

Executive overview

Most people read passively — finishing bad books out of obligation, skimming for the gist, never revisiting what they've read. Reading is a skill with rules, and ignoring them wastes the investment entirely.

Great readers quit freely, annotate aggressively, buy immediately, and reread deliberately. The goal is not consumption — it's retention, depth, and application to life.

The reader who engages fully with fewer books gains more than the one who skims many.

Quit books that aren't working

• Finishing every book you start means reading fewer books overall
• Quit when a book isn't doing it for you — not when it's merely hard
• Epictetus: if Chrysippus were a better writer, you'd have less to brag about soldiering through him
• Sometimes you return and realise you were the problem, not the book

Mark up your books

• Pristine books signal disengagement — miles on the book signal respect
• Underline what's great, disagree in the margins, flag where it doesn't go far enough
• A heavily annotated copy is evidence of genuine engagement with the author's ideas

Buy books; treat them as investments

• Don't wait for paperback or a library copy — buy the book when you want it
• Warren Buffett's best investment was a copy of The Intelligent Investor bought for a dollar or two
• Books return their cost many times over; treat the purchase as exactly that

Read to understand the present through the past

• History and philosophy remove recency bias and partisan framing from current events
• Reading about the Antonine Plague gives context for COVID; Cato vs. Caesar illuminates modern political ambition
• The Stoics appear ancient but reveal that human nature hasn't changed

Read deeply, not just often

• General Mattis: if you haven't read hundreds of books on your profession, you're functionally illiterate
• Breadth matters, but depth matters more — don't mistake volume for understanding
• The muscle applied to reading — time, effort, repetition — determines what you get out of it

Never settle for the gist

• Reading is the opportunity to fully understand something; the gist is what tweets and TikToks are for
• Read intros, footnotes, and reviews; supplement with scholarly works and video explainers
• Surface-level understanding gives false confidence without real comprehension

Take notes and keep a commonplace book

• Capture ideas in a physical commonplace book — notes extracted from books become raw material for thinking
• Marcus Aurelius's Meditations is itself a commonplace book: quotes, fragments, lines from plays
• Getting ideas out of the books and into a retrievable system is what makes reading compound over time

Read people and ideas you disagree with

• Epictetus: you can't learn what you think you already know
• John Wheeler: as the island of knowledge grows, so does the shoreline of ignorance
• Seek out books that introduce unfamiliar territory — not just more of what you already believe

Read for application, not information

• Seneca: too many readers get lost in pointless debates while storms rage in their own lives
• The purpose of reading — fiction or nonfiction — is to extract lessons and apply them
• Note-taking and recall are tools; the goal is to change how you think and act

Reread

• Each time you return to a book, you are different — the book yields something new
• Rereading in different translations or at different life stages reveals layers invisible the first time
• Heraclitus: you never step in the same river twice — the same applies to revisiting great books