Sym·poly·mathesy

by Chris Krycho

Reading Habits

How exactly do I go about reading, and what do I read these days?

Assumed audience: People interested in reading, habits of reading, and more generally habits of mind.

What are your specific habits for journal/magazine/blog consumption? There are usual suspects that come through here, but are you subscribing to email newsletters, keep feeds, have a news aggregator, have tabs in a browser: what do you do and when do you consume it?

  • Books: nonfiction I almost exclusively read in paper. Fiction I tend to read on my Kobo these days. (I have an older model, the Kobo Aura ONE; I really like it.)

  • Magazines: I’m subscribed to the paper copy of The Hedgehog Review; currently that’s about it. I tend to read pieces from The New Atlantis when they become available online; otherwise, I read a mix of things as they come across my radar.

  • Online reading: this goes in two buckets: feeds, and general reading.

    • Feeds: I use Feedbin (because I prefer to pay for my services) and subscribe to a mix of feeds I find interesting (including a few Twitter feeds; it has a lovely feature where it turns threads into single entries in the feed reader); I mostly read those via Unread on my iPad.

    • General: Whether I discover them via links in other things I read, links here and in similar online communities, or even just items in my feed,, I usually push longer-form things into Pocket, because (and only because) you can sync it to a Kobo, which I do. Most sufficiently-long pieces online I end up reading on my Kobo as a result. When I like a piece, I “favorite” it which pushes it into Pinboard for later ease of lookup.1

  • Email newsletters: my subscriptions are fairly limited. I read Michael Sacasas, Gracy Olmstead, Craig Mod, Ben Thompson2, and Matt Levine (who is absolutely hilarious as well as deeply informative).

Notes

  1. At one point I was using Pinboard extensively to track things I’d read. I’m likely going to move away from that; at this point I do all of that tracking in Bear instead… I just need to take the time to extract it and push it over into Bear in a way that will mesh well with my note-taking system. Also, what I’m doing with Pinboard at this point I could just as easily do in Pocket, so… ↩︎

  2. I’m debating whether I’ll keep my membership to Stratechery next year, because while I really like it it’s also not cheap, and I’ve been looking at subscriptions I can cut. ↩︎