The Art and Science of Reading Deeper

Reading as a Discipline + My Favorite Things of 2025

Every December, I make a list of my favorite things since the December prior. I love lists. They install some loose order to a disordered life.

As I was typing up this year’s list, I went back and compared it to the previous six. And I noticed that with every passing year, I read a little bit more and a little bit deeper—like each solar revolution unconsciously sketched new connections within my messy network of knowledge.

For example, six years ago, my favorite book was Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. The next year it was Renovation of the Heart, which heavily inspired Ruthless Elimination. A year later, Dynamics of Spiritual Life topped the list, which influenced Renovation. Then it was Confessions and Cur Deus Homo, each of which helped make many of the books on the previous lists possible.

Now, this progression didn’t happen naturally. Some friends think I like to read because my personality tells me to do so, but I’m not a natural born reader. I have ADHD and graduated high school with a GPA in the high 1’s. When I got back into reading as an adult, the struggle was embarrassing. It took me almost 2 months to get through Ruthless Elimination, which is 200 pages of aesthetically spaced, easily digestible prose. I’d read the same paragraph two or three times before moving on because my attention span behaved like it was recently taken off Ritalin.

But I tried to get better at reading because I noticed that many higher-eds flatly stopped reading after graduation. Their teaching and writing then seemed to fizzle out around one-dimensional platitudes about penal substitutionary atonement or predestination that they memorized for a final paper but never felt a need to revisit. And I didn’t want that.¹

I also knew I was supposed to become a writer, which necessarily involved becoming a better reader. Stanley Kubrick didn’t become Stanley Kubrick from daydreaming about directing movies one day; Kubrick became Kubrick by spending all day every day reading scripts, stories, and studying the minutiae of movies that made them great. Similarly, no writer I know or admire has become a great writer by passively hoping to become a great writer. Their free time is donated toward training their brains to detect and comprehend what exactly it is about the books they love that makes them loveable.

So I’ve purposefully tried to love reading—to challenge myself to read more books for the sake of quantity and read more difficult books for the sake of difficulty. I’m still not where I should be, but it’s a start. And as I’ve read more difficult stuff, I’ve built more fluency in difficult topics, which makes even more difficult books go down easier.

Which goes to show that the art and science of reading deeper essentially boils down to practice, practice, practice.²

The social scientist Anders Ericsson’s technical term for this is “deliberate practice.”³ To date, it’s still science’s best paradigm mastering any skill.⁴ And while (1) practice, practice, practice is the most crucial part, mastery also requires (2) clear goals and (3) immediate feedback.

(1) practice, practice, practice

If you ever feel bad for binging a YouTube playlist rather than picking up a 600-page Tom Wolfe novel, don’t. If the world’s brightest minds gathered to invent something perfectly curated to satisfy the human brain’s need for stimulation, they could all head out early and celebrate over drinks after dreaming up social media reels. The YouTube playlist is like fast food for the brain: it’s quick, cheap, easy, but missing some essential nutrients. I still backslide once a week and end up watching some string of Tim Robinson sketches until I crash out in a guilty stupor.

Practice is hard. So I’ve tried to set up more barriers: only allow the tv on during certain times of the day, delete your apps after you’ve finished doing whatever you needed to do, and keep books within reach. Honestly, one of the best tricks I’ve found for reading more is bringing a book with me anywhere I go; I even bring one to the gym or my home treadmill and read while I walk at 3.0mph and a 12.0 incline. Sure, you look either lame or pretentious or both, but it’s worth it.

A good analogy for why practice helps is the literary principle “Chekov’s Gun”: if a loaded gun appears in the first act, the gun must go off by the final act, or else you should delete the gun from the manuscript. The more that you read, the easier it is to notice the Chekov’s Guns — you’ll realize that a parking ticket a character ignores in act one will come back to bite them in act two, that the main character’s failure in the final stretch of the movie will turn into the antagonist’s comeuppance by the credits’ roll. When my wife and I watch anything, we’re constantly calling out foreshadowing as if we’re trying to solve the mystery before the director.

Same thing goes for books — even the loosely structured non-fiction kind. The more you read, the more you pick up on tips and tricks: what works for an author’s argument, what doesn’t, what’s cliche or superfluous, when the author is dumbing down a point too much or too little, when the pacing slows to a crawl or accelerates uncomfortably. And as you consume and consciously take notes of what you like and dislike, you become a better reader. Your brain starts speaking book.

(2) clear goals

For me, my first ever reading goal was to read 100 books a year because I heard John Mark Comer and Jon Tyson read 100 books a year and they seemed cool enough to imitate. Then my next goal was to get to a place where I could feel confident that I could read anything my doctoral program might throw at me. So I read a bunch of Oliver O’Donovan and John Duns Scotus (the latter of which I plainly did not understand).

Today, my goal is to read for the sake of formation and using what I read to love and bless others in some small way (i.e., reading a lot of books, summarizing my research, sending it out to folks for free on Substack. Sure, maybe I could love you all better and more effectively in some other way, but as it is, this appears to be one of my few marketable skills).

(3) immediate feedback

As for feedback, it’s always lovely having people review your work. They can tell you whether you’ve understood what you’ve read or stumbled into heresy (obviously there’s no middle ground between these polarities). But personally, I find that the best way to get immediate feedback as a reader is to simply rewrite what you’ve read in your own language.

If you can write out something complex, read it back, and find it makes sense, you know that you’ve actually read something and not just skimmed (like I’ve admittedly done with Scotus and Kant). If you can, write out your translations by hand; it’ll cement knowledge into your brain a bit better.⁵

This process also helps reiterate whatever you just read, which fulfills what the novelist Vladimir Nabokov said about how rereading is the only way to really understand books:

…one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader…When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation.⁶

But as we read the words again, we move from merely absorbing to appreciating, from trying to cross something off a checklist to taking in a book like an art connoisseur takes in a painting.

So my advice for anyone who wants to read more is the same advice anyone would give anyone interested in learning a trade: like exercising a muscle, the discipline of reading turns you into a better reader. You’ll eventually read faster without feeling hurried, understand what you read without feeling lost, and crave reading a good book over doomscrolling. We don’t just spend more time reading — we become readers.

ok that’s the end of the actual content of the post. If you have no interest in reading about my favorite things of 2025, feel free to bail now.

A Note on Ratings

I used to rank books on an ascending order of worst to best. I stopped doing that last year, because it makes listmaking slightly harder — and because I’ve found it’s kind of unfair to list some classic like The Interior Castle next to some 2025 spiritual formation book, since it feels somewhat immoral to not rank the one that’s a verified classic higher than the one that’s only existed for 120 days. So there’s no hierarchy here. I enjoyed them all.

Theology/Formation

God in the Dock - C.S. Lewis

As an academic, you’re supposed to roll your eyes at least a little when people bring up C.S. Lewis. You have to signal that you know that his words aren’t authoritative. I once had a blind peer-reviewer (blind as in I didn’t know his identity; his eyes worked fine) tell me I needed to pull in another interlocutor to support a point that I quoted Lewis to support. So I found someone who said something similar, and it passed the review. Again — this other person MADE THE EXACT SAME CLAIM AS LEWIS; but since it wasn’t Lewis who said it, it passed. This is why academia is stupid.

Anyways, I’m of the persuasion that more of us need to roll our eyes at the temptation to roll our eyes at Lewis. He was an exceptional mind of a generation, and this book really reminded me why.

I love Lewis’ big titles (Narnia, Mere Christianity, Screwtape, and Great Divorce). But I always wondered what he was like in more casual writing and dialogue. This book remedied that curiosity. God in the Dock is a collection of almost 60 essays (don’t do the math, because that estimate might be way off). There couple were duds, but many of my own essays are duds — all of them could be duds, in fact. My favorite from this collection were “Some Thoughts,” “Answers to Questions on Christianity,” “Work and Prayer,” “First and Second Things,” and “The Sermon and the Lunch.”

The Scandal of Leadership - J.R. Woodward

This book was a full-on dissertation just slightly dumbed down for a wider audience. I felt much like a dog wearing a tuxedo cosplaying an aristocrat while reading this one. But honestly, if you’re looking for a project that can answer so many of the problems going on within Christian leadership today, this is the perfect resource. I also love it when an esteemed theologian can talk at length unironically about demons.

The Consolation of Philosophy - Boethius

Many of the great artists throughout history go by single word names: Cher, LeBron, Zendaya, Oprah, and, of course, Boethius (he’s always included in such lists). If you’ve hung around Substack at all, you’ll know that Ian Harber rarely stops talking about Boethius; now I see that he has good reason for it.

My PhD advisor and I joked that there are certain classics that theologians have to say that they love or else they lose street cred. No theologian could get away with saying they don’t like City of God, for example. However, this book was thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish, so much so that I’d categorize it as pleasure reading. It’s rare when something that’s 1500 years old holds up this well.

The Cost of Ambition - Miroslav Volf

Check out my review of this one here.

Everything Is Never Enough - Bobbie Jamieson

As many of you know, I’m writing a book on happiness (due Jan 15 — prayers much appreciated). Reading this book was like having my eyes grated, because with every passing page I realized that this was the book I wish I’d written. I felt a grand envy. You can tell Jamieson was indeed a professional jazz musician, because there’s a cadence and rhythm to his prose that only a musician could pull off. You can almost tap your foot to it.

Works of Love - Søren Kierkegaard

I had to get really into Kierkegaard over this past summer, and this one was definitely my favorite. Still not sold on much of Kierkegaard’s philosophy of duty, but there’s some brilliant wisdom in here about the nature of love.

Spiritual Emotions - Robert Roberts

Throughout the reading of this book, I was continuously shocked that Roberts’ parents decided to name him Robert. In fact, I could never stop thinking about it. What went through their minds as they said, “Hmm…what shall we name this boy? I do like the ring of ‘Robert.’” Were they so uncreative that they just took the nearest name that they saw and said “yup”? That’s the creative equivalent of trying to dream a new superhero and settling on “paper-plate man” because the only thing in our line of sight is a paper plate.

Why We Pray - John C. Peckham

I’ve never felt so inspired to pray as if prayer actually matters than after reading this book. I talk about it here.

Happiness and the Christian Moral Life - Paul Wadell

I made a joke earlier this year about how Catholics had much better resources on a theology of happiness than protestants. I got blocked by several people after making this remark, but it’s nonetheless accurate. Out of all the academic works on happiness, this one was probably the most exhaustive and good and true and beautiful.

Social Sciences

I didn’t read as many social science books as I would’ve liked to this year, mainly because I’m trying to get into the habit of just reading the academic articles that social science books are based on. But nevertheless:

Ritual - Dimitris Xygalatas

I adore rituals. This book gave some of the most fascinating research on the topic to date.

Good and Reasonable People - Keith Payne

Wildly helpful for mitigating political polarization — or simply just understanding where the people you disagree with are coming from.

Shift - Ethan Kross

It’s always interesting to see how secular people handle the topic of emotions. I disagreed with a good amount of what was written here, but it was nonetheless fascinating and worthwhile.

Life in Three Dimensions - Shigehiro Oishi

For most of history, people have only dealt with two ideas of happiness: the hedonic and eudaimonic. Oishi believes we’re missing a third: exploration, growth, and trying new things. It’s a phenomenal theory that’ll make you want to pick up new hobbies and book a flight somewhere you’ve never thought to go.

Validation - Caroline Fleck

I recommend males check this one out. This book helped make sense of the nearly universal male disposition to try to fix rather than listen. Men aren’t neanderthals, we just tend to think differently about how to approach problems.

Why We Sleep - Matthew Walker

May Contain Lies, discussed below, aggressively points out some of this book’s insufficiencies (i.e., skewing research, avoiding studies that disprove some of the studies he mentions, etc.). But even still, for the parts of this book that are accurate (which is about 95% of it), it’s highly didactic and wonderfully practical. As a lifelong insomniac, I can attest that this book really helped make this the best year of sleep I’ve ever gotten.

Range - David Epstein

One of those so-shockingly-well-written-books-that-you-get-a-little-sad-reading-it type of books.

May Contain Lies - Alex Edmans

This was mildly depressing because it points out so many of the ways in which research—even the peer-reviewed kind—is horribly inaccurate, flat out wrong, or irreproducible. I’m working on a whole post about this one that I’ll likely finish within the decade.

Fiction

The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

One of the more emotionally devastating but beautiful stories I’ve read.

The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner

Took me so long to understand what was happening in this novel. I heard that this is a great book to reread, but an incredibly difficult one to read. I definitely agree.

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

Sad, dark, dreamlike. We did a lot of Joseph Conrad in my undergrad but somehow skipped this one. Nice and short, too.

Exhalation - Ted Chiang

Some of the best short stories I’ve ever read.

The Paper Menagerie - Ken Liu

This one deserves a spot on the list just for the titular short story. Heartbreaking. Cried a lot. My wife was like “What’s wrong?” and I just said, “Can’t talk about it.”

The Sellout - Paul Beatty

So egregiously funny in the most awful way.

Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov

This is the epitome of an experimental novel. Most of it was enjoyable, but every once in a while, it got to be a bit much. Still think it’s a literary crowning achievement for sheer inventiveness.

Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka

It’s hard to describe why a Kafka story works, it just does.

Atonement - Ian McEwan

Emotionally abusive. Alarmingly brilliant prose.

Etcetera

How Proust Can Change Your Life - Alain de Botton

A perfect summation of why Proust is great even though I’d prefer to not read him.

The Extinction of Experience - Christine Rosen

Genuinely fascinating and arresting. Rosen crafts an exceptional vision for the issues of life in the digital age.

Happiness and Contemplation - Josef Pieper

I enjoy Thomistic thinkers, and I personally found this to be my favorite work in that field that I’ve encountered so far.

The Rigor of Angels - William Eggington

A sprawling story of Kant, Borges, and Heisenberg. Absolutely riveting from start to finish. This is the kind of creativity more philosophical writers and historians need.

The World-Ending Fire - Wendell Berry

This was my first ever Berry book, recommended by Substack’s resident Wendell Berry scholar Hadden Turner. A perfect place to start with Berry’s work.

Nicomachean Ethics - Aristotle

It’s astounding how much of Aristotle’s philosophy holds up to modern intellectual and even scientific standards.

Nurturing Happiness - Robert Wuthnow

It was extremely fascinating to read a sociological account of how happiness is involved in church culture from an outsider’s perspective. Some of it was a bit cynical and there were a few beats that Wuthnow missed, but in general, it was immensely enjoyable.

Podcasts:

History of the Christian Church

This podcast is technically a decade old, but I just found it this year. It lived in my airpods for a month and a half straight while I was polishing up my curriculum for Church History. The host is a Pentecostal protestant, so many of the episodes skew in that direction, but it’s a surprisingly engaging introduction to church history in bite-sized audio chunks.

Reconstructing Faith with Trevin Wax

Trevin emailed me out of the blue in response to my post on the Beatitudes and recommended his podcast episode on the Beatitudes. It was the most hyper-direct form of marketing I’ve ever experienced. But perhaps this was ingenuous on Trevin’s part, because he created a faithful new fan.

Mere Fidelity

Anything Brad East-related is always a treat. I’m so happy they brought him on to guest host this past season. This podcast is about the highest brow Christian podcast that still remains orthodox and relatable, and I love every episode.

Not Just Sunday

I miss Truth Over Tribe so much. I enjoy Not Just Sunday because the hosts have a great rapport and do their research. But I do wish they had more guests on though.

The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast

I still remember the day one of my elementary friends told me to go on this new platform called “YouTube” and watch something called “Lazy Sunday.” This podcast is full of so much nostalgia from my childhood. Whenever I need to relax and just laugh, this podcast is the perfect choice.

Movies/Shows

I don’t watch enough TV or movies to say what this year’s best movies or TV was. But if I had to make a list:

TV: Task, The Runarounds (don’t ask me why; I just loved something about this show despite how obviously ridiculous, cliche, and corny it was. My wife would literally bully me if she walked in while I had it playing), Pluribus, The Chair Company.

Movies: One Battle After Another, Eternity, Weapons, Good Fortune, Sinners.

Music

I honestly thought my love for music would sort of decline after my teens and early 20s. Apparently, the age of 19 is the apex of music enjoyment.

But personally, I love music more than ever right now. All of my Apple’s Top 25 Most Played songs (which has been keeping track of my plays since I was 10 and got an iPod Nano) are songs that came out in the past three years. I’m consistently impressed with what’s going on in the world of music; it feels like artists are reaching new heights of creativity every year.

Alex G - Headlights

Alex G’s music is the closest thing to transcendence you’ll find outside of the sacraments. If you’re unfamiliar with his music, the best place to start is probably God Save the Animals or House of Sugar. But you’ll probably find “Afterlife” from this album to be a verified bop regardless of your prior exposure to Alex G.

Tyler, the Creator - Don’t Tap the Glass

One thing that I figured would eventually go away after I stopped being an atheist was my love for Tyler, the Creator. It surprisingly hasn’t changed at all — though his morals definitely leave me much more alienated than they did as a hardened 14-year-old religious skeptic. I really enjoyed the overall theme of this album: telling kids to stop “tapping the glass” (i.e., phone screens) and just let loose and dance.

Royel Otis - Hickey

Moody songs about unrequited romance. My only romance in this day and age is heavily requited, thanks to the married-ness of it. But this album still hit.

Dijon - Baby

There is almost no song structure to Dijon’s music; it’s not verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus. And maybe that’s what makes it so compelling.

Favorite songs of the year:

Reflections on a Year

I saw a picture of myself six years ago and shortly afterward saw my current face in a mirror. I looked like an “after” picture that some eye cream that prevents gray bags from growing under your eye sockets would use as a warning to people who don’t believe in their product’s effectiveness. I’m not old, but I’m also the oldest I’ve ever been. I could use more rest. I work two jobs while I’m in my Ph.D. program and do a lot of freelance writing on top of it. I got by for the first few years of this schedule, but it’s definitely getting tiring.

I have a change in my day job coming up in the early summer, which I think will help a lot. But if you could remember to keep me in your prayers, I’d be enormously grateful.

It’s also been an incredibly difficult year emotionally and personally. Lots of deaths, both literally and figuratively. But even in the midst of a year with some extreme pain and letdown, God’s been so incredibly gracious that it’s consistently mind-blowing. We are so thankful.

I love life, thank you.

1. Not that I didn’t want to have positive opinions about PSA or predestination; just that I really didn’t want to not be able to articulate or explain the whole spectrum of the conversation on these topics while discussing it.

2. Surprisingly, there’s so much psychology and neuroscience about reading itself, but there’s shockingly little on the science of how to read deeper and more complex works. So, I’m borrowing most of what’s in this article from general mock-ups of how humans grow in any sort of discipline, but please take it with a grain of salt since there haven’t been any specific studies to describe what I’m getting at here.

3. Anders K. Ericsson, Ralf T. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (1993): 363–406. See also Ericsson’s book Peak.

4. Though, of course, there’s debate about this and nuance is needed. If you’re looking for an easy overview of the studies, check out David Epstein’s Range.

5. Frederikus van der Weel and Audrey Van der Meer, “Handwriting But Not Typewriting Leads to Widespread Brain Connectivity: A High-Density EEG Study with Implications for the Classroom,” Frontiers in Psychology 14 (2025): 1219945.

6. Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 3.