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Eddie Hood
Today we're going to talk about how to build a reliable daily reading habit. If you're somebody who has always wanted to get better at reading books but just feels like maybe you can't focus or you don't have the time, I'm going to share with you some things that have helped me actually craft that reading habit every day. And I'm also going to go over six books that help me sort of return to that habit with a happy heart. Right. It's really important that you're reading books that you love. I'm going to share six books that I absolutely love. Maybe one of them will help you. Let's get into it. Welcome to this week's episode of the Read well podcast. My name is Eddie Hood and I'm your host where I believe it's more important to read well than to be well read. So grab your favorite book, open up your notes, and let's get ready to learn something fascinating. Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Read well podcast. My name is Eddie Hood and we're talking about habits today. Habits are fun. I love the idea of every day just a little bit more, trying to make myself better in whatever I'm interested in. And as you know, I love books more than anything. Next to my wife and children, of course. But if we're going to build a daily reading habit, if we, if we sort of turn to the James Clear concept of atomic habits. Great book. You've probably read it. Everybody's read this book. But the, the ideas in here, although I'm not going to quote them directly, are pretty applicable to crafting a daily reading habit. But I'm going to share with you how I apply that in my own daily life and go over these six books. So first of all, it's really important that your body knows it's time to read. I like to always have the same time every day if possible. That is my reading time. If I sort of let it happen whenever it's going to happen, then it's probably not going to happen because I get really busy. So I used to always read in the morning at like 6am or 7am that that time changed as I got older and things moved around. But recently I've decided to actually do something maddening. I started to write my own book. I'm writing a novel right now and I've needed to use my morning time for that when my head is sort of freshest. So now I've shifted my reading time to the afternoon at 2:30. That's working just as well, for me, and I think there's this big argument online, well, it's better to read in the morning or it's better to read in the night. My argument is just that it's best to read at a consistent time because it's in your schedule and your brain knows it's time to do that. Now here's the thing with habits. If you like doing the thing, you'll be able to build a habit out of it. If you hate doing it, then it's going to be really, really hard to build a habit. I have found that most people want to read, they like the idea of reading, but there's sort of this friction that happens when they sit down to read because their attention wanders and then they sort of self doubt and they ask themselves, why can't I do this? What's wrong with me? I used to be able to read, but now I can't. And so they sort of have attached negative feelings to reading books. It's like this thing that feels unattainable to them now because they have Internet brain. I don't know, whatever. Well, James Clear would argue probably that you have to attach your habit to something positive that makes you feel good about life so that you'll want to do it. This is the idea of like habit stacking, right? What's something you're already doing? So a great example for me, I love to make a cup of coffee in the morning and I look forward to that. I love sort of sitting down and just enjoying that. That's a habit that has served me well and I look forward to. I could combine my reading habit with, with that if I was feeling stressed about reading books. Now I don't, I, I thoroughly enjoy reading books. So for me I don't have to attach it to anything. But if you're in that space where you're just like, oh my gosh, this is really hard, then just give yourself some room, attach it to something more interesting and it will get there, I promise. This actually reminds me of an interview I did recently with Dr. Marianne Wolf. She's the author of Reader Come Home and she talks about how we all have reading brains that need to be trained to remember how to read. And if it's been a while, read since you've read your last book. It's probably going to take about two weeks of you showing up every day before that feels good again. Right? And for two weeks just sign up for the fact that it's not going to feel good. You're just going to have doubts and concerns and focus issues. And that's normal. And my message to you is this. Be kind to yourself. Allow yourself to not be perfect. Allow yourself to not be the world's greatest reader. And just give it time. Let your brain remember, resync into the words on the page. So those are the tips I have for you. I like to go over these books next. But again, just try to show up at the same time every day. You don't have to read for long periods of time, especially in the beginning. Cause then it's overwhelming. So if you start with maybe 10 minutes a day and just build that up, let your brain sink into it, then that's great. And then of course, make sure it's a habit that you're enjoying. Okay. If you don't have a problem with that, great. If you do, attach it to making a cup of coffee. So I've got three books here that are nonfiction and three books here that are fiction. And then if you stick around to the end of this video or this episode, I'm going to be announcing the book that I'm releasing in my online bookstore called edgewaterbookstore.com I do a new book every month. I. I purchase a whole bunch of them and that gets added to the curated library in my store. And I'm very excited for March's book. So we'll do that next foreign. So the first book. Now, I picked these books because they've served me well throughout my life, no matter what. They've helped me build that reliable sort of daily reading habit because they're so good, they're written so well, and they just sort of pull you in. And they're the books that you just don't want to stop reading. I've been in a lot of books where I'm like, ah, God. Kind of have to push through this section. And sometimes you even want to skip sections because they're just not great. Well, these books are great all the way through and have served me well. And even now, even though I read constantly, there have been times in my life where I've lost my reading habit because of major life upsets or stress at work or whatever. I know I can return to these six books. Any one of them will pull me back in and give me that chance to sort of remember why I love this. So the first one is Jane Eyre, right, by Charlotte Bronte. We're actually reading this in my online book club right now. And side note, if you're looking for a book club to join, we would love to have you in ours. We meet every Tuesday night online, live. I'm there with you. And right now we're doing Jane Eyre. As of. We're in March now, March 2025. But we have just a wonderful list of books that we're reading. And in fact, I'll be making a new episode mid March, I think, to announce the next group of books we're reading. So stay tuned for that. There's a reason why I love Jane Eyre, and I think it's a really good book. Although it is large, this particular version, this is the Penguin cloth bound Classics edition. I mean, we're over 500 pages here and size doesn't really shouldn't sort of divert your. Your opinion of a book, whether it's large or small or whatever. But don't let that scare you. Here's the thing with, with this book, the moment you start reading it, you just know you're in good hands. Charlotte Bronte was so incredibly talented. It just blows my mind that her, her words stand up so well even today and that the protagonist, Jane Eyre, is this young woman that just like, just will not let down in the face of everything that that is against her. So, yeah, if you're looking for classic literature, a book that will just keep you reading and not sort of lose you. Jane Eyre is a. The next fiction book that I have is Animal Farm by George Orwell. Here's why I like this. Orwell is one of my favorite writers of all time, mainly because he wrote about really hard things, but did it in a really digestible way. If you look at Animal Farm, this is quite a small book. This particular edition, which I sell in my bookstore at Edgewater, is all of roughly 100 pages. Not big. Right. And it's a. It's a short story. It's really a satire about politics and how we get up to the power struggles we get up to. But the reason why I like it is because the characters are so relatable. We're talking about pigs and horses and all these random animals on a farm, but you can see in these animals the characteristics of all of these other people in your life. And it feels like you're on this farm. There's never a moment where I'm bored in this book. I just thoroughly love it. Plus, it's such a small book that it's like, it feels easy to get into it. We're talking about animals on a farm, Right. And of course, if you take your time and read it slowly, you'll catch all of the deeper Meanings that Orwell's got baked into that thing for you. The next and the third fictional book I have for you is Flowers for Algernon. I talk about this book a lot, so nothing new here. In fact, I named it my favorite book that I read in 2024, if you haven't heard about it yet. It's a book that was written quite a while ago, I think in the 50s. It's a book about a man named Charlie Gordon who is mentally handicapped. He lives in an institution and sign scientists select him for a procedure that will vastly improve his intelligence. And it's a. It's a book about the ethics of medical discovery and what we should be allowed to do to each other and what we shouldn't be allowed to do to each other. And we see the rise and sort of fall of how it affects people and the choices that they make. It's a wonderful book that I just, I loved. I don't. There's again, never a page where I feel like it's slow. I'm just super vested in everything that's happening. It's a great book. You'll love it. I get a lot of good feedback on that. Everybody that reads it comes back and messages me in the community and they're like, oh my gosh, I was screaming and I was crying and I was laughing and I was shouting. It really does make you feel all the feels now if you're more of a non fiction person, which I totally get that if you are. Here are three books that I love. I. I sell all these at my bookstore as well. If you want to pick them up. I sell them at my bookstore because these are the books that have changed my life. I only add books to my bookstore if I think they're the best of best of the best. And because I don't have endless amounts of money, I can only get one book out of there a month. So Marcus Aurelius's Meditations is a book that many people know of. And this particular edition I like. This is the Robin Waterfield edition. And if you're always sort of stood on the the sidelines of philosophy or stoicism and you thought, boy, that sounds interesting, but I'm really scared to get into it. I don't want to waste my money on the books. Maybe I won't understand them. Meditations is a really lovely place to start. It's very accessible. It's written with like tons of aphorisms in place to sort of help you just try to live a better life. And the nice thing about it is it's is sort of who the author is, right? We're talking about Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor at the time, the most powerful person in the world. And he is writing this book, admitting all of his faults and why life is hard. And he's trying to do the right thing amidst plague and wars and. And just ruling the world, essentially, which is a really weird contrast. But he does it. He's one of the better emperors, for sure. That's not to say he didn't do bad things, right? But definitely this is a guy who during his time was trying to do the right thing. And I think that's why it's still valuable today. Anyway, if you want to think about something a little deeper and not get sort of bogged down, that's a great one. The next book that is non fiction that I love. We read this in my book club a while back too. This is Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow is a great book because it describes that process that you've felt in your own personal life when everything just comes together for you. Maybe it's an hour of time or maybe it's an entire afternoon, I don't know. But there have been moments in your life where everything just seemed to work. You were in a state of flow, you were getting things done, you were super focused, you were knocking all the pins down, nothing could stop you. And it felt really good. And then all of a sudden the feeling just stopped. Maybe you ran out of energy or whatever it might be. Gumption call it. So Csikszentmihalyi went out and did a whole bunch of to try and figure out why that state happens and how to get into that state and nurture it more often. I will say the one downfall to this book is how it was printed on page. It is pretty condensed, it's a lot of text per page, but the text is so engaging and it's written pretty dang well that you get past that pretty quickly. You're going to highlight a ton in this book and really start applying things in your life. So yeah, I really like Flow by Mihaili Csikszentmihalyi. The sixth non fiction book. And then don't leave because I'm going to share with you March's book for Edgewater. This is Deep Work by Cal Newport. I've talked about this book a lot too, but I've come back to this book many times because for me this book represents the third section of my Mantra, which is read slowly, take notes and apply the ideas. For me, Deep Work was the book that helped me learn to apply the ideas from the books that I read. It was so inspiring and helped me realize that if I wanted to do good work, deep work, really do something that mattered. With my 8 hours or 10 hours of working time a day, I was going to have to make some hard decisions. I was going to have to change where I worked, how I worked, what I was working on, and so on. And I'm really grateful to this book because it helped me launch this podcast, it helped me launch my bookstore, it helped me get out of a job I didn't really care for. I just, I really love it and I'm grateful to Cal Newport for writing it. I will say that it is written for the business minded person. I guess it would technically be a business book. There are bits in here related to that business setting. Don't let that throw you off. Read them, maybe scan them lightly if that's not you, but don't discredit it because you have something you want to do in your life, something that really means something to you. Perhaps you're an artist and you want to find time to finally create your masterpiece. Or maybe, I don't know, maybe you want to open a golf course or maybe you want to learn a new language. Whatever it is, Deep Work is really a beautiful book to help you make those harder decisions to get where you need to be. Okay, now let's jump into the announcements for Edgewater for March of 2020 25. So I am going to be. Well, I'm very excited for this, this book this month. This is definitely, probably one of my top five books of all time. Definitely one of my favorite authors. We're going back to the author of Animal Farm, Mr. George Orwell. So I am stalking 1984 by George Orwell. This is just an incredible book about what happens to humans who stop thinking for themselves and sort of pawn off that thinking responsibility to their government and how that can really get out of hand. F past. It's really critical that as people, we take time to question our political, religious and cultural leaders because if we don't, they will make decisions for us that ultimately won't serve us. And 1984 is an exploration of how bad that could get. Orwell was really concerned with the direction the world was going in and he wrote this book. And if you've ever heard of a character called Big Brother or the phrase Big Brother is watching, that's what this comes from. The main character, Winston Smith, is this guy who's trapped in this sort of dystopian fascist government, and he's trying to exist with the remorse and depression he feels. And how do you, how do you sort of fight back against this big roving machine? Right? So check it out. 1984 by George Orwell. I want to thank each and every one of you for supporting the readable podcast. Huge announcement or a huge bit of gratitude? Really quickly. Just this week I actually hit 10,000 subscribers on YouTube. I never ever thought that would happen. Started this channel seriously about a year ago with a couple hundred subscribers, and I just never thought we would get to the point where we had so many people wanting to talk about great books. The support on the podcast has been amazing. We have great interviews coming up with some really fantastic authors. So stay tuned for that where I host live interviews with them and we get to ask them questions about their writing process or thinking process and the themes behind their books. So until next week, as always, remember to read slowly, take notes, and apply the ideas. Thanks everybody. If you'd like to take your reading to the next level, then head on over to thereadwellpodcast.com there you'll find daily posts on how to read well. You'll also get access to all of my book notes and tools for becoming a better reader. And as always, don't forget to read slowly, take notes and apply the ideas. Thank you for listening to the Read well Podcast.