I often don’t like to share what I’m reading. Or even that I’m reading at all. In the busy world of startups, where most people don’t read (which is totally okay), or where reading is seen as a leisure activity separate from life’s primary preoccupations, there’s a quiet isolation in being someone who identifies as a reader.
Because reading often gets unnecessary weight as a virtuous act, it lends itself easily to performance. On the number of books one reads in a year. On reading classics. On reading as an input to professional growth. On reading as a sign of discipline through systems. On replacing books with summaries. On the “wow” one gets because how are you able to do “this” while working.
There’s no malintent in any of this. And yet, it alienates so many readers like myself—people for whom reading is not something to get through. I don’t read every day. I don’t finish most books I start. I don’t open a book expecting to extract “value.”
Reading—being with words and books—simply makes me feel more present in this hurried world. I don’t have a transactional relationship with books written with care. I just feel joyful hanging in the company of words from a writer who has really written to express, to say what they want to say, to share what they have understood. It is a conversation. From them to me.
And this conversation needs quality attention—not quantified time. The intimate kind of attention that isn’t for the world to know, unless there’s a conscious choice to share it. Sometimes it’s built through ten-minute coffee chats. Sometimes through entire days together. Like old friends, long silences aren’t signs of neglect. It’s just that sometimes, life is asking something else of me, and I don’t have what it takes to give a book the attention it deserves. But wandering away doesn’t make me less of a reader.
Which is why presenting reading as optimisation or system—even without any intent to perform—kills the very thing that makes it transformative for me: care for someone else’s ideas and imagination. An encounter with another mind, who lived before me or alongside me, figuring out how they experience this same world.
That’s what it comes down to. Not an input to growth. Not instrumental to anything. Reading simply reflects how I—and many readers I know—like to be. When someone turns that ordinariness into performance… well, we learn to disengage. And walk through quietly.