There's a book on my shelf — a battered paperback of Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse — with pencil marks throughout it and a coffee ring on the cover from 2017. I bought it at a second-hand shop in Bangalore's Russell Market for thirty rupees. I didn't expect it to stay with me for almost a decade.
But that's the strange, impossible-to-predict thing about reading. You pick up a book for casual reasons and walk away carrying something that rewires how you see the world.
I've been a daily reader since my late teens, and in that time I've noticed something: people who read consistently don't just know more things. They think differently. They're better at holding two contradictory ideas at the same time, better at imagining how someone else might be experiencing a situation, more comfortable sitting in uncertainty without immediately needing to resolve it. These aren't mystical outcomes. They're traceable, direct effects of spending regular time inside books.
Why Reading Rewires Your Brain Differently Than Other Content
I want to be specific here, because I've heard the "reading is good for you" pitch enough times that it starts to sound like a vitamin commercial. Let me tell you what actually changes.
Reading long-form text — the kind that requires you to track characters, remember context from three chapters ago, follow an argument through its complications — exercises sustained attention in a way that most modern media does not. A podcast gives you the words and the tone. A video gives you the visuals. A book gives you nothing except symbols on a page and asks you to generate everything else yourself: the faces, the rooms, the emotional weight of a scene, the implications of an argument. That generation process is cognitively demanding in the best possible way.
Neuroscientists studying what happens in the brain during reading have found that reading fiction in particular activates the same regions involved in social cognition — the parts that help us model what another person might be feeling or thinking. Regular fiction readers tend to score higher on empathy measures. Not because books make you a nicer person in some abstract sense, but because they give you daily practice in inhabiting a perspective that isn't yours.
For non-fiction, the effect is different but equally real. Following a sustained argument across two hundred pages builds the habit of not jumping to conclusions. You learn to notice when evidence is weak, when an author is overreaching, when a conclusion doesn't quite follow from what came before. That's a skill that transfers directly to how you evaluate information in your daily life — which, in 2025, matters more than ever.
How I Actually Built the Habit (Not the Idealized Version)
The version I've seen in productivity articles goes: wake up early, brew a clean cup of coffee, sit in your reading chair, read for an hour before the day begins. That's lovely. It's also fantasy for most people, including me in most phases of life.
What actually worked for me was this: I stopped thinking of reading as a special protected activity and started treating it as something that filled gaps. Waiting for a meeting to start — book. Metro from Indiranagar to MG Road — book. Ten minutes before bed — book. None of these sessions were long. Most were fifteen to twenty minutes. But they added up to forty to sixty minutes daily without requiring any structural overhaul of my schedule.
The second thing that helped was giving myself permission to abandon books. I used to feel obligated to finish what I started, which meant I'd get stuck in something I wasn't enjoying and stop reading entirely rather than admit defeat. Now I drop books without guilt. Life is too short and the stack is too tall. If a book isn't working at the fifty-page mark, I move on.
The third thing: I stopped tracking reading as a numbers game. The goal isn't fifty books a year. The goal is to read something good, pay attention to it, and let it do what it does. Quality of engagement matters more than quantity of pages.
What to Read When You're Just Starting Out
This is genuinely a harder question than it looks. The wrong answer is the canonical one — start with the Great Books, read the classics, build a proper literary foundation. That advice has killed more reading habits than it's created.
Start with something you actually want to know about. If you're curious about how money works, pick up Ankur Warikoo's Do Epic Shit or Morgan Housel's The Psychology of Money — both are short, direct, and written like someone explaining something to a friend rather than writing a textbook. If you're curious about history, Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens is a reasonable starting point, not because it's perfect (it isn't) but because it covers enormous territory at a pace that doesn't lose you.
For fiction, I'd suggest skipping the classics for now unless you genuinely want them. Start with someone contemporary whose voice pulls you in. Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines if you want literary fiction that's also genuinely gripping. Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad series if you want to be absorbed into a story so completely that you miss your train stop. R.K. Narayan's Malgudi Days if you want something warm and unhurried that doesn't demand anything from you.
The point is: match the book to your actual mood and interest, not to someone else's idea of what you should be reading.
Reading and the Long Game
I can't tell you exactly what changed in me because of nine years of daily reading. The changes are too distributed, too subtle, too intertwined with everything else that happened in that time. But I can point to specific moments where something I read was directly useful.
A chapter in Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow helped me understand why I was consistently making a particular type of bad decision at work. A novel I read in 2019 — The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro — shifted how I thought about professional loyalty and its costs in ways that took another two years to fully surface. A book on photography composition by Michael Freeman gave me a framework that I still use every time I pick up my camera.
These weren't outcomes I could have predicted when I picked up those books. That's the real case for daily reading: it's a long-term investment in your own thinking, with uncertain but consistently positive returns.
Start with twenty minutes. Find something you actually want to read. Don't finish it if it stops working. Read tomorrow too.
That's the whole system.
Tags
Taresh Sharan