this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2026
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How do I read? [Serious] (hexbear.net)
submitted 2 days ago by lobaa@hexbear.net to c/askchapo@hexbear.net
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OK the title is a joke but the question is serious. A bit of backstory:

My parents failed to make me love books, because they also introduced me to a PlayStation 2, and I decided that I like playing vidya games a lot more than reading stuff. School didn't make me love books either because the literature they force you to read in my curriculum, is, in my opinion, better suited for adult reading.

Fast forward to now, I am a freshman in a prestigious university, but it turns out that it requires me to read a lot of stuff, but I don't really have enough willpower to sit through academic literature for more than an hour a day. And the fact I'm noticeably behind my peers in amount of books read makes me feel like I don't belong.

So my question is how to learn to love reading books, get immersed or enter flow state or whatever, and also retain information? Is it some kind of talent or superpower? I know a few of my peers who don't stop reading books and seem to not distract themselves with tiktoks and video games, and attend optional lectures in their free time which is kind of insane to me, but I respect it a lot and want to become like them.

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[–] Carl@hexbear.net 8 points 2 days ago

Something that might help is to adopt a "one for them, one for me" mentality. If every time you try to read you're just reading dry academic textbooks, you will come to associate reading with dry academic text. For every work or school book you want to commit to, also pick out something that is strictly for entertainment or on a topic that doesn't really effect you but that you find interesting. I got myself from like a decade of not reading anything to reading at least 30 mins a night doing it this way, switching between fiction and marxist theory/history.