What it means to read without rules
On planes, I read on my Kindle.
Not because I prefer it. I own a lot of physical books, and I travel with them. But a Kindle has no cover, so no one can see what I’m reading, and no one will lean over and ask about it before I’ve finished. When I do travel with a physical book, I hold it spine-out or cover-down for the same reason. I want to read it first. I want to have my own thoughts about it before it becomes a conversation.
That habit is small and slightly absurd, and I’ve thought about it more than it deserves. The habit is older than any conversation it might start. The awareness that what you read in public is a signal, and strangers form impressions that carry more weight than they should.
I still catch myself doing versions of this. Carrying a book I think I should read instead of the one I actually want. Describing my reading list in terms that make it sound more serious than it is. Noting, privately, when what I’m reading feels defensible and when it needs an explanation.
What eventually stopped it wasn’t discipline or a decision exactly. It was realizing the identity I’d been performing wasn’t mine to begin with. I hadn’t chosen it. I’d inherited it from school, from other readers, from years of absorbing the implicit message that certain books were serious and others weren’t, and that what you read was a statement about the kind of person you were. Once I saw that clearly, the performance lost its logic. There was nothing left to perform.
Reading without rules means choosing books based on what they do to your thinking, rather than what they signal about you.
Where the rules come from
The pressure to read the right books came from several directions at once, and never really from a single source I could argue with directly. The school gave me a canon and implied it was the whole conversation. Other readers, encountered over the years, made it clear that certain shelves were serious and others weren’t. Online book culture added a new layer, not just what to read, but how fast, how many, and whether you’d read the thing everyone was reading this month.
No one wrote these rules down. That’s what made it hard to refuse. You just absorbed it, the way you absorb most social norms, through repetition until they feel like your own opinion.
The identity it produced wasn’t mine. I didn’t actually prefer the books that identity required. I preferred The Exorcist, Tim O’Brien, Joan Didion, and vintage military maintenance publications from the 1940s. I preferred whatever was actually doing something to my thinking, regardless of which shelf it came from or whether it had a reputation worth citing at a dinner party.
Performing an identity you don’t have creates exhaustion. It accumulates slowly, and then one day you notice it. You’re in an airport with a book in your bag that you bought because it seemed like the right thing to read, and you don’t want to open it, so you’re reaching for your phone instead. In that moment, something becomes clear: this isn’t working.
What broke the spell
It wasn’t a single book. But PS Monthly, a vintage U.S. Army maintenance publication from the 1950s and 60s, helped me understand what I’d been missing.
PS Monthly was written to teach soldiers how to maintain equipment in the field. It used comics, humor, and plain, direct language to explain things that could get people killed if explained badly. The writing was precise, unsentimental, and occasionally funny. It knew exactly what it was trying to do and did it without apology or ornamentation.
There is no defensible version of reading that on a plane. There is no literary context in which it counts. And I read it with the kind of attention I’d given to maybe a dozen books in my life.
That made the problem visible. Not because it proved that all reading is equally valuable. It doesn’t, and I don’t believe that. But because it showed me that the question I’d been asking, “Is this the right kind of book?” was the wrong question. The right question was: Is this book doing something? And if yes: what?
What reading without rules actually looks like
It isn’t a system. It’s a way of approaching reading. It’s closer to permission. I stop managing how my reading looks from the outside.
In a given week, I might be reading a novel, a history, a memoir, and something completely unclassifiable. I don’t finish everything I start. I reread books I’ve read multiple times, including Frankenstein, The Things They Carried, and Didion’s essays, which I’ve had nearly memorized for years. I don’t track what I’ve read or set annual goals. I don’t participate in reading challenges. I read what I want when I want it, and I try to be honest about what I want rather than substituting what I think I should want.
If you’re trying to build a reading life that actually fits, start with How to read without rating or On rereading, marginalia, and a lifelong reading practice. Both approach reading as something you develop over time, not something you perform.
The Kindle on planes is still there. Some habits outlast the thinking that created them. But the reason I reach for it has changed; it’s a reading preference now, not a social defense. That distinction changes the experience of reading.
Where to go from here
If this essay found you, In defense of reading everything takes the same argument further into genre hierarchies, intellectual snobbery, and the question of why reading across categories changes how you think.
And if you’re in a difficult season and wondering whether books still belong to you, Why I keep reading, even when life is loud was written for that.
