5 Interesting Tactics That Will Spice Up Your Reading Life

I’ve read over 700 books in the past decade. In that time, I’ve experimented with numerous tactics for getting more out of each book while finding more enjoyment.

Here are five tactics I’ve found that will spice up your reading life:

1. Music Mixing: Listen to songs that align with what you’re reading

I’ve begun to occasionally listen to movie soundtracks or playlists that align with whatever I’m reading. Here are a few recent book/music pairings I’ve enjoyed:

• While reading Robert Caro’s biography about President Lyndon B. Johnson (Book 1: The Path to Power), I listened to the soundtracks from each season of the political drama “House of Cards.”
• While reading the dystopian AI book I, Human, I listened to the soundtrack from Apple TV’s dystopian series “Severance.”
• While reading Ursula Le Guin’s sci-fi classic The Left Hand of Darkness, I listened to otherworldly soundtracks like “Interstellar” and a Spotify playlist called “Atmospheric Sci-fi Soundtracks.”

Each of these musical pairings gave me a deeper appreciation for what I was reading, allowing me to engage a second sense (listening) as part of my reading experience.

You could try this with an endless array of book/audio combinations. Listen to Hans Zimmer’s “Gladiator” soundtrack while reading Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. Put on an ominous soundtrack like “Gone Girl” or “The Village” while reading a page-turning thriller like The Silent Patient. Or queue up a summer vibes playlist while enjoying your latest beach read.

2. Media Mashing: Check out other media about your topic

In addition to listening to related music, seek out other media that pertain to whatever you’re reading. This is especially pertinent to nonfiction but can also occasionally be applied to fiction as well.

For example, I recently read David Grann’s The Lost City of Z about Percy Fawcett’s exploration of the Amazon rainforest. The book made me wonder what the Amazon is really like, so I watched a couple of nature specials and YouTube videos about it to gain a deeper appreciation for the deadly challenges Fawcett faced (mosquitoes, piranha, bullet ants, etc.).

Podcasts are also great for this type of “media mashing.” If you’re reading a true crime book, search for related podcast episodes. Or if you’re reading a book about personal development, the author probably did a media blitz and recorded several podcast interviews or YouTube talks. Listening to those will further cement the book’s takeaways in your brain because the author will inevitably recap the most salient points they want readers to remember from the book.

3. Altered Angles: Approach one topic from multiple perspectives

One of my favorite reading tactics is to read multiple books about the same topic, all written from different perspectives. Ryan Holiday calls this “swarming,” and I’ve tweaked that concept to include reading both fiction and nonfiction books about the topic.

For example, last year I went on a WWII kick, so I read the following books:

• The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larsen (Nonfiction / History)
• Maus I and II by Art Spiegelman (Graphic Novel)
• The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (Nonfiction / Biography)

Larsen’s book is a fact-based narrative that focuses on WWII from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s perspective, while Spiegelman’s novel is jarring in its cartoonish portrayal of Nazis as cats and Jews as mice. And Frank’s diary layered on an all-too-real perspective of a 13-year-old peering out of an attic hiding place upon the barbaric world around her. It was enlightening to read about the same events through such varied lenses.

I’ve also paired other books together to examine a topic from multiple examples. As one additional example, I read the following books when I wanted to learn more about America’s structural racism:

• Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown (Nonfiction / History)
• The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Novel from 2016)
• The 1619 Project created by Nikole Hannah-Jones (Nonfiction / Essays)
• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (Novel from 1952)
• A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan (Nonfiction / Historical Thriller)

Every time I’ve tackled a topic from multiple angles, the process has given me a more robust understanding of the issue than if I had just read a single book (or even if I had only read nonfiction books about the topic).

4. Dinner Discussions: Summarize the book for family or friends

The best way to learn something is to teach it, and I’ve found that I often don’t understand a book well enough until I’ve explained it two or three times to others.

The first time is usually choppy — I struggle to articulate the core theme and aimlessly bounce from one interesting tidbit to the next. But the more I discuss what I’m reading, the more eloquence I develop and the more I understand what I’ve read.

If you’re meeting up with a friend for coffee, ask them what they’ve been reading recently. They’ll likely ask you the same question, which will give you an avenue for not only teaching them what you’ve learned but also solidifying the knowledge in your own brain.

5. Short Summaries: Write quick recaps of what you’ve learned

In addition to talking about what you’re learning, build the habit of writing about it. This can take many different forms:

• Write a blog post or Medium article with your takeaways
• Send a short email or Slack message to your team (Consider creating a Slack channel for #3-takeaways, where any book lovers in your company can quickly share their top lessons learned from what they’re reading.)
• Short posts on LinkedIn, such as the example below