In 2018 I wrote about how I read. Eight years later, the practice is mostly unchanged; the tools around it have been entirely replaced. Google Sheets for tracking was replaced by Google Play Books’s In Progress sorting, Pocket by Reader, and the recall ritual by Readwise’s daily highlights.
Books I’m interested in go on a wishlist. When they’re 50% off or better, they move to my Google Play Books library as available-but-not-started. Papers I can get as PDF skip the wishlist and go directly to the library. The In Progress shelf is sorted by completion percentage; when I finish one and pick a new one, I take the most recent library addition I haven’t started. Within In Progress I read in short bursts—a chapter at a time for non-fiction, situational for fiction. Before resuming any book I pause and recall the last section.
Articles arrive in Reader’s Feeds view. I scan at bedtime: save to later or ignore. Saved items get read and highlighted on the tube or during downtime, sorted most-recently published first. Readwise pulls fifteen highlights from past reading into a morning notification.
I’m still reading multiple books concurrently, though the count has changed. The 2018 “five to ten” grew to twenty at the physical peak, then to over forty when going digital removed the physical limit. At forty-plus, the in-flight set was effectively unbounded and the sense of progress disappeared. The hard nine—one screen-glanceable set in Google Play Books—is what settled out. The mechanism is the same: read in short bursts, leave space between sessions for the chapter to condense, return with practised recall rather than skimming back to where I left off. It’s a sanity cap, not a memory limit.
I still read non-fiction one chapter at a time, setting the book down and picking up the next. Fiction is more situational; sometimes the sectional discipline holds, sometimes I get caught up and read several chapters at a stretch—a distinction the 2018 post didn’t make explicit.
The mechanism—short bursts, practised recall, and consolidation across days—still describes how I retain material. Cognitive-science writing has caught up to the intuition the 2018 post gestured at: the spacing effect describes how distributed sessions strengthen retention, and cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Julie Fratantoni’s advice to “close down and repeat back what you learned” maps almost exactly onto the practised-recall ritual. I can recall books I read nearly a decade ago—which is what keeps me confident in the practice, even when I can’t prove it’s the practice doing the work.
The tools, on the other hand, have all moved. I dropped the spreadsheet when I went all-digital. In 2018 I kept readability scores in Google Sheets, sorted ascending—lowest score first. Google Play Books provides a facsimile: its in-progress list sorts by completion percentage descending, surfacing the most-complete books first. That’s the dominant factor of the original formula recovered as a built-in sort. The other factors—page area, pages remaining, font size, age—are gone, but in practice the completion sort lands on the right next read most of the time.
Pocket’s shutdown pushed me to look for an alternative. The deciding factor for Reader wasn’t features but integration: Reader handles RSS feeds and arbitrary articles in one place and connects to the rest of my workflow in ways Pocket didn’t. I read on the tube and during downtime, and my bedtime routine includes triaging new feed content. Reader is what made those routines coherent.
Practised recall hasn’t changed; Readwise added a layer on top. The 2018 ritual still fires when I resume a book—pause, recall the last section, then read. Readwise adds a broader scan: fifteen highlights from past reading delivered every morning as a notification. The 2018 ritual happens when I pick up a book; Readwise’s notification arrives whether I think about it or not. Whether that adds depth or just frequency, I’m not sure.
I pitched the method “for others” in 2018. Eight years on, I can verify it works for one person but I can’t separate the methodology from the underlying memory. If you try it—or already have—you’d be answering something I can’t: whether the method works because of what I do, or just because of who I am.