Your Phone Can Help You Read More Books - One Trick to Read More

I genuinely hate to say this, I really do. And I want to preface this by saying that I do think that Amazon is the devil, run by the devil, all those things. But I am going to counter myself and say that I made one small change to my phone and I’ve been reading so much more.

If you're a 90s baby or older you might relate to this dilemma. I used to read a ton in middle school and high school and it was something that I really enjoyed. Over the past several years since really getting addicted to Instagram and Twitter and TikTok and YouTube… and any other platform you can really name that has taken my attention away, I've really lost the time that I committed to reading books. That's frustrated me, and so I've tried interventions to get myself to read more books. And I always have this mentality where I'm like physical books are so much better than digital books, and I used to joke about books without batteries and I thought that that was really the most efficient way for me to get more reading in my life was just to commit fully to having a book in my hand all the time. And then it just stopped happening, I stopped picking them up, or I would carry the book around and I really would like the way the book looked, and I wouldn't want to finish it because I enjoyed the feeling of the book so much- because it had become such a novel experience for me- that I didn't finish my books.

I just eventually stopped picking up books in the same way, and over the past year especially, I've been really trying to assess my personal relationship with social media and Instagram and all the time I spend there, and trying to focus more of that time on to the things that I do want to be doing. Which is reading. As dorky as that sounds, I have so many books that I've been wanting to go through for years and I just have been brushing it off to the side.

In the past I got rid of my Instagram all together and that gave me more time in my day to read, but I still felt like there had to be some sort of balance struck. So, I've had the Kindle app on my phone for a while, but recently I've really started to break into my habit of Instagram-Twitter-TikTok-GMail ~ open the app, close the app, open the app, close the app, open the app, close the app ~ and I've sort of started to intercept that by adding in the Kindle app so I'll get to a point where I'm circling through all these apps and I'm like okay, let's hit the Kindle app and I get into the Kindle app and this is the trick! I've discovered the lesson (for me at least) by putting on continuous scrolling, it feels like I'm reading an article.

I used to just also open the Google home page and go through articles, and read articles that I didn't even have control over whose articles were being promoted to me. And that just really frustrated me because I was reading a lot, but I also was just doom-scrolling and you know, reading what the algorithm was feeding me. And I wasn't reading the books that I wanted to be reading. So by putting the continuous scrolling setting on the Kindle app, I felt like I was reading an article and I could just keep reading it like it was an article.

Regrettably, I've been an Amazon Prime member for several years now and every month Amazon sends out an email of what they call their Kindle Firsts. You get to pick one book from a selection of six every month to add to your Kindle library, so I've been doing that for years but I haven't been reading the books, but I've been curating and selecting my library collection. And recently I thought, let me just start plowing through these. So I have been. And I just want to say that I'm really excited about this. I know it seems really strange and trivial, and everybody when I first tell them that I'm reading books on my phone is like 'are you out of your mind?' but I realized that the easiest way for me to reintegrate reading into my life is to not try and pull the phone out of my hand because clearly that hasn't been working. So it was more about trying to adapt the next thing into how I'm reading going forward. Because even adding a Kindle, it's still carrying something around, and like I love the idea of it where it's carrying something around like a book but it's light, and you can have a bunch of books on it, all that stuff. But I really haven't been drawn to that as much as I have been effective at just opening the app that's on the phone that's already on and in my hand. You know? So that's my little recommendation.

I know it seems ridiculous, I know it seems crazy, but I've been plowing through books left and right. I've been trying to figure out what to do with them, I posted a couple reviews on my Instagram account @lilmitrop you can see those there, they're in the highlighted story, but I'm thinking about also maybe doing some blog stuff, maybe doing some more YouTube stuff about books? I don't want to be a BookTuber I'm not a BookTuber. I respect you guys, I don't read that much, but I have been reading a lot right now because this is just kind of what I'm doing right now, I'm just reading a lot. I also found out that Goodreads reviews were public, I didn't love that. It's like, where do you strike the balance of like a book review but like I don't want to tag the author because I don't want to hurt their feelings? But also like, good job on getting a book out, but like I didn't really like it? You know what I mean? Like I don't wanna, I feel bad! I used to think- I think back in the day Goodreads used to be a different app and it was private- so I would post all these reviews that were way too detailed and then I started getting likes on them and I was like i'm gonna take those down... but anyway I have been reading a bunch of books I just published my most recent reading list on my Patreon which you can check out at the link in the description if you want to support me, take a look at my reading list. I will probably be posting more book videos I've been posting more lifestyle content, I've been trying to figure out how to make more lifestyle content. I made a bunch of art videos in the past, I still will probably be making some art videos, but we're just changing it up. If you want to watch some of my other stuff you can click all the things that are popping up around me.

Thank you so much for checking in. My name is Sophia Mitropoulos, I'll see in the next one bye!