I don’t necessarily read more, but I always have something I’m reading.

August, huh? I only say that because, now that I’m actually sending these monthly, I think I am contractually obligated to talk about the month at the beginning of every newsletter.

Looking back at July, well, it was a very 2026 month. I got to see my wonderful cousin get married, and spent about 12 of the 72 hours of that trip sitting in airports. (And then a work trip later in the month was fully canceled when my flight was canceled, no other flights were available for two days, and the airline agent told me to just take a refund because there was no way I was getting on a plane.)

I had a wonderful writing retreat/vacation with my writing group, AKA two of my closest friends, which was lovely! We go to Cape Cod and work on novels and put our feet in the ocean and eat ice cream every summer. I wrote 13,000 words! It was beautiful and super fun! And also: the sky was orange and the air was unbreathable due to wildfire smoke, and thanks to a parasitic outbreak I could not eat any leafy greens, which is HARD when you’re a vegetarian, and summer is peak salad eating season.

So yeah: 2026 sure was 2026ing hard in July. Hopefully August will be a little more stable.

On My Mind

Last month, I talked about why people who want to read more don’t, including me. At the end I promised to talk about reading more consistently and deeply, so here we go.

There are plenty of ways to do that which have worked for people I know. BFF Jess reads a chapter every night, no matter what. Some people have great successes with reading challenges, on Goodreads or elsewhere. My cousin always reads multiple books at once so she can pick up whichever one she’s feeling at any moment. Neat! None of these work for me, personally, but I can see why they do for other people. (This is less of an advice newsletter and more of the story of what has worked for me… unless you happen to have the exact same bad habits I do.)

For me, reading consistently came down to listening to the tiny voice in my brain that occasionally said “Hey, you could read a book right now! That would be fun!” and actually doing that… but to do that I had to make sure I could hear that voice. So what was blocking the voice out?

Well… Youtube videos.

If you read my last newsletter, you might have noticed how often I referenced Youtube. It’s basically replaced TV and movies for me; now I watch endless video essays and book reviews and science specials. I watch people redesigning their apartments and upcycling thrifted clothing and doing crafts. I watch soooo many pottery videos. It got to the point where I started hearing my internal monologue in Youtuber vernacular. That probably wasn’t healthy.

The thing is, I still watch a ton of Youtube… but a little less. That comes down to a couple of changes.

The first was that I realized I spent SO MUCH TIME on it because my standard evening and weekend brain-off activity was to play phone games endlessly, and I’d put Youtube on for background noise. The games were what you’d expect — Candy Crush and its ilk — and there’s nothing wrong with that, but I was spending at least two hours a day on this, often more like three or four. I’d get through all my lives on one game, then switch to another and go through all my lives, then switch to another, and so on until it had been so long that my lives in the first game had fully regenerated.

Listen: there is nothing inherently wrong with this. But I was unhappy with how much of my life it was eating, and how my attention span was shrinking, so I… stopped. Cold turkey. A bit over a year ago — Memorial Day 2025 — I deleted most of the games off my phone and decided to go for a week without playing the ones that remained. Then that week became a month. Then I decided to never open them again.

But what of Youtube? Well, without the games I was playing, I had nothing to do but… watch videos. And it turns out that most of the videos are actually not that engaging. I don’t really want to watch four hours of people showing their organizational hacks or morning routines or anything else, every evening, if that’s really all I’m doing. This has given me two advantages: first, no second screening means that when I watch anything, I’m actually paying attention and engaging more deeply, and so I notice if it’s boring or stupid or annoying and I turn it off.

Second, because so many things turned out to be boring or stupid or annoying, that little voice in my brain became more vocal. It wanted something interesting. The internet was suddenly boring. My brain would itch and I’d have the reflex to scroll to soothe it, but there was nothing engaging when I scrolled. In that case, my brain will usually say, might I consider, perhaps, picking up a book?

One of the things I wrote about last month is that reading feels like a more difficult task than watching endless videos — that’s still true. I do still find times when my brain is spinning, bored, and all it wants to do grasp a dumb, easy video to distract itself.

Hilariously, Youtube itself has helped me conquer this:

Years ago, I told Youtube not to capture my history, because why would I want to give them any extra data on me? A few months ago, they threw a temper tantrum about that and blocked me from accessing their algorithm-driven homepage full of video suggestions, unless I turn it back on. That page is what I would scroll looking for something dumb and easy when I was in those moods… and they nuked it for me. Thanks, Youtube! You still can’t have that additional data!

I still watch plenty of videos — obviously. But now I only see a list of videos from the creators I’ve subscribed to, and I only occasionally go looking for other videos to take in. Which means increasingly when I’m bored, and there’s nothing I’m subscribed to that I’m interested in, I shut the tab instead of scrolling.

And then, at least sometimes, I hear that little voice and I pick up a book instead. Incredible!

Here’s the other main thing I’ve done to read more consistently: I started going to bookstores again.

There was a time in my life when I was in bookstores constantly. When I was in high school and there was no nearby bookstore, my dad and I would regularly spend evenings driving an hour to the nearest B&N to shop, sitting down at a diner, and reading what we just bought while we ate. When I moved to the city, well, there were PLENTY of bookstores. Heck, I worked at a Borders (RIP). I wandered the aisles for hours.

But… my apartment was small. Shelf space was limited. Ebooks were cheap. So I didn’t go to bookstores as much anymore, because it was quicker and cheaper to buy on my ereader.

Then the pandemic happened, and I stopped shopping in stores almost entirely for a few years. Not just bookstores — any kind of stores. I was never a huge shopper but when I had to buy anything, it happened online.

But a couple of years ago, my sister got a membership to a local indie shop, which is only a 15-minute walk from our apartment. So I started ducking in occasionally just to see what’s there. And this is dumb, but: wow. I had forgotten what it was like to wander aisles and pick up anything that looked interesting, to read the back cover or the inner flap, check out a few paragraphs, and shove it into an increasingly-heavy basket because I can’t bear to put anything back on the shelf.

I’ve learned about a lot of great books online — more on that in a second — but there is just nothing like browsing a bookstore in person. When I buy a book I get more excited about reading it! And on top of that, I pick up books that looked neat that I would not have heard of otherwise. I follow what catches my eye. (As a direct result, I’ve read way more nonfiction in the last couple of years, too; they have a way more extensive nonfiction section than genre fiction, which is what I normally reach for.)

Okay, yes, this is an expensive habit to return to, and my shelf space is still limited. But I’ve been reading more consistently because I’ve got a lot of books I’m excited to pick up.

As for book recommendations online, I’ve become a lot more excited about those, too. I do watch a lot of booktube, and a lot of video essays — essentially, documentaries. When a booktuber describes a book that sounds neat, whether or not they liked it? I pull up the library catalogue. The video essayist references the books they did for research? Library catalogue time.

That is where I’ve found my ereader is the most useful. I bought a new ereader last year, and I use Library Extension liberally. The upshot of all of this is that whenever I hear about a book that sounds mildly interesting, I can either get it almost instantly, at no cost, to see if I like it and want to read it, or at least add it to a holds list. (Drawback: the NYPL only lets you have three holds at a time.) I also have a long, long list of saved books, so any time I’m bored I can comb through that and find one that looks intriguing at the moment, snag it, and go to town.

Finally, one last thing about reading itself. I’ve mentioned a couple of times that sometimes it feels hard. I’ve realized that usually happens when I’m between books — the idea of picking up a new one and starting it feels like a bigger barrier than picking up a book I’ve already started. So I baby myself: I know if I read a few pages, it’ll get easier, so I convince myself to pick up whichever book catches my eye and read only a few pages. If I read five pages and my brain just doesn’t waaaaanna, okay, I’ll put it down and can watch a mindless video. But usually, just having broken the seal and started makes it easier to continue. Because sometimes when something feels hard it isn’t actually, and you’ve just gotta, like… do it. Some company has a slogan about that but I try not to think in advertising speak.

So all of that is how I’ve started to read more consistently. Am I reading more overall? I mean… probably a little, but it’s not a difference that’s going to double how many books I read or anything. But it does mean that I’m almost never in a real reading dry spell anymore, and that feels pretty good.

As for reading more deeply and thoughtfully —

Oh crap this got really long again. I guess that’s for next month. I didn’t realize this was going to be a series!

A Thing I Made

As I said up top, this month I went to my cousin’s wedding! She got married in the midst of a redwood forest, surrounded by extremely beautiful nature. It was so inspiring that I decided to make these as wedding gifts.

These mugs are slab built (not thrown on the wheel), with a tree bark texture pressed into the clay. The nice thing about these is that anywhere they bulged or looked a little funky, I can just call that “organic” and it fits right in. They were done with brown speckled clay and a nutmeg glaze that lets some of the speckles show through.

I’m really happy with how they turned out! (But not as happy as I was at the extremely joyful wedding.)