How I Read (Go Flip Yourself)

Blog post, k7v.in/how-i-read, by Kev (@k7vin), on the blog Go Flip Yourself.

Date note. The post carries no publication date and does not appear on the blog’s current index. source_published: 2022 is an inference from its own line linking “the books I’ve read in 2022” in the past tense; it could as easily be early 2023. Kyle saved it in January 2024. Flagged rather than asserted — confidence: medium for the date only; the content below is verbatim from the live page.

Key Takeaways

• There is no trick, and he says so: “There is no secret. I make time for reading on an everyday basis.” Roughly 2–3 books a month.
• One protected slot, everything else opportunistic. The evening hour in the living room — not in bed, often with tea, until his body wants sleep — is “the only moment I intentionally make space in my calendar.” Everything else (queues, buses, the bathroom) runs off a phone with no games on it.
• Four books in parallel, differentiated by medium, not by subject: a ‘main’ physical book in the living room, a second physical book by the bed, a digital one on the phone, and historically an audiobook (lapsed with the Audible subscription).
• He reads cover to cover and thinks it’s a flaw. “I know this is weird but I never succeed to stop completely reading a book.” The corrective he invokes is the tail end — the finite number of books left in a lifetime — “so I better not waste time on mediocre ones.”
• Ownership is unresolved and handled in phases. “On one hand, I aesthetically love the accumulation of books… On the other hand, I hate the idea of accumulation itself, I find that pretentious and sad.” Since he moves countries often, he accumulates while settled and purges on moving.
• The online layer is industrial: ~200 Feedly blogs and 200+ Substack newsletters. Feedly gets a fast title-and-excerpt scan into a ‘weekend board’ folder, emptied on weekend afternoons during his kids’ naps; Substack gets 30 minutes each morning after school drop-off.
• Speed reading was learned and rejected. He studied Tony Buzan’s techniques (his grandfather was a fan) but “when I do this, I don’t feel I’m reading. It feels more like I’m scanning some content.” He reserves it for online skimming and reverts to slow reading — inner voice, images, deeper thought — when something lands.
• The retention mechanism is social. “More often than not, when I read something I find impactful, I read it again out loud to Mat [my other half].” He acknowledges she probably hates the tenth time in fifteen minutes, and that it sometimes sparks the best conversations they have.
• Podcasts fill movement time — 20–30 minutes minimum daily while walking or cycling, at 2x for English and 2.5x for French.

Connections

• Kyle saved this alongside his “Books 2.0 / University 2.0” note, which fed University 2.0. The relevance is the unbundling angle: this is one person assembling a personal curriculum out of books, 200 feeds, newsletters and podcasts, with no institution involved — the demand-side evidence for the draft’s supply-side argument.
• Sits next to Live the Library and the broader Reading material as a concrete reading-system description rather than a theory of reading.
• The “tail end” idea (a finite lifetime book count as a filter on mediocrity) is the sharpest transferable item here.