What are you talking about?
I didn't say they don't read. I said they don't read the shit books that you read.

What do successful people read?
That's not so difficult to find out nowadays. If you follow successful people's online presence they tend to tell you what they read. Elon Musk, for example, has read a lot of classic sci-fi Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, Philip K Dick, Douglas Adams etc. He's pretty successful. There are even webpages that list the books various successful people talk about having read, e.g. there's a page that lists all the books mentioned on the Joe Rogan podcast ordered by number of mentions. He's pretty successful too.

Furthermore, you wouldn't be considered a "reader" with that list of books. There are readers and then there are readers. If someone only reads self help guides and calls themselves a reader, they'd get laughed out of most intellectual conversation. The same for women who just read romance, Harry Potter and everything by Katie Price, or guys who just read detective novels, books by ex SAS and biographies about gangsters. Technically they are reading but... come on... they don't know anything about the art of literature.

And then there are some books that are more or less considered essential reading, like 1984. Any adult human who doesn't live in a remote African tribe and hasn't read 1984 is failing at life. You can't even be in a conversation about modern politics if you haven't read that book, you don't even know what big brother is, you don't even know what room 101 is, you don't even know what newspeak is, you don't even know what double-think is... and like this you'd be incapable of discussing modern politics. The person you are taking to would keep having to stop and explain those concepts to you, or would just tell you to fuck off and come back when you've read it. Has anybody ever read 1984 and not had it permanently effect their way of thinking about the world?

What's wrong with the books you read?
You don't read books. You read book. They are all basically the exact same book. They are badly written, poorly researched and are full of lies, half truths and fake, psuedo or at best cherry-picked science. They are chewing gum for ears. Furthermore, they are supposed to influence behaviour somehow... but you just read one, then read another, then another. To implement even 10% of what any one of them says would take months. You need to write a plan and check in once a week to see how well you are doing etc. The last book of that kind I read was The 77 laws of success by David Deangelo, on recommendation of Phil. And I wrote the rules down and marked off which ones I already have nailed and which I need to work on and how to go about that and went back to it once a month or so for a while. Now I'm not in that mode at all though.

As for what I generally read. The books that come to mind that I read in the past year or so are...
Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev
What is to be done? / A vital question, Nikolai Chernyshevsky
Notes from the underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk
The Bhagavad-Gita, no one knows who wrote it.
12 rules for life, Jordan Peterson
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
The war of art, Steven Presfield
On writing, Stephen King

Pretty amazing, eh!

Currently reading...
The gulag archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The dhammapada, no one knows who wrote this either.
The Foundation series, Isaac Asimov

I tend to only read one fiction at a time but might be in the middle of a few historical or philosophical texts at once, as now. The gulag archipelago is a historical document and is huge and I've been reading it on and off for months. The dhammapada is a collection of sayings believed to have been uttered by the Buddha, as with much Eastern philosophy you kind of have to read one saying and then sit and think about it for a bit. The Foundation series is science fiction.


Peace,

kowalski