Many children and youths dream of becoming avid readers. It is always a cool thing to love reading, especially since socialisation and how media play it out suggest so.

Reading is a long game. Once you gain a solid footing in reading, you continue to read and continue to read. It’s not like a video game where you complete the final task, and then the game is over. Because once you are in it, there are always more books you want to read.

The question is: How can I start developing a reading habit? For many years throughout my teenage years, I used to read a book per week. Upon entering university, I sped up to reading a book per day—usually spending about four hours on one book so I had enough spare time to fulfil other academic and social commitments.

Here are a few lessons I learnt about transitioning into a regular book reader:

1. Find Your Core Field(s) of Interest

When I was a teen, I read a wide range of subjects. For example, one week I might be reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, then the next week I would read The Road of Lost Innocence: The Story of a Cambodian Heroine by Somaly Mam.

Spending the first few years exploring different subjects is conducive to paving your way to becoming a committed book reader. Like academic learning, we study a wide range of subjects at the introductory level in secondary education (or middle school and high school) before figuring out what we would like to major in at university. As a freshman, we still study a range of introductory sub-disciplines. This helps us decide which sub-disciplines we want to specialise in in the long term.

Book reading is no different. While we might have a particular genre we prefer from the beginning, there are still many topics or subjects we can focus on within a single genre. For me, I spent my teenage years figuring out that I enjoy reading non-fiction books related to human development or society. This has paved the way for my lifelong reading habits.

Try to explore different subjects of books early on, so you know what you prefer or not prefer sooner

2. Start with Trade Books

Upon accumulating a few years of broad reading experience and selecting particular core fields of books to read, you can begin reading books that provide an overview or literature review of these fields.

It’s okay if you are still reading slowly at this stage because we have all been there. The reason we should start with books that provide an overview or literature review of the core fields of interest is that this helps us establish a foundation of knowledge in these areas.

Usually, trade books provide a more general understanding of a topic or subject, while academic books contain many jargon and technical terms that are hard to digest. Therefore, I recommend reading trade books until you become an experienced reader.

Trade books are usually the majority of the books you can find in a bookstore or book fair. These books are written in a reader-friendly fashion, designed for readers who might not necessarily have prior knowledge of the topics.

Read trade books but not academic books until you become an capable reader

3. Read Slow to Read Fast

Once we build up our foundation of knowledge in particular fields, we can challenge ourselves to read books that are thicker or more wordy. A typical trade book is about 200 pages. Perhaps you can choose to read books that exceed 250 pages or reach almost 300 pages. Usually, books that are more extensive in length provide more specialised exploration and discussion. Therefore, these books not only deliver a general overview of a topic but also share more detailed investigation that may take time to digest.

Trust me, as long as you build up your foundation of knowledge, your reading efficiency with the next books will improve. This is because your brain takes less time to make sense of what the paragraph is trying to convey, as your brain has probably already processed such a concept or argument while you were reading your previous books.

If you want a more technical understanding of particular fields, you can even try reading academic books. There are many semi-academic and semi-trade books published by university presses, such as Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Princeton University Press. Usually, the content of these books is academically focused, but the writing style is for general readers.

Reading these books published by university presses allows you to learn more specialised and detailed expertise in the fields you are interested in. Once you feel comfortable reading these books, congratulations, you have turned yourself into a very capable book reader and lover.

And I am sure your reading list will extend, and your reading interest will expand.