William Powers disconnects the internet modem in his house Friday night and reconnects Monday morning. This is from his book Hamlet’s Blackberry. He calls it the Walden Zone. I don’t know Powers still practices this disconnection. Cal Newport talks about doing something similar. He relates it to the Jewish practice of Sabbath.

I love binging internet-TV shows. When I don’t bing TV, I binge Youtube. I love the variety and color from video but I have come to love books more. To give books a chance, I decided to try Internet Sabbath for myself.

I’ve given myself more rope than the Powers’ family did. I don’t switch off the internet modem because my wife has not asked for this. I also limit Internet Sabbath to just Saturdays.

I set the phone to go into focus model all day Saturday; the screen goes dark and notifications silence
I don’t watch Internet TV which is the only form of TV we have; I allow myself to watch DVDs but haven’t done it yet
I don’t use the web browser on any device

Rigid rules rarely last. Powers talks about making exceptions in his book from time to time. Here are mine:

Any app that works offline is allowed — my note-taking app, for example, lives on the cloud
Budgeting is allowed on the web browser — I use Google Drive and OneDrive
I will stream podcasts on my phone’s podcast app or music on the music app
Maps are fair game

I surprised myself as I finished my sixth book at 10:30 PM on December 31st. Never had I finished these many books in one month, ever!

Here are the books I finished reading in December:

The Practice of Groundedness by Brad Stulburg
The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew Crawford
The Color Master by Aimee Bender
Hamlet’s Blackberry by William Powers
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan

I had started a few of these books before December which helped push the number to six. I always enter a new month with one or two books already started. Capturing the month when I finished books is a good enough metric.

But this is also the trap, the fascination of the numerical metric, the high-score! Six is better than four which is better than one! If all my books were in the genre of Stulburg’s Groundedness then I could have read 10 books easy. This is because the concepts and ideas among similar books are more familiar, and thus faster to absorb.

For example: Two books I have read in 2021 referenced Natasha Dow Schüll’s book, Addiction by Design. This makes the material familiar and thus faster to absorb as I re-read it.

I am turning my focus from hitting a number of books to getting a variety in my diet of books. I have given myself a rough guideline of 1 book a week or 4 a month. However, I have detailed guidelines on adding variety to the books I read.

How do you add variety to your reading list?