My Case for Reading Books

I still remember the first book that completely captivated me: Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. I was a kid, and suddenly I wasn't just sitting - I was surviving in the Canadian wilderness with Brian, making fire, catching fish, and feeling every triumph and setback like it was happening to me. It also coincided with my family and I going on a road trip from Austin to Alaska, camping, climbing, cooking, kayaking, fishing… so my brothers and I couldn't stop talking about it. That's when I realized books could transport you somewhere else entirely, make you feel deeply, and connect you with people in ways that nothing else could.

Fast forward to today, and I'm looking around our world and, more specifically, our team at Querio. I see brilliant minds who've somehow missed out on this incredible pastime. They're consuming content constantly - TikToks, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube videos and Netflix shows - but books? Not so much, they sadly don’t have the same attention-grabbing machinery backing them up. And honestly, I think they're missing out on something transformative. This is my attempt to convince you that you should start reading.

Your Brain Will Thank You

Let's start with something practical: that screen you're staring at before bed? Don't deny it - I know you are, and I get it. The pull is incredibly intense! But it's sabotaging your sleep. Harvard Medical School research shows that blue light from screens suppresses melatonin production, messing with your natural sleep cycle (link). Studies found that 2+ hours of evening screen time seriously disrupts the melatonin surge you need for quality sleep (link). But you already know that, don't you? So why don't you do something different? Because you lack the willpower to resist that dopamine, that addiction - something I think books can actually help you build, but I'll come back to that.

Reading a physical book before bed? It's a game changer. It's become my ritual - 30 minutes every night, no screens, just me and whatever world I'm diving into. Whether it's getting lost in the philosophical depths of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (which inspired me to write about software maintenance), or following Paul Atreides through the political intrigue of Dune, reading before bed feels like my brain is actively working and engaging rather than just passively consuming. Oh, and an extra point for reading: if you're really tired, truly tired, it'll get you to sleep incredibly fast.

Speaking of your brain working - reading exercises it. Research shows that reading stimulates neural pathways, enhances brain activity, and improves memory (link). It prevents long-term cognitive decline and builds what scientists call "cognitive reserve" (link). When I'm reading, I can feel my brain moving, connecting ideas, actively processing - completely different from the brain-rotted feeling I get after watching YouTube for hours, something I struggle with myself.

An Empathy Machine

Here's something that might surprise you - reading fiction actually makes you a better person. Multiple studies show that people who read literary fiction have higher emotional intelligence and empathy levels (link). You learn to see the world through someone else's eyes, and you see the values you read about in non-fiction being lived out through characters.

Take The Catcher in the Rye - living through Holden's adolescent disdain for everyone around him taught me something profound about feeling alienated and trying to preserve innocence in a world that feels fake. Or Cien Años de Soledad, where Gabriel García Márquez made me fall in love with magical realism and connect with Latin American culture that felt close to home. During the pandemic, reading Atlas Shrugged gave me and my co-founder Rami a shared language for thinking about life and values.

Even dystopian fiction hits different. 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Animal Farm, Slaughterhouse-Five - these books don't just entertain you, they make you protective of truth, aware of how fragile freedom really is. They show you that the world is messy and complex in ways that a two-hour movie just can't capture.

And fantasy, sci-fi, and the rest? Absolutely transformative! Dune and Lord of the Rings transport you to entirely new worlds, but somehow you come back with fresh perspective on the one we live in - on power, loyalty, courage, the inner dichotomy we share with Paul Atreides, and what we should strive for as humans.

Information That Sticks

Look, I love YouTube probably more than most, but when it comes to actually retaining information? Books win every time. Research consistently shows that reading results in deeper comprehension and retention compared to videos (link). A 2019 meta-analysis of 33 studies found that students understood more informational text when reading versus consuming it digitally (link).

I've applied countless ideas from books directly to work: The Lean Startup, The Mom Test, Continuous Discovery Habits, Founding Sales (I go as far as calling it the bible), The Design of Everyday Things. These aren't just concepts I half-remember from a video - they're frameworks that have fundamentally changed how I approach product development and customer research.

And here's the crazy part - books let you time travel. I can literally read the words of the philosopher king himself, Marcus Aurelius, from almost 2000 years ago in Meditations. Or dive into Stephen Hawking's brilliant (and hilarious) mind explaining how the universe works in A Brief History of Time - holy shit, the universe is insane, and not only does he make it accessible, he makes it hilarious and thought provoking.

Transformation

The beautiful thing about reading is you never know which book will hit you deeply. Maybe it's philosophy - stoicism changed my entire approach to life, first through The Obstacle is the Way, and later through books like Letters from a Stoic and A Guide to the Good Life. Now I try to live by these principles daily, seeing obstacles as opportunities, focusing on what I can control, seeking tranquility while I do my part for society.

Maybe it's understanding humanity - Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens, Homo Deus, and Nexus completely shifted how I think about our species and where we're heading. Or evolutionary psychology books like The Moral Animal and Sex at Dawn - unprovable but damn, they make so much sense of human behavior.

Maybe it's the pure adventure ones that simply make you want to live - Wind, Sand and Stars, Endurance, Into the Wild, Sailing Alone Around the World. These books don't just tell you about adventure, they make you crave it, make you want to explore and push boundaries.

Or maybe it's existentialist philosophy that resonates - The Myth of Sisyphus (another book that inspired a blog of mine) and What Is Existentialism? by Simone de Beauvoir, helping you embrace and live off of life's absurdity. Hell, maybe it's just a "Brief Introduction to..." whatever you're curious about - no better way to quickly learn about music, philosophy, or a country you're experiencing for the first time.

Get Going

The point isn't that you need to become a philosophy scholar or read Dostoyevsky (though The Brothers Karamazov is incredible if you're up for it). The point is that reading offers something at every level - better sleep, sharper thinking, deeper empathy, practical knowledge, pure entertainment, and sometimes, if you're lucky, complete transformation.

So here's my challenge: pick one book. Something that sounds interesting - sci-fi, business, adventure, whatever. Read for 20-30 minutes before bed instead of scrolling. Try it for a month. Feel the initial resistance, push through the obstacle, and be proud of yourself when you feel the joy that comes from it. Remember that willpower I mentioned earlier? This is how you build it - one page at a time, one night at a time.

I guarantee your brain will feel different. More active. More engaged. Like it's actually working instead of being fed content through a fire hose.

And who knows? Maybe you'll discover what I discovered with Hatchet all those years ago - that books aren't just information delivery systems. They're portals to other worlds, other minds, other ways of being. They're conversations with some of the smartest, most creative, most adventurous humans who ever lived.

Your brain is capable of incredible things. Feed it something worthy of that potential.

References:

• Harvard Health Publishing. (2024). Blue light has a dark side. https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-has-a-dark-side

• Sutter Health. (2024). Screens and Your Sleep: The Impact of Nighttime Use. https://www.sutterhealth.org/health/screens-and-your-sleep-the-impact-of-nighttime-use

• Nuvance Health. (2023). Physical and mental health benefits of reading books. https://www.nuvancehealth.org/health-tips-and-news/physical-and-mental-health-benefits-of-reading-books

• PMC. (2021). Reading activity prevents long-term decline in cognitive function. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8482376/

• Big Think. (2023). How reading fiction can make you a better person. https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/reading-fiction-empathy-better-person/

• Shoe, A PhD. (2024). Which is Better for Learning: Reading or Watching Videos? https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/which-better-learning-reading-watching-videos-angela-shoe-md3ie

• GovTech. (2023). Books vs. Screens: What Does the Latest Research Say? https://www.govtech.com/education/k-12/books-vs-screens-what-does-the-latest-research-say

Here’s a list of books I happen to have digitized in my Reading List as recommendations. Some I’ve read and some I haven’t gotten to yet, but I think they’re all worthy of your time. There’s soooo so many books not mentioned in this blog nor in the list below that I love, that I don’t know about and that are simply incredible. Let me know if any come to mind, it’d be nice to expand the digitized list.

• A Brief History of Time — Stephen Hawking

• A Man in Full — Tom Wolfe

• A Time of Gifts — Patrick Leigh Fermor

• Abundance — Ezra Klein

• Ada Blackjack — Jennifer Niven

• All About Love — bell hooks

• Amusing Ourselves to Death — Neil Postman

• Antifragile — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

• Atlas Shrugged — Ayn Rand

• Augustus — John Williams

• Basic Writings of Kant — Immanuel Kant

• Being and Nothingness — Jean-Paul Sartre

• Beyond Good and Evil — Friedrich Nietzsche

• Blue Ocean Strategy — W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne

• Breve Historia de Europa Central

• Capital in the Twenty-First Century — Thomas Piketty

• Capitalism and Freedom — Milton Friedman

• Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky

• Cyrus the Great — Xenophon

• Dead Wake — Erik Larson

• Dune — Frank Herbert

• Don Quijote de la Mancha — Miguel de Cervantes

• Don’t Make Me Think — Steve Krug

• Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited — Steve Krug

• Einstein — Walter Isaacson

• Either/Or — Søren Kierkegaard

• El Amor en los Tiempos del Cólera — Gabriel García Márquez

• Endurance — Alfred Lansing

• Everybody Lies — Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

• Factfulness — Hans Rosling

• Finite and Infinite Games — James P. Carse

• Flatline Constructs — Mark Fisher

• Founding Sales — Pete Kazanjy

• From Eternity to Here — Sean Carroll

• Geometry of Design — Kimberly Elam

• Gift from the Sea — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

• Gödel, Escher, Bach — Douglas R. Hofstadter

• Gravity and Grace — Simone Weil

• Hatchet — Gary Paulsen

• Historia Mínima de México

• Homo Deus — Yuval Noah Harari

• How Design Makes Us Think — Sean Adams

• How to Be a Leader — Plutarch

• How to Be a Stoic — Massimo Pigliucci

• How to Keep Your Cool — Seneca

• How to Love — Thich Nhat Hanh

• How to Read a Book — Mortimer Adler

• How to Think Like a Roman Emperor — Donald Robertson

• How to Think Like Socrates — Donald Robertson

• I Me Mine — George Harrison

• I Will Teach You to Be Rich — Ramit Sethi

• Impro — Keith Johnstone

• Infinite Jest — David Foster Wallace

• Innumeracy — John Allen Paulos

• Introducing Time — Craig Callender

• Juárez: El Imperio y la República

• Lanark — Alasdair Gray

• Leadership in Turbulent Times — Doris Kearns Goodwin

• Lean Enterprise — Jez Humble

• Letters from a Stoic — Seneca

• Life and Fate — Vasily Grossman

• Lila — Robert Pirsig

• Lincoln’s Virtues — William Lee Miller

• London: A Guide for Curious Wanderers — Jack Chesher

• Lonesome Dove — Larry McMurtry

• Man and His Symbols — Carl Jung

• Meditations — Marcus Aurelius

• Meditations on First Philosophy — René Descartes

• Memoirs of Hadrian — Marguerite Yourcenar

• Misbehaving — Richard Thaler

• Mismatch — Kat Holmes

• Montaigne — Stefan Zweig

• Moral Ambition — Rutger Bregman

• Nexus — Yuval Noah Harari

• Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper — Roland Allen

• On Character — Stanley McChrystal

• On Character: Choices That Define a Life — Stanley McChrystal

• On the Shortness of Life — Seneca

• Passions Within Reason — Robert H. Frank

• Phaedrus — Plato

• Recursion — Blake Crouch

• Riddley Walker — Russell Hoban

• Rites of Spring — Modris Eksteins

• ReWork — Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson

• Running Lean — Ash Maurya

• Sapiens — Yuval Noah Harari

• Sailing True North — Admiral James Stavridis

• Shogun — James Clavell

• Speedboat — Renata Adler

• Stillness Is the Key — Ryan Holiday

• Story Mapping — Jeff Patton

• Sun and Steel — Yukio Mishima

• Talleyrand — Jean Orieux

• The 48 Laws of Power — Robert Greene

• The Aeneid — Virgil

• The Anthropocene Reviewed — John Green

• The Black Swan — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

• The Book of Disquiet — Fernando Pessoa

• The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky

• The Captain Class — Sam Walker

• The Character of Physical Law — Richard Feynman

• The Colossus of Maroussi — Henry Miller

• The Count of Monte Cristo — Alexandre Dumas

• The Creative Act — Rick Rubin

• The Culture of Narcissism — Christopher Lasch

• The Decadent Society — Ross Douthat

• The Design of Everyday Things — Don Norman

• The Discovery of Slowness — Sten Nadolny

• The End of Everything — Katie Mack

• The European Union: A Brief Introduction — John Pinder

• The Fountainhead — Ayn Rand

• The Four Noble Truths — Ajahn Sumedho

• The Hearing Trumpet — Leonora Carrington

• The Iliad — Homer

• The Invention of Morel — Adolfo Bioy Casares

• The Jobs To Be Done Playbook — Jim Kalbach

• The Lean Startup — Eric Ries

• The Lives of the Stoics — Ryan Holiday

• The Little Book That Builds Wealth — Pat Dorsey

• The Man Who Planted Trees — Jean Giono

• The Man Without Qualities — Robert Musil

• The Master and His Emissary — Iain McGilchrist

• The Master of Go — Yasunari Kawabata

• The Moral Animal — Robert Wright

• The Mum Test — Rob Fitzpatrick

• The New New Thing — Michael Lewis

• The Odyssey — Homer

• The Origins of Virtue — Matt Ridley

• The Peregrine — J.A. Baker

• The Republic — Plato

• The Ride of a Lifetime — Robert Iger

• The Right to Oblivion — Lowry Pressly

• The River Why — David James Duncan

• The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt — Edmund Morris

• The Sea, The Sea — Iris Murdoch

• The Selfish Gene — Richard Dawkins

• The Sky Is Not the Limit — Neil deGrasse Tyson

• The Snow Leopard — Peter Matthiessen

• The Splendid and the Vile — Erik Larson

• The Sympathizer — Viet Thanh Nguyen

• The Universe in a Nutshell — Stephen Hawking

• The Unfettered Mind — Takuan Sōhō

• The Wealth of Nations — Adam Smith

• Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman

• Thinking With Type — Ellen Lupton

• This Side of Paradise — F. Scott Fitzgerald

• Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot — James Stockdale

• Trillion Dollar Coach — Eric Schmidt

• Travels with Epicurus — Daniel Klein

• True and False — David Mamet

• Tunnel 29 — Helena Merriman

• Us — Terrence Real

• Utopia for Realists — Rutger Bregman

• Viaje a la Ciencia — Isaac Asimov

• Weapons of Math Destruction — Cathy O’Neil

• What Is Existentialism? — Simone de Beauvoir

• What’s Your Dream? — Simon Squibb

• Why Buddhism Is True — Robert Wright

• Why Nations Fail — Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson

• Wind, Sand and Stars — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — Robert Pirsig

• Zen Mind: Beginner’s Mind — Shunryu Suzuki