My Summer Reading #Lifehack of a Lifetime - Exploit Infinite Scroll on Your Phone to Read More; Plus - The Fire this Time: America, Read "Burn Down Master's House" by Clay Cane

It's basically summer and you may have seen AOC is doing a summer reading challenge, and NPR came out with this list of "5 ways to read more books this summer". One of the tips from NPR is to go with paper books over digital to minimize distractions, which is certainly one good approach, but as a counterpoint I would strongly recommend reading on your phone in vertical scroll mode (if you have a smartphone).

Vertical scroll - vs default horizontal page-flipping, a digital holdover from physical books - allows you to harness the power of doom scrolling for something more edifying. But as a prerequisite, I highly recommend adopting an allow-list approach to mobile notifications - disable almost all notifications and just leave on essentials for dramatically better quality of life. Also I send unknown callers to voicemail...but anyway, I got back into reading in 2023 using vertical scroll on my phone, after not reading too much after college, so maybe you can benefit too.

Apple's reader app has this mode, as does Readest, which I believe is now the best mobile reader on iOS (it's also cross-platform - and the main functional advantage over Apple's reader, which quietly introduced semi-adjustable margins in the last iOS or the one before, at this point is being able to freely import and export book files).

Also...I kind of hate to recommend it, but KyBook3 is extremely good for reading PDFs on iOS - it can crop/zoom comfortably to the width of the text, and automatically adjust the color scheme to improve legibility (like how scanner apps can make a photo black and white). Unfortunately the developer appears to be some kind of Russian Nationalist, who stopped updating the app in 2019 (wonder what happened in 2019...). It looks like it uses Google for analytics, but other than that I think the downside to using it, for free, is just ideological...(for a really great Ukrainian-made app, Anywhere is the best music player on iOS money can buy).

And as far as the substance of reading...you would be derelict in not reading Burn Down Master's House by Clay Cane. This is a profoundly powerful book, both in the sense of being personally affecting but especially in its power to effect social change. It's not a coincidence that it's been written now, just like MAGA and Trump are not in power by chance or contrary to America's history and values, and I believe it's the next first autobiography of Frederick Douglass, or Roots, or The Fire Next Time - it's extraordinarily humanizing, holistic, and direct. And the fire is coming.