The weekly non-fiction reading list is coming to an end (kind of)

October 5th of this year marks four years of doing the weekly non-fiction reading list. I published the first one over on Medium back in 2020, and I haven’t missed a single week since.

That’s right. During holidays, vacations, sickness, and other situations, I haven’t missed a single Monday of publishing this reading list. Now, it’s changing.

TLDR for those of you who just want to know, I’m going to switch to a monthly reading list.

For those who care, read on.

I stopped reading for about 15 years. I loved reading as a kid but high school made me dislike books because we were forced to read. After having the internet come after me in 2020, I wanted to understand why, so I just started reading a ton of books. Each book recommended more books, and I read those. I became obsessed with learning about human nature and the world.

I started the reading list for a few reasons. The main reason I started the list was to hopefully encourage others to learn as well. The more we learn about human nature, the more we learn about ourselves, and this world would be a lot better if we had more people getting educated about why they do what they do and why they think what they think.

The second main reason I started this reading list was to promote authors. It’s amazing to me that so many experts spend their lives researching a topic and then consolidating it into a book for us to consume. Then, there are authors who spend years learning about a subject to write a book. It’s awesome. I want to tell people about their work so they can enjoy the gift as well.

Lastly, I started this reading list because I’m a father who is always looking for side hustles, and that’s just me being honest with you. I love creating and putting work out there, but I need to make money.

Again, I haven’t missed a single week of this reading list for four years, and it makes me about $10 per month. The only reason I haven’t stopped is because I’ve gamified it and I don’t want to break my streak. This is me giving myself permission to break the streak.

I have a full-time job and multiple other side hustles in addition to being a father and a boyfriend. I typically publish the reading list during a break at work, and some Mondays it’s much more of a pain in the ass than it should be. I’ll be insanely bogged down with work, and in the back of my head all day is this voice saying, “YOU NEED TO PUBLISH THE READING LIST!”

This is pressure I put on myself, and I’m sure only a few of you would even notice if I posted it a day or two later. I also know that I could be doing a lot more to promote the reading list and try to have it generate revenue, but that’s not something I want to do.

I appreciate all of you who check out the list every Monday, but it’s clear that a lot of you are like me, and you like free stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s very little financial support for the reading list, so it’s not worth the stress I put on myself.

I’m not going to stop reading, so I might as well keep doing the list. When I first made this decision, I was just going to leave it completely sporadic, but that’s a bit too much chaos for me. So, I decided to just switch to monthly. I’m not sure when it’ll be monthly, and I don’t want to set a day.

As it stands, just expect a newsletter to go out with all of the books I read from the previous month. If you want a more up-to-date look at what I’m reading and reviewing, follow me over on Goodreads. I typically write my reviews on Mondays when I post the reading list, but I’ll try to get better at posting them as I finish books for those who decide to follow me over there.

Anywho, I appreciate you all, but this is something I probably should have done a long time ago.

To stay updated follow me on Twitter and Instagram.