Every time you sit down to read, first decide how much to do — the next chapter, or these 20 pages, or this narrative chunk. Then get settled with your book, pencil, and paper, turn off your phone, and do the reading. Shut up and do it. Yes, it will probably be hard. Yes, there are lots of new things that you don’t know. Good. You are freeing yourself.

Don’t stop when you’re confused. Ignore the internet. You can always go back and answer questions. Keep going til you finish the chunk you decided to read.

For example, if you are about to start Homer’s Iliad, you should first read Book 1 in one sitting. That’s a good chunk. No interruptions. Get your book, grab your pencil and notepad, turn off your phone, and sit and read all the way through Book 1. Shut up, get reading, and finish what you started.

Take notes outside the pages of your book. Do not highlight in the text. Do not underline in the text.

The purpose of notes is to give your future self access to the thing you found important and the page number where it occurs.

You have two options for notes.

Option one: on the blank pages at the very front and very back of your book. Jot down the important thing plus the page number.

Option two: on a separate piece of paper used as a bookmark, a 5x3 notecard, a 4x6 notecard, a legal pad, or a notebook. Again, important thing and page number.

Not only do highlighting and underlining fail to give you easy future access to what you wanted to remember. They also ruin your book. Remember, if you are going to build yourself into a tyrant-proof Navy SEAL of the American mind, you are going to read these texts many times over the course of your life. Give your always-future-self the gift of a “new” text. The words are sacred. Take notes somewhere else.

If you saw my copies of Aristotle’s Ethics and Tolkien’s The Hobbit — just to take two examples — you would see dozens of three-to-four word notes, then a comma, then the page number on the inside pages of those texts. Additionally, I have outlines and further notes of these books in separate notebooks. But the texts are pristine.

On your first two or three read-throughs of these books, stick to your mind and the text. That’s all you need. You have what it takes to read these miracle-building works. You do not need any help, and you surely do not need any noisy nonsense getting in your way.

Ignore the internet. Ignore AI. Ignore your phone. These things are like alcohol: they will suck you in, destroy your life, and never let you go.

You’re now like a runner who just needs a raw fire in his heart, a fine pair of shoes, and an open road ahead. Tune out the noise, and get free.

Ignore the internet, read the books yourself.

Keep going. Yes, the Hebrew prose of Genesis is hauntingly sparse. Yes, Homer is full of names you don’t know. Yes, parts of Aristotle are dense. Good. Keep going.

Yep, there’s a world of historical context around Socrates and Jesus you ain’t got a clue about. Keep going. Yep, there are all kinds of nasty people blaring nonsense about the Bible and the Founders on all kinds of anti-social media. Who cares? Keep going.

Yes, these books raise a lifetime of questions. You can research them, and we can discuss them, in due time. But the first thing you need to do is precisely the thing that most aren’t willing to: actually read the books.

Be one of the few.

When you’re confused, and curious, and excited, and transformed, keep going.

When you finish these books, come back. Read them a second time, then a third.

Come start again, and see the same things all over, only better. And when you forget, and you wander into tyranny, and you find yourself enslaved to an idol or a lust or a politician or an addiction or a feeling, come back.

The Exodus awaits, your Socrates beckons, and these tyrant slayers stand ready to build you free again.

But you have to come home.