Steven J. Reese is a reader, creator, and former book-hater turned reading evangelist. After years of feeling bored or burned out by reading, a few well-timed book recommendations changed everything. He created the viral Read Your Color quiz and framework—taken by over two million readers—to help others fall in love with books the same way he did: not through guilt or grind, but by understanding themselves. Steven lives in Colorado with his wife and two kids, and when he’s not reading, he’s designing, writing, and building things that make people think.
Get more out of reading with this radical guide to shelf-improvement, which reveals your core preferences and helps you choose books based on why you read, not what you’ve read before. Includes the viral Read Your Color quiz taken by more than two million people!
“A fun and insightful approach to cultivating both a habit of reading and a love of reading.”—Karen Swallow Prior, author of On Reading WellRead Your Color introduces a six-type system that identifies the essential desires you have as a reader and builds a personalized plan from there. Are you a Red reader who craves intensity and stakes? A Blue reader seeking emotional resonance and truth? A Green reader looking for clarity and real-world application? Whoever you are, this framework gives you a vocabulary for your reading impulses and a map for reading well.
The book isn’t just a diagnostic manual; it’s a step-by-step guide to transformation designed to help you fall (or fall
back) in love with books. Think of it as a personal trainer for your reading life. In
Read Your Color, you'll
- learn how to break free from algorithmic and genre-based reading habits
- expand your literary range without losing your core preferences
- build a sustainable rhythm that makes reading feel less like a chore and more like a reward
With honest cultural observations, tested psychological insights, and a practical 120-day plan,
Read Your Color meets you where you are—scrolling, burned out, distracted—and shows you what’s possible on the other side of a truly meaningful reading life.
Read Your Color doesn't ask you to try harder. It gives you the tools to fall in love with reading, and with who you become when you read the right way.
“Most people don’t need more discipline to become readers. They need to discover the right books that will turn them into lifelong readers. In
Read Your Color, Steven Reese offers a smart, practical system for doing exactly that. This book may be the reason you fall in love with reading again.”
—Donald Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz and Building a StoryBrand“If you want to read more but don’t know where or how to start, this is the book for you.
Read Your Color develops a fun and insightful approach to cultivating both a habit and a love of reading. But this is also a book for those who are seasoned book lovers, presenting solid research, spirited encouragement, and bright affirmation of all the joys of reading. This is a book for every bookshelf.”
—Karen Swallow Prior, author of On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books
1A Book About BooksThe following pages are about reading books. How to read more of them. How to read them better. How to become a person who reads. However, the author of this book about books was not always a reader. In fact, I was about as far from a reader as you can possibly get. I don't mean I struggled with reading or that I read slowly. I mean I actively avoided it. For most of my life, I treated books the way some people treat exercise equipment—something I owned, occasionally looked at, and felt vaguely guilty about ignoring. If you'll entertain me for a few pages, I want to share how I went from not reading books at all to writing a book about books for people who want to read more books.
Surprisingly, I made excellent grades in school despite my aversion to reading. I aced tests on works I never opened. I wrote papers about themes I'd never encountered on the page. My secret weapon was my old friend SparkNotes—a loophole in the system. Why spend hours reading when you could spend twenty minutes absorbing a summary and still get an A? As long as the letter C did not appear on a report card, I remained ungrounded, my parents happy, and my teachers satisfied.
I remember one weekend in particular that paints this picture perfectly. My friend and I were supposed to read
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for English class. A book that, by most accounts, is a thrilling read. It's not like we were being asked to read Shakespeare or Homer. Instead, we spent the entire weekend running around our neighborhood, engaging in what I'll generously call youthful mischief—the kind of low-grade troublemaking that feels important when you're sixteen. Needless to say, we didn't read a single page.
Monday came. The in-class essay commenced. My clever friend wrote something about "the duality of man" and turned it in, feeling pretty good about himself. I did the best I could from the twenty-five-minute Wikipedia cram session I had during lunch. The next day, my friend was called up after class. The teacher had recognized his phrasing—word for word from SparkNotesdotcom. He got suspended. I got lucky. But neither of us had read the book.
This pattern followed me to college, where I refined it into something I was actually proud of. When my friends complained about textbook prices, I'd brag, "I don't even buy them. Why would I?" I said this like it was clever, like I'd discovered some secret the other students hadn't figured out. I was gaming the system. I was efficient. I was also, though I didn't know it yet, building a life without one of the most important habits a person can have. And I didn't even care.
How I Did (Not) Become a ReaderEverything changed in my early twenties. I got married, started my first real job, and felt that surge of ambition that hits a lot of young men when responsibility arrives. I wanted to optimize myself. I started lifting weights. I cleaned up my diet a bit. I made spreadsheets for my goals. And somewhere on my list of self-improvement projects, I wrote, "Become someone who reads books."
It seemed like the obvious next step. Successful people read. Thoughtful people read. The kind of person I wanted to become—disciplined, wise, well-rounded—that person definitely read. So, I went to the bookstore and bought what I thought I was supposed to buy. Dostoyevsky, because serious people read Russian literature. Viktor Frankl, because everyone said Man's Search for Meaning was life changing. A book by a Navy SEAL about discipline, because I was in my optimization era and that's what the algorithm served up.
I stacked these books on my nightstand like trophies I hadn't earned yet. Every night, I'd put my phone down, pick up one of my serious books, and try to read. Ten pages. Twenty if I was feeling strong. I told myself this was how habits were built—through consistency, through discipline, through showing up even when you didn't feel like it.
It didn't work.
I'd get a few nights in, fighting through paragraphs that felt like walking through hardening concrete, and then I'd miss a night. Then another. Then I'd find myself back on my phone, scrolling for an hour before bed, the serious books gathering dust beside me. I'd try again a few weeks later. Same result. Try again. Same result.
For years, this was my pattern: genuine desire to become a reader, followed by failed attempts, followed by quiet shame. I watched friends devour a book a week and wondered what was wrong with me. I had the discipline to go on a run. I had something that resembled discipline for my diet. Why couldn't I make myself read?
How I (Finally) Became a ReaderThe turning point came from an unexpected direction. A close friend—someone who knew me well, who had watched my failed reading attempts with patient amusement—recommended a book. Not a classic. Not something from a must-read list. Not anything I would have chosen for myself.
"I think you'll like this," she said, handing me The Stand by Stephen King.
I almost laughed. It was more than a thousand pages. I'd recently tried to start
Anna Karenina and couldn't get through twenty pages. How was I supposed to finish something longer than the biggest book I had ever picked up? And Stephen King? His novels weren't on my list of books that would make me the person I wanted to become. They were just . . . entertainment. I had Netflix and Instagram for that.
But I trusted my friend. She wasn't recommending the book because it was important or canonical or impressive. She was recommending it because she knew me. As my friend, she knew what might work for my particular brain, and she thought this would fit.
So, I started reading.
What happened next is hard to describe to someone who hasn't experienced it. The best I can do is this: For the first time in my life, I didn't have to force myself to read. I wanted to read. I was sneaking pages during lunch breaks. I downloaded the audiobook so I could get a few chapters in while I walked the dog. I was staying up too late because I couldn't stop. I was annoyed when real life interrupted my reading. That thousand-page book that should have taken me months? I devoured it in weeks.
When I finished, I didn't feel the usual relief of completing an assignment. I felt hungry. I wanted more.
I immediately picked up
The Terror by Dan Simmons. Another long book, another book I never would have chosen from a list of "important" literature. I tore through it. Then a few books by Blake Crouch. Then
Red Rising. I was reading constantly now—not because I was supposed to but because I couldn't stop. The discipline problem had evaporated, and something had been unlocked.
As if being someone who chose a paperback over my Instagram feed wasn't shocking enough, I noticed something incredible: The reading didn't stay in one lane. Those propulsive novels created an appetite that began to wander. After
The Stand, I found myself drawn to
Killers of the Flower Moon—a work of narrative nonfiction that read with the same urgency as the thrillers I'd been consuming but that was teaching me real history. Then In the Kingdom of Ice, a harrowing account of Arctic exploration. Then, somehow, I was reading a dense biography of Frederick Douglass. Then Theodore Roosevelt. These weren't beach reads. These were serious, substantial books—the kind I had tried and failed to read during my discipline era. But I wasn't white-knuckling through them anymore. I was absorbed. The appetite I'd built on Stephen King had grown into something that could digest much heavier fare.
The transformation became clear to me when I found myself reading Augustine's Confessions and Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Books I could not have finished ten pages of before because I hadn't built the reader's stamina, the reader's desire, the reader's capacity for complexity. And I'd built all of that by following the thread of genuine interest wherever it led.
I went from struggling my way through four books a year to reading twenty, then thirty, then forty. I finally understood what I actually wanted.
Many people want this. You might want this. You may have had this before and you want to find it again. That is what this book is going to help you discover or recover. If the guy who got through high school and college without reading can become a reader, then so can you.
