I’ve actually wanted to write about these two books for a long time. I love reading, but I absolutely detest writing. Maintaining a blog is practically a miracle for me. I love reading because I love and believe in the power of education. As for how much I hate writing, let me tell you a little story.
I Hate Writing Essays#
My dislike for writing is practically innate. Since elementary school, I never wrote diaries or essays. Every winter and summer break homework required a daily diary entry — I never wrote a single one. I still remember when school started and I had to turn in summer homework. The teacher threatened that if I didn’t finish it, I couldn’t attend class. I still wrote nothing and just sat in the classroom as usual. Later, for some assignment, our homeroom teacher had to submit examples of correcting typically flawed students — only 4 or 5 kids in the class were selected. One was bad at sports, one had a temper problem… and I was the one bad at writing! And the task was to write an essay about correcting that flaw! I can’t write — why would you make me write an essay about fixing my inability to write??? I dragged it out for two weeks. All the other students turned theirs in. I couldn’t squeeze out a single word. The homeroom teacher personally coached me. She said: when you walk down the street, you can turn anything you see into a sentence. See a blue sky? You can form a sentence in your mind: “The sky is cloudless for miles.” Practicing sentence construction regularly can help with writing. You could also think of other ways to fix your writing aversion. Another week passed, and I wrote down exactly what she told me, verbatim. I could see the frustration in her eyes. Later, in middle school, I cleverly befriended the Chinese class representative so she’d leave my name off the missing-homework list. That’s how I dodged three years of middle school. Then in high school, I once awkwardly wrote an essay my own way and scored 30 out of 60 — a devastating blow. So for every monthly exam, I simply didn’t write the essay. I figured: it’s just mock exams, not the Gaokao — I’ll just forfeit those 60 points. Finally, for the actual Gaokao and the two mock exams before it, I crammed Qu Yuan and Li Bai into essay templates like eight-legged essays. I found there was nothing you couldn’t cram them into, and I muddled through the Gaokao essay hurdle. College? No need to mention it — my hand had forgotten how to hold a pen.
Yes, with this peculiar writing psychology, I hated essays. But after entering the workforce, I gradually understood: the dullest pencil is better than the sharpest memory. No matter how many books you read, you need to internalize them. The pressures of ambition, family, and work forced me to change. Whether I needed this skill or not didn’t seem to matter — if society needs it, I should try to adapt. Writing not only pushes you forward, it’s also a way to record growth, to record life. Even my own technical articles — years later, I still have to come back and read them carefully, review them carefully.
Reading Originals Is Good for Body and Mind#
I read both Educated and Atomic Habits in their original English. I had a bit of an English foundation, and since I was preparing for graduate school entrance exams at the time, I wanted to improve my English reading — so I chose English originals. At first, reading English originals was quite difficult. Many words were unfamiliar, and I’d look them up and annotate them in the book. Progress was painfully slow. But as I read deeper, there were fewer and fewer annotations. It wasn’t that I quickly memorized many new words — rather, some important words appear repeatedly throughout a book, while others that appear rarely don’t affect comprehension. Also, at the start you don’t know what the book is about, so comprehension latency is high. Later, once you know where it’s headed, reading naturally speeds up. For instance, the word “ridge” appeared very frequently early on, and I eventually remembered it. Some similar words I still can’t remember, but I know they’re some kind of geographic term — summit, valley, ridge — and even without remembering them precisely, it doesn’t stop me from reading. That’s how English originals work: difficult at first, faster the further you go.
Educated#
The Chinese title of Educated is You Should Fly Like a Bird to Your Mountain — I really want to complain about this title. “Educated” is the spiritual essence of the entire book, and near the end, the author drives it home with “call it educated” — absolutely brilliant. This Chinese title is like shit, completely missing the book’s essence. The author’s personal experience is legendary: a child who walked out of some corner of the American mountains, who through sheer effort studied all the way to Cambridge. Her father was uneducated, anti-social, lacking basic physics knowledge — his ignorance led to family members getting injured or even disabled. He disapproved of children going to school, even believing education was government brainwashing. Countless absurd behaviors. Her brother also had personality issues — he shoved her head into a filthy toilet and made her beg for mercy, then the next day acted like nothing happened and continued being her “good brother”… Later, the author found her way out through education, and in the end, she didn’t want to return to that valley. Reading the ending always reminds me of my own experience. Of course, I didn’t have such an extreme environment, nor such a legendary journey, but I feel like I can understand — after being educated, family interactions somehow feel unnatural. It’s not about getting cocky after university — the generation gap is real. I deeply believe in the importance of education. If my family hadn’t sold everything they had to fully support my education, our circumstances would never have changed. If you’ve truly been mired in poverty, you know how fierce the desire to escape it is — and education is almost the only way out for people like us. Educated is a great book: clear prose, comfortable sentence structure, suited to modern reading rhythms, a gripping story, a profound theme. It’s an excellent choice as your first English original.
Atomic Habits#
Atomic Habits — I’ve forgotten exactly how I found this book, but it changed my understanding of behavior. Building good habits isn’t actually that hard; most people just don’t know how. Many have said: I’ll read X books in a few months, run Y kilometers, lose Z pounds — but they rarely follow through. Building good habits requires genuinely liking the habit, changing your mindset, reducing the friction of the action, putting obstacles farther away, forming reward mechanisms, and so on. When you want to become a certain kind of person, don’t focus on how to become that person — think about what that kind of person does, and learn to do it. For example, quitting smoking: if your brain thinks you’re “in the process of quitting,” it’s very hard. If someone offers you a cigarette and you say “I’m quitting,” a few words from them might get you to smoke. But if you genuinely believe you’re someone who “doesn’t smoke” — note, this must be your authentic inner belief — when someone offers you a cigarette, you’ll simply say “I don’t smoke,” and you probably won’t have to smoke it. Some small details: say you want to build a habit of reading at night — you need to break the habit of scrolling on your phone. Move your books from the bookshelf to your bedside for easier access. Put your phone at the foot of the bed, making getting up the barrier to grabbing the phone — this makes it easier to reach for the book instead of the phone. If picking up the book is still hard, reframe your thinking: “reading” as an action may feel difficult, but break it down — “pick up the book” or “open to the first page” becomes your mental target. The startup action for reading is simple and easy to complete. After reading the first page, think about what comes next — and in reality, once you’ve read the first page, it’s hard not to read the second. Of course, there are many more excellent suggestions for building good habits and shedding bad ones — every word is a gem, thoroughly engaging. After reading Atomic Habits, whenever I want a certain habit, I first consider the book’s guidance, then plan how to implement it — rather than acting on impulse.
Finally#
At last — these two books have had an enormous impact on me. One is a legendary autobiography; the other is a behavior-transforming book. Neither is the kind of work you forget shortly after reading. They’re perfect starter books for cultivating a reading habit, especially for those wanting to read English originals. I really don’t recommend Pride and Prejudice or One Hundred Years of Solitude — yes, they’re classics, but their impact on the reader is quite low, and they were written so long ago that some vocabulary and grammar are too archaic, making them unsuitable for first-time English readers. Looking at this through the lens of Atomic Habits: reading these English classics is not only more difficult but also lacks immediate personal benefit, making it hard to form a habit.