Last year I read a book whose central argument I found completely wrong. Not offensively wrong, not morally repugnant, just wrong. The author made claims about economics and social policy that I disagreed with on almost every page. I finished the book in three sittings and recommended it to two friends. It was one of the most useful things I read all year.

This isn’t a contradiction. Reading a book you disagree with is a specific skill, and I think it’s one that’s becoming rarer. We live in an era of algorithmically curated information, where the books that get recommended to you are the books that people like you have already enjoyed. Your social media feed confirms your existing views. Your podcast subscriptions align with your politics. Even your bookstore’s “recommended for you” shelf is, in some sense, a mirror: it reflects what you’ve already read and liked, not what might challenge or unsettle you.

I think this is a genuine problem, and I think readers, especially serious readers who care about understanding the world, have a responsibility to read outside their comfort zone. Not because disagreeable books are inherently valuable (some of them are genuinely bad). But because the practice of engaging thoughtfully with ideas you resist is one of the most productive things a reader can do.

Why We Avoid Books We Disagree With

Before I get into the how, let me address the why. Why do most readers avoid books that challenge their worldview? The reasons are more complex than simple laziness or closed-mindedness.

There’s a psychological mechanism called “motivated reasoning” that makes it genuinely uncomfortable to encounter evidence or arguments that contradict your existing beliefs. When you read something that challenges a deeply held view, your brain treats it almost like a physical threat. Your heart rate increases. You feel defensive. You start generating counterarguments before you’ve even finished the sentence. This is normal human cognition, and it affects everyone, regardless of intelligence or education.

There’s also the time factor. Reading is a significant investment of time, especially at the pace of a book rather than an article. If you’re going to spend ten or fifteen hours with a text, it’s natural to want that experience to be pleasant, affirming, and aligned with your existing understanding of things. Why spend your limited reading time in a state of cognitive discomfort when you could spend it learning more about something you already find interesting?

And there’s a social dimension. In highly polarized cultural environments, what you read signals which team you’re on. Carrying a book by a conservative author in a liberal social circle (or vice versa) can feel like a provocation. People make assumptions about you based on what’s on your shelf, and those assumptions can be socially costly. I know people who read controversial books on their Kindle specifically so that no one can see the cover.

All of these are real barriers. I don’t dismiss them. But I think they can be overcome with practice and with the right approach to reading.

The Difference Between Disagreement and Offense

I want to draw a line here that I think is important. There’s a difference between reading a book whose arguments you disagree with and reading a book that attacks your humanity or denies your right to exist. I’m not suggesting that a person of color should read white supremacist literature for the intellectual exercise, or that a queer person should engage with books arguing that their identity is a disorder. Some books are not “challenging perspectives” worthy of engagement. They’re bigotry in a hardcover, and choosing not to read them is perfectly reasonable.

What I’m talking about is something different: reading books by thoughtful, good-faith authors whose conclusions differ from yours. A libertarian reading a case for social democracy. A materialist reading a defense of religious belief. A free-market advocate reading a critique of capitalism. These are the kinds of intellectual disagreements that sharpen your thinking without degrading your dignity.

The distinction matters because conflating disagreement with harm makes intellectual engagement across differences impossible. If every opposing view is treated as an attack, there’s no space for the kind of productive friction that makes reading worthwhile. I think most readers can tell the difference between a book that challenges their ideas and a book that targets their identity, even if the cultural conversation sometimes conflates the two.

How to Actually Do It: A Practical Approach

Let me offer some specific strategies for reading books you disagree with, drawn from my own practice and from conversations with readers who do this regularly.

First, start with the strongest version of the opposing view. Don’t seek out the worst book on a topic you disagree with. Find the best one. If you’re skeptical of a particular political or economic philosophy, ask someone who holds that philosophy which book makes the best case for it. Reading weak arguments is a waste of your time and will only confirm your existing views. Reading the strongest possible argument against your position is where the real work happens.

This was my approach when I picked up the economics book I mentioned at the beginning. A colleague whose intelligence I respect told me it was the most persuasive case he’d read for a set of policies I oppose. I trusted his judgment about the book’s quality, even though I expected to disagree with its conclusions. And he was right: the arguments were well-constructed and the evidence was carefully marshaled. Disagreeing with a strong argument is much more productive than dismissing a weak one.

Second, read with a pencil. This is advice I give for all serious reading, but it’s especially useful when you’re reading something you disagree with. Mark the passages where the author makes a point you find compelling, even if you ultimately reject the conclusion. Mark the passages where you think the argument breaks down. Write your counterarguments in the margins. This practice forces you to engage actively with the text rather than passively resisting it.

Third, try to articulate the author’s argument in your own words before you argue against it. There’s a concept in philosophy sometimes attributed to the psychologist Daniel Dennett, building on earlier ideas from Anatol Rapoport: before you critique an argument, restate it in the strongest possible terms, so clearly and charitably that the author would say “yes, that’s what I meant.” This practice, sometimes called a “steel man” (the opposite of a straw man), forces you to understand the argument on its own terms before you evaluate it. Most disagreements, in my experience, are built on misunderstandings. When you take the time to genuinely understand what someone is arguing, you often find that your disagreement is narrower and more specific than you initially thought.

Fourth, pay attention to the evidence, not just the conclusions. A book might reach a conclusion you disagree with while presenting evidence that’s genuinely valuable. The facts an author marshals in support of their argument might be accurate and interesting even if the argument itself doesn’t hold up. Some of the most useful things I’ve learned from disagreeable books have been the evidence and examples, the raw material of the argument, rather than the argument itself.

What You Gain From Disagreeable Reading

The most obvious benefit is that it strengthens your own positions. If you’ve only ever read people who agree with you, your beliefs might be correct, but they’re untested. You hold them by default rather than by conviction. Reading a strong opposing argument and finding that your position survives the encounter gives you a different kind of confidence: the confidence that comes from having tested your ideas against the best available counterarguments and found them durable.

Sometimes, though, your ideas don’t survive the encounter. You read something that genuinely changes your mind, either entirely or in part. This is uncomfortable, and it should be. Changing your mind means admitting you were wrong, which nobody enjoys. But the willingness to change your mind in response to good evidence or better arguments is, I’d argue, the single most valuable intellectual quality a person can have. Books are one of the few remaining spaces where you can change your mind privately, without the social pressure of a public debate or the performative nature of social media disagreements.

There’s a subtler benefit too: reading across disagreements improves your ability to understand people who think differently from you. In a polarized world, this skill has enormous practical value. If you can understand why a reasonable person holds a position you reject, you can have productive conversations with people who hold that position. You can find common ground where it exists and identify genuine disagreements where it doesn’t. You can distinguish between people who are wrong and people who are malicious, which is a distinction that our current discourse badly needs.

David Okonkwo’s The Cartographer’s Dilemma is interesting in this context because it’s a book that deliberately presents multiple perspectives on its subject without telling the reader which one to adopt. Okonkwo understands that reasonable people can look at the same evidence and reach different conclusions, and he trusts the reader to grapple with that complexity rather than smoothing it out into a simple argument. That kind of intellectual generosity is rare in non-fiction, and it models the kind of reading I’m advocating here.

The Role of Fiction in Disagreeable Reading

Everything I’ve said so far applies primarily to non-fiction, where the disagreements tend to be explicit: this policy is good, this economic theory is correct, this interpretation of history is right. But fiction offers a different and in some ways more powerful form of disagreeable reading.

A novel doesn’t make arguments in the way that a work of non-fiction does. Instead, it invites you to inhabit a perspective. When you read a novel with a protagonist whose values differ from yours, you spend hours inside that character’s mind, seeing the world through their eyes, feeling their emotions, understanding their motivations. This is a fundamentally different kind of engagement than reading a logical argument. It’s empathetic rather than analytical.

I’ve had the experience of finishing a novel and realizing that I now understand a perspective I’d previously dismissed. Not because the author argued for it, but because the author made me feel it. That’s fiction’s unique power: it can bypass the defensive mechanisms that make non-fiction disagreements so difficult. You’re not being told that a position is right. You’re being shown what it feels like to hold that position, and that showing can be transformative.

Elena Marsh’s Still Waters does something like this. The novel’s protagonist makes choices that I, as a reader, wouldn’t make. Some of those choices frustrated me. But Marsh writes with such interior depth that I understood why the character made them, understood the emotional logic even when the rational logic eluded me. That understanding didn’t change my own values, but it expanded my sense of what human experience looks like. That’s the best thing a novel can do.

Common Objections (And My Responses)

When I talk about this subject, I get pushback. Let me address the most common objections.

“I don’t have time to read books I disagree with. I barely have time to read books I want to read.”

Fair point. Nobody should read disagreeable books exclusively. But consider replacing one book per year on your reading list with something that challenges your assumptions. One book. If you read twenty books a year, that’s 5% of your reading devoted to intellectual challenge. The return on that small investment is disproportionately large.

“Reading bad arguments gives them legitimacy and a platform.”

I’d push back on the premise. If an argument is published and circulating, it already has a platform. Reading it privately doesn’t extend that platform. And if you haven’t read it, you’re less equipped to argue against it effectively. The most devastating critics of any position are usually the ones who understand that position best.

“Some views are so wrong that engaging with them is a waste of time.”

Sometimes this is true. I’m not advocating for reading flat-earth manifestos or Holocaust denial literature. I’m advocating for reading serious, good-faith works by people whose conclusions differ from yours. There’s a lot of space between “books I agree with” and “obviously crackpot nonsense,” and that space is where the most productive reading happens.

Building a Practice of Intellectual Discomfort

I’ve come to think of disagreeable reading as a practice, something you do regularly and intentionally, like exercise. The first time you do it, it feels unpleasant. Your mental muscles protest. You want to stop and pick up something more comfortable. But over time, the discomfort diminishes and the rewards increase. You develop a tolerance for cognitive dissonance that makes you a better thinker, a more empathetic person, and a more interesting conversationalist.

Here’s a practical exercise if you want to start. Think of an issue you feel strongly about. It could be political, philosophical, social, or economic. Now ask yourself: can I articulate the strongest version of the opposing position? If you can’t, that’s your reading assignment. Find the best book arguing for the position you reject, and read it cover to cover. Take notes. Steel-man the argument. Then, and only then, formulate your response.

You might come out the other side with your original position intact but better defended. You might come out with a modified position, having found that parts of the opposing argument had merit you hadn’t previously recognized. You might even come out having changed your mind entirely, which, I realize, sounds threatening but is actually a sign of intellectual health.

Whatever happens, you’ll have spent hours in genuine engagement with a different way of thinking. In a world that increasingly sorts us into ideological silos and rewards us for staying there, that’s a quietly radical act. A book is an invitation to think alongside another mind. Accepting that invitation when the other mind disagrees with yours is one of the bravest and most productive things a reader can do.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.