Ways of Working : Riyaz Usman on reading
Ways of Working. Issue 01.
Ways of Working is about how people do what they do. Each issue grows out of a conversation with one person, around their work, habits, tools, choices, and what they care about. The writing takes shape from there.
The first conversation is with Riyaz Usman. We’ve known each other for more than fifteen years. Over those years, one thing I’ve consistently noticed is how much he reads, roughly 300–400 books a year, as if reading never really pauses.
Riyaz has spent nearly two decades at Infosys. His role there is that of an educator, though that label doesn’t capture the range of things he does. Over the years, he has also been a stage artist, a writer, a free software advocate, a translator and more.
He didn’t plan to become an educator. After joining Infosys as a developer trainee, he was offered a role in the Learning and Development team and chose it because it felt familiar in an unexpected way. In college, a teacher who taught Problem Solving had encouraged discussion and presentation, and that experience stayed with him. The role also allowed him to travel, which he actively wanted at the time. Being away from Kerala and choosing Hyderabad were part of that decision, simply to travel more and experience a different environment. Reading seems to sit underneath them all, quietly shaping how he moves through work and life.
Before reading needed a reason
As a child, he read whatever was available. It began with Malayalam children’s magazines and slowly moved to the books at home. He grew up in a joint family, all with different interests and the library at home reflected that diversity. It wasn’t a big library. It was a small shelf, pointing in many directions.
An uncle who was an Islamic scholar had collected Malayalam Islamic magazines and bound them by year. Another leaned left and owned Russian-published Malayalam books and titles from Prabhath Book House. There were also pulp novels, Malayalam fiction, and other odds and ends. “It wasn’t organised,” he said, “but everything was there.”
As his village had no library or bookstore, his reading was shaped by availability. If a book existed in the house, it was read. He picked up translations of books like Maxim Gorky’s The Mother or Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment without worrying about fully understanding them. Understanding wasn’t the point; the act of reading was.
His first real encounter with a library came during higher secondary at Ansar School, where he stayed in a hostel. The school library, unexpectedly, had a solid fiction collection. Students were allowed to borrow three books a day and he decided to finish all three in the same day. Hostel life ran on a tight schedule, leaving only two or three hours that felt like his own. Reading slipped into those hours, and sometimes into class hours as well. He recalls that the speed came from not having enough time, rather than discipline.
By the second year, the school changed the rules. The limit quietly changed from three library books a day to two books and one mandatory academic book. It didn’t take much explanation why.
Order was never the point
When I ask him about systems, routines, or habits, he almost waves the question away. “There’s no routine,” he says, as if that’s the most ordinary thing in the world.
He has tried, at different points, to make it more structured. Logging what he reads. Building a catalogue. Keeping track. None of it lasted very long. “Once reading starts to feel like something to maintain, it’s not as interesting as just reading.”
That shows up in how he chooses books too. There is no sequence, no priority, no next-in-line logic. He doesn’t use recommendation engines or online catalogs, and he doesn’t read based on lists. He does remember book recommendations, but that won’t affect the priority. “It’s random from a pile, not last-in, first-out,” he says.
“Once reading starts to feel like something to maintain, it’s not as interesting as just reading.”
Finishing books, on the other hand, is something he does more often than not. Once he starts, he usually goes through to the end. Not because he believes in finishing, but because stopping midway feels harder. When I ask about reading multiple books at the same time, he doesn’t see it as a strange pattern, just similar to reading magazines.
Books, without shelves
At some point in the conversation, tools enter the picture, but even there, nothing feels planned. The real disruptor is the Kindle, which quietly removes a lot of friction from reading. “As a student, reading often meant negotiating with the book itself. Thick hardbound volumes were heavy and awkward, especially in bed”. He remembers reading while lying down, his head hanging off the edge, the book placed on the floor simply because it was easier that way. With e-reading, all of that goes away.
He has more than one Kindle now, including the first one he bought in 2013. One stays at home, one in the car, and one in his laptop bag. The idea is simple - reading should never be blocked by not having a book nearby. Calibre sits quietly in the background, doing the unglamorous work of transferring and backing things up.
Problem of plenty
What changes with this ease isn’t how much he reads, but how much accumulates around him. With digital access, friction drops. Buying a book takes less effort than finding time to read it. His interests deepen quickly, and books begin piling up faster than time allows. These days, he says, the problem isn’t interest anymore. There are just more books than time.
He shared it with an example. Back in school, he read a translated book on the history of crime investigation. He never knew the original title, but the ideas stayed with him. For nearly fifteen years, he kept searching for the book, which became almost routine. Recently, using Gemini, it finally led somewhere. The book turned out to be from the 1960s, not available as an ebook, only as a scanned PDF.
“I downloaded it. It was The Century of the Detective” he says. “After almost fifteen years of searching. It’s somewhere there now. I still haven’t read it.”
Buying patterns have shifted alongside this. After moving houses several times, and later moving to the US, carrying books became less practical, and emotionally difficult to leave behind. These days, most of his reading is digital. Access has also expanded in other ways. Public libraries in the US connect directly to his Kindle, making borrowing feel almost like owning. Magazine reading followed a different path. He used to read magazines regularly and tried moving that habit to digital platforms briefly, but it didn’t sustain and eventually dropped out of his reading life.
Even with this kind of access, his reading doesn’t suddenly increase. Availability widens what’s within reach, but it doesn’t change how much time he has. As he puts it, “More availability doesn’t translate into more reading. It just widens the pile.”
Audio narrows the space
Audiobooks fit into this mix, but with limits. He mostly uses Audible for non-fiction, and even then, not as focused listening. It’s usually in the background, while cooking or driving. For him, fiction on audio doesn’t work as well. Performance fixes too much. The voice, the pacing, the interpretation start narrowing the space that reading usually leaves open.
“It’s like some book-to-movie adaptations. Reading gives you space to imagine. Audio narrows that space.”
He gives a familiar example from film adaptations. Daivathinte Vikrithikal is a book he had read multiple times before watching the film. In the novel, the character Alphonse Achan is described as physically heavy, and over time a particular image of the character had settled in his mind. In the film version, Raghuvaran plays the role, which doesn’t align with how he had imagined the character. It’s a valid creative choice, he says, but the image formed through reading gets overridden, and the space that imagination once occupied starts to shrink.
Agreement without resistance
AI enters his reading life quietly. Mostly as a way to search, to find, and to reconnect with things that were only half-remembered. It’s faster, especially for academic topics. He notices the improvement in text-to-speech, which might be useful for other readers, and the ease with which AI helps discover material.
“Imagine your AI collaborator as an infinitely fast intern, eager to please but prone to bending the truth.” - Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick
At the same time, he’s wary. AI tends to agree too easily. Instead of pushing back, it often reflects your own thinking. Over time, that loop of confirmation becomes a limitation.
None of this has led to an attempt to catch up or clean up. The pile stays open. Reading continues alongside everything else, without a plan to reduce, organise, or optimise it. It’s not about reaching the end. It’s just about continuing, moving for now between How To Solve Your Own Murder, Hamnet, The Origins of Political Order, India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent and the audiobook of The Anarchy.
This is a pilot issue of Ways of Working. If you have feedback, suggestions, or ideas for who I should speak with in a future issue, I’d love to hear from you. You can leave a comment, email me, or set up a short call with me.
In the world of AI slop, this reads like a breath of fresh air. ❤️
Great start! The fact that you didn't started off with someone design related came off as a surprise :)