4. OOH, I READ YA... AND YOU CAN TOO!

 OOH, I READ YA… AND YOU CAN TOO!

I’m satisfied with the number of books I read and how I engage with literature. I could read more, but I could also read less, or worse, not at all. Reading is one of my strongest habits. I make sure to read every single day. This is something that a few people I know happen to struggle with. For some, it’s not that they don’t want to read but rather that it’s a difficult habit to maintain consistently. I agree with that statement, it can be a time-consuming activity, how can you squeeze it into your schedule? I’d like to provide a few pointers on how you can read more!

My first pointer is to take this piece with a grain of salt. Your relationship to reading cannot be dictated (not that I’m going to dictate your reading journey), and it requires experimentation on your part. This is less of a roadmap to becoming a natural reader and more of a backpack full of equipment to help you on your reading journey.

Apologies for this but the first step requires some thinking work. It’s all thinking work. The step in question is to think about why you want to read more. I can’t speak for you but I can speak for myself. I want to understand the world of literature deeply and how it intersects with history art and politics. After you figure out what it is that draws you in, you need to start picking out books to read. For me, that would be classics with a few non-fiction books on history and various socio-political issues to get what I want out of literature.

It’s good to have a rough list of books you want to read. Whether you want this to be a physical list or not is up to you. I like keeping a mental list. I get overwhelmed by a physical one and it makes me impatient. I divide my mental list into categories and select books depending on what type of book I am looking to read. I usually like to research various authors and movements to further my writing skills. For instance, I hear a lot about Ernest Hemingway’s style from a lot of other writers and now I’m reading The Old Man and the Sea.

Finally, a practical tip. I would recommend reading two books at once. Try to make it two different books. Like I enjoy a good nonfiction book alongside a compelling fiction novel on various topics. Right now, I am reading Malcolm X's Autobiography The Old Man and the Sea as I’ve mentioned before. Today, I didn’t feel like hearing from Malcolm so I read some fiction. Other days, I find myself with some downtime and all I want to do is read about the happenings in the life of Malcolm X. Most days, I read a bit of both but you don’t have to. 

Don’t discredit any type of book or literary work. There are non-fiction readers who look down on fiction readers, usually, these are the philosophy heads (who don’t seem to understand that some of the most important absurdist works are fictional) or Jordan Peterson junkies and then there are people who only read fiction and that’s fine I guess. The non-fiction world is full of so many pigeon-holed NARCs, that it’s easy to get put off but I would say, don’t box yourself into one camp. There are fiction works out there for you and there are non-fiction works out there for you too.

It’s getting late, so I will provide one final piece of advice: just read at your own pace and don’t worry about progress. I tend to stay out of the book-tok and booktube spaces because they put a lot of emphasis on reading as many books as possible and buying a lot of books but it’s far more important to engage with what you read than it is to burn through something. When I finish a book, I want to be left with an experience, not a statistic. I don’t even read much, I just engage a lot and that gives people the impression that I read more than I do. I can talk about the same few books for the rest of my life and bring up new topics and different readings each time. I can do one of these on how to get the most out of a book in the future but for now, this is what I leave you with.

Happy reading!

EPILOGUE

Thank you for reading this one, it is much appreciated. This section is more laid back so I am allowed to let that comma splice slide. Stay in your seats though. I have a few things of note to mention. I am planning on writing something about how to engage with a book on a deeper level or at least my method of doing so. This is something you do in school but in my experience, nobody tells you how to do it. I am a nerd who wanted to engage with a few Shakespeare plays in ways that weren’t a part of the school curriculum so I taught myself. 

I would also like to talk about writing. That was the first ever blog I wrote but that was solely my relationship to writing and not a general guide on how to write or maybe develop some sort of Moth… OF DOOM reading list. Wait that’s not a bad idea. I will create an essential reading list for this blog, which is just a list of books that I enjoy since this blog is just about me.

Last thing of note, if you want any more tips or I wasn’t specific enough or you need book recommendations, just ask me. The majority of the readers know me in some capacity so just ask me, don’t be shy. If there’s one thing I can talk about forever, it’s literature. Anyway, until next week!