No. 38 - I've made some mistakes with my reading, and I'm going to correct them.
I've only been reading one book, and I'm not getting a lot of pleasure out of it. At the beginning of the year, I decided I would work on being a more diligent notetaker, and in my mind, that meant reading everything deeply and only one piece at a time.
For context, I typically read 25 to 100 books each year, so when I tell you that I haven't finished any books this year, that should give you an idea as to why this is odd for me.
Until about six months ago, I had a long-ish commute to my day job, which allowed me to listen to audiobooks for roughly thre hours daily.
I tore through audiobooks on my commute, and this fast devouring of the books made me pause.
Was I getting everything out of the books I was supposed to get? Was I missing some nuances or details because I had to split my attention between driving and listening to the book?
I will be generous with myself here and say that I mostly listened to fiction in the car because I was less likely to have to take notes or want to take notes. There were times when a character would say something or the author would do something clever, and I would take note of the timestamp, go back to it later, and take a proper note. I had a system, but I still wondered what I was missing.
This feeling that I was breezing through too many books, coupled with my recent fascination with YouTube videos of people annotating their books, led me to challenge myself to become an annotator and slower reader.
For my first book of the year, I chose a small book called Atheism: a Very Short Introduction. This book is only 116 pages long and is part of a personal challenge to collect as many of the Very Short Introductions by Oxford University Press as I can.
As a side note: if you are a polymath, Renaissance person, or generally curious person, the Very Short Introduction series by Oxford University Press is perfect if you want to know about literally anything!
Back to the subject at hand –
Given that this book is only 116 pages, I should have finished it in one to two days. But I've been reading this since January 1, and I'm only on page 47.
I want to be clear: there's nothing wrong with reading slowly. I am naturally a very slow reader. I'm also an auditory learner, so I prefer to listen to books when possible.
While I enjoy the slowness and stillness that comes with sitting in a chair and reading a book with my eyes, when I want to learn something, I have a much better time of it if I can listen to the book and read the book with my eyes at the same time. This is called immersion reading or immersive reading.
I have been reading and annotating as I go, trying to retain every piece of information in front of me.
After I finish reading a section, I open up the Day One app, where I'm keeping my book notes this year, and transpose my annotations from the book into my reading journal. I note the day and number of pages read. I include quotes and notes about how it immediately made me feel.
I have a couple of issues with this: first, it takes me out of the book every section, which doesn't allow me to be fully in the material. Second, logging the date and the number of pages I read that day is fun data for me to look at later, but there is a little aggravation and even judgment about how much or how little progress I've made.
Why am I not just logging this on Goodreads, you ask? I recently went on a tear and decided that Goodreads was social media, so I deleted it. I don't necessarily miss the clunkiness of the app, but I do miss having my e-books automatically logged somewhere. I have been using a few apps to record my reading, but I haven't settled on one yet. I'll review those in another post.
So, how will I correct this reading pit of despair that I have dug for myself? Well, I'm going to do a few things:
I'm going to read what I want when I want
I'm going back to the way I was reading before. I'm going to check out 10 books at a time from the library, I'm going to go to the used bookstore and spend $60 on 40 books and put them on my shelves for when I'm in the mood for them; I'm going to dip in and out of various books - including books that I've read several times before.
Dipping in and out of different types of books keeps me interested and engaged. I found that reading only one book at a time makes reading feel like homework, and I am 43 years old and have no use for that.
I'm going to read first and write notes later.
I've enjoyed highlighting passages and making little notes for myself in the book I'm currently reading, so I will continue doing that. I will stop transposing those annotations and notes immediately into my reading journal. I will instead read the book all the way through and compile my thoughts right after I finish the book.
As for notes from the other books I'm reading, including audiobooks that I am not listening to immersively, I will jot down notes in my bullet journal and add notes to my reading journal as it is convenient. There's nothing wrong with collecting scraps of paper and saving them in your notebook for a later date.
What works for me may not work for you. But what works for me is having a mix of light reading with some harder, academic reading.
There are no hard and fast rules with reading. We're all just making this up as we go along, so don't be so hard on yourself about the number of books you have on your To Be Read list or the speed at which you read.
Read the way that makes you happiest, and enjoy yourself.
If you would like to purchase a copy of Atheism: A Very Short Introduction, Support Local Bookstores, and support this blog at the same time, you do that by using this Bookshop.org affiliate link - Atheism: A Very Short Introduction
Prefer to shop on Amazon? Use this Amazon affiliate link to get your copy - Atheism: A Very Short Introduction
For auditory learners, I use an app called Speechify, which allows you to take clips or pictures of text, and then the app will read it to you. I've left my affiliate link below if you're interested.
Speechify - [https://share.speechify.com/mzuz8O5](https://share.speechify.com/mzuz8O5)