I was inspired to start writing this because I’ve had a large focus on reading for the past few years. Reading is great and all, it can entertain and inform, both in the form of fiction or non-fiction, but after a while, I had to ask myself, why was I doing all of this reading? The main reason being to pursue a course of life long learning; just because we are no longer in school, does not mean that we need to, or should, stop learning; so I took it upon myself to further my education.
Reading has the power to change your life, it’s just a matter of finding the right book or even just the right line in a book that really speaks to you, and gives you a new insight into a problem you have been facing, or the motivation to do something new or make a change to the way you are living your life. As Thoreau said in Walden:
It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life.
If you study reading as an activity, there are multiple levels at which one can read something at according to the classic, How to Read a Book:
- Elementary – Simply being able to understand the words that are on the page
- Inspectional – Pretty much skimming, just trying to get a basic idea of what it is about
- Analytical – A more active style of reading, taking notes and looking up words and references you don’t understand
- Syntopical – Combining a variety of sources and comparing and contrasting their various arguments to have a deep understanding of a particular topic
For most of the reading I’ve done outside of school I was stuck on the border between inspectional and analytical. I’d read every word, so not just skimming, but I wouldn’t bother to look up words I did not know, and assumed that for the most part I’d forget most of what I read, so I just hoped maybe something would stick. Eventually I realized that while there were worse things I could have been doing, for the most part, I was still wasting my time, by not making an effort to engage in, or even properly understand a book, I was merely passively consuming something that could be of a greater value to me. I could have gotten about the same from watching TV as I was getting out of the books I was reading.
So, in the past year I’ve started making a point to highlight and take note of any passages I find interesting and save them into Evernote while also looking up words and references I don’t know. I was inspired to do this thanks to an article I read by Ryan Holiday, about keeping a common place book, a collection of all of the things you come across and find noteworthy or would like to be able to quickly recall later. While admittedly he does say to actually write things down instead of using Evernote, I will type out any notes I take from a book, hoping that going over the text again, carefully, might cause it to stick in my memory better.
Now that I’ve started to build up this collection of notes I’m hoping to use it to start to push towards producing a synthesis of what I’ve read and hopefully in the process try to spread some of the ideas that have caught my attention or been spawned from something I have read. I want all of the reading that I’m doing to build towards something, beyond just keeping me entertained; what that something is, I’m not really sure yet, but I’m hoping this is a start.