“If books were roads, some would be made for driving quickly - details are scant, and what details there are appear drab - but the velocity and torque of the narrative is exhilarating. Some books, if seen as roads, would be make for walking - the trajectory of the road mattering far less than the vistas these roads might afford. The best book for me: I drive through it quickly but am forced to stop on occasion, to pull over and marvel.” ― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read
I did not set many goals for this new year, but I have decided to continue a habit that I developed over the last year: voracious reading. A few years back, I read Edmund Morris' The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and one of the most memorable takeaways I had was how Roosevelt would read two or three books each day. Can you imagine reading nearly a thousand books a year, while acting as President of the United States?
With that tidbit in the back of my mind, my reading throughput has increased over the years. But since last May, after moving and discovering Goodreads I have been on a bender and I don’t plan on stopping. Officially, my goal is to read at least forty books this year.
I do have a few general guidelines (which I do bend from time to time):
Read at a comfortable rate. I can throttle up my reading speed, but I find that my short-term comprehension and long-term retaining of information decreases at a higher rate.
Two-to-one non-fiction to fiction ratio. I enjoy good fiction, but I also love learning, so I tend to find this ratio to be my natural tendancy.
Don’t be afraid to read multiple books at one time. However, I tend to read fiction by itself so I can focus on the world that the author has created.
Don’t be afraid to stop reading a book (or skim it if it is non-fiction). Reading is supposed to be fun: keep it that way and don’t fret over quitting. I rarely have done this since I tend to research what books to read, which helps. But I have grabbed interesting-looking titles from the library only to lose steam midway through.
Write about what you’ve read. This is something I wish I started doing a long time ago. With the Kindle (and its apps) you can easily highlight passages and then view them without opening the book again, which is quite nice. However, writing down a few observations or quotes makes a great difference in how you retain the important stuff from your reading. I doubt I will remember every detail that I found interesting, but if I record a few into Evernote or a pen-and-paper notebook, I will be able to look back on them years down the road and re-trigger that memory.
But there is one rule that trumps any other: have fun. Sometimes I am in the mood to study a topic I am reading about; other times I just want to be taken on an adventure. Reading does not have to be a chore and you don’t need to collect read books like Pokémon.
That being said, here is my list of 2015 books read, thus far :).