Avoiding reading for reading’s sake
We constantly hear how important reading is. It has the potential to deepen our understanding in our interests and vastly broaden our perspectives.
Knowing this, you picked up some book that you thought would be ‘cool to read’ like some autobiography of some guy you heard a lot about. You start reading it before bed and it’s mildly interesting. It doesn’t take long until the words become distorted and you take that as a queue to go to sleep.
A couple of days later, you do your normal stuff and get to bed. You think it would be a good idea to get back to the book, but for whatever reason it’s quite hard to get started. Again, at the end of the reading session you are left with a ‘That was mildly interesting’…
A month or two pass and you see that book on the shelf. You remember you didn’t read in a while and you feel bad. You think that the problem is in the fact that it is not in your routine to read so you decide that every evening, before bed, you would do just that.
You do this for a bit, but you notice it is becoming more and more of a drag, at the end of every reading session being left with a ‘Hmm, that was mildly interesting’.
After some struggle, you eventually finish the book and the only thing you got out of it was: ‘That was mildly interesting I guess’.
Was this worth it?
Not really, you just created a lot of stress to get yourself to read something that you didn’t really get anything out of.
Then why did you do it?
You know reading is something good to do.
Why is reading something ‘good’ to do?
It has the potential to deepen our understanding in our interests and vastly broaden our perspectives.
Then what was the problem?
The book you just read was just mildly interesting.
What does that mean?
It means that the book did not deepen your understanding in any of your interests or broaden your perspective in a way that was valuable for you.
How will you avoid this instead of becoming bitter about reading?
Picking a book
Before picking up a new book, ask yourself what would you like to get from a book.
Maybe you want to know more about one of your interests. Or maybe you would like to experience another life, like the life of a wizard in a fantasy or the life of someone in a dystopian future. Being ‘cool to read I guess’ is not a sufficient reason.
When it becomes a drag
When a book is becomes nothing more then ‘mildly interesting’, ask yourself if you really need need it and decide if it is worth continuing or not.
It can be the case that you only need part of that book so you could just go through the chapters and see what captures your attention. In that case, just read that. Why go through the boring part if you can just directly jump to the truly interesting part right away?
If everything seems like a drag, that’s OK too. Just find something else to read.
After all, there is no value in reading even the most insightful book if you cannot get any insight out of it.
This also doesn’t mean you are any less of a smart or interesting person. It simply means it is not the right time for you to read that particular book or it might not even be the right book ever, and that’s OK.
To conclude…
Reading should not be a drag. It can be very interesting and exciting. When it is not, you are probably not reading the right thing.
