Falling in Love with Reading Again: Pt 1
Doing something that I never thought possible and perhaps helping you to rediscover reading as well. A short autobiography of me and reading.
I have fallen in Love with reading again.
I know… That’s like the craziest thing you’ve heard this week (I mean… Who even read now of days?).
Yes. I’m equally surprised.
I now read for 4 hours a day. I find myself gravitating to reading a book rather than watching a TV show, playing computer games, and even YouTube 😱.
But this is not new to me.
Here’s my history:
The Younger Years: My first Rodeo at Reading.
When I was a pre-teen. I devoured books.
My mom remarked that whilst Jayden and Joash were playing fake fighting, I would be sitting down somewhere with a book in my hand.
During my younger years, this was fiction.
The first book series I fell in love with was the Boxcar children. Short mystery books about a family of kids investigating mysteries. It was short, around 100 pages for each book and it helped me dip my toes into reading as a hobby.
Subsequently, I discovered young-adult fiction as a teenager.
One day, I was browsing the bookstore to find a book to read. I was in the fiction section and stumbled on the book “Hunger Games”.
At this point, the book was just released, and I stumbled across it randomly. No recommendation, nothing. But after reading the description of the book on the back of it, I decided it might be worthwhile to check it out. So, I decided to give it a shot.
I started reading and got swept away by the narrative! The action! The Drama! The… ROMANCE!
Soon later the book became a huge hit! I felt like I was one of the first few people that read the book before it became “Mainstream”.
I not only enjoyed reading fiction.
I equally became a huge fan of non-fiction. The first non-fiction book I read was super-Freakonomics and that inspired me to become an economist during my teenage years.
However, the best vignette of my reading life was this:
“The History of Infinite”
I was a teenager at that time, it was after school, and I was browsing our local bookstore. I then found this gem. Thinking back, who in their right mind at 16 would be reading this book?
A historical book about mathematics. (The dryest combination of book topic).
I met my aunt later and told her about it.
She looked me in the eye and said: “Joel, you only do this kind of things”.
Oh! The Tragedy! The Horror!
But subsequently after that. Tragedy Strike.
Social media entered the scene. I’m sure many of you can testify that once you were exposed to social media and all its addictive forms, reading books became an uphill struggle.
Why read a book when you can browse Insta, Facebook, and YouTube.
The attention span that I used to have reading for hours on end has been reduced to minutes. I would be reading a book, then a thought pops into my head:
“Oh yeah, better respond to ___ about my plans” "
“Let me drink some water first…”
The excuses are plenty and we are all too familiar with them.
In conjunction with that. Enter the Podcast and the YouTube lectures. Long form content that has some semblance of intellectual rigor.
I started binging on those at 1.5 speed.
I mean, if you can consume information at that speed? Why bother ever touching a book again? The amount of effort to move your eyes is a waste of energy.
Book reading became my least preferred way of digesting content. That was my life…
Until.
Reading Resurrected
It was not a single thing that revived my interest in reading. Rather, multiple factors contributed to this resurrection of my joy of reading. I must mention as well that I wasn’t looking to “revive” my reading habit.
Functionally speaking, I was quite happy with the way I was digesting my media.
But the first tipping point was this:
“Realizing that the purpose of reading is not for Information, but Transformation”.
I was listening to a Podcast by Maryanne Wolfe (I know, it’s ironic).
Understanding post-internet reading habits.
She was sharing that post-internet, the way that we have read has changed drastically. Due to the bombardment of information on the internet, we no longer actually read deeply, we merely skim and scan for content. For example, when you are on a webpage or even on this blog, you might not have even read the paragraphs fully.
You read in an F Pattern.
You read the first page of the paragraph and then browse down to read the next paragraph sentence. The way your eyes move is like an F alphabet. (The other way of skimming is the Z pattern).
We scan and skim because we want the main gist of the article. Aka, we are reading for information.
Another detrimental effect of skimming that she mentioned was this: “Comprehension Awareness” decreases. When you read a book, if you find something that you don’t understand, you will normally circle back to reread that section again to understand that. This awareness is called Comprehension Awareness. We are aware of when we understand or don’t understand something. This is an important skill when it comes to digesting tougher content.
Given skimming, comprehension awareness is limited.
We are not aware of what we are not aware of.
So, we speed through content understanding the gist, but nothing more than that. (There are some studies that show that skimming allows you to get the gist, but when prompted with a different kind of question, the quality of answers deteriorate)
Idolization of Information
This idolization of information compared to transformation I begin to see everywhere. People just want the destination and not the journey to arrive at the destination.
I saw it in myself. I was listening to Podcast at that kind of speed so I can MINIMIZE my time wasted.
I scrolled down to the end of the articles as fast as possible so I can form my opinion based on the conclusion of the article.
I see it when I set goals: “I want to read XX Number of books in a given year so I can be considered well read!”
I did not even realize that my reading habits had changed so drastically. It was when I realized the above and took a step back to truly reflect.
I began to see that I was no longer a “good reader”. I’ve become an “excellent skimmer”.
…
So, I thought to myself:
Instead of being well read, why not I try to read well instead?
Instead of trying to hyper-speed through it. Why not try to enjoy the view?
Enjoy the scent?
Savor the flavors?
And lastly immerse myself once again in the words that I used to love.
Continued in Part 2