The Bookers Club
Earlier this year, when I decided to get back to writing, there was something still missing. You see, writing is just one side of the coin. Reading is the other. There is no writer I have heard of, who does just writing.
So, I have made a plan- to read as many ‘books’ as I can in a year. No targets. No number. Just to start building on the lost habit again. In general, most people in academia read a lot. In fact, even outside of academia, there is a lot that is read. But those are mostly pieces of information picked up in the newspaper, articles online, in various content-curated websites, ones such as Medium itself. There is nothing against such reading. In fact, to me that seems as the new form of reading, but I might rephrase this ‘new form reading’ to ‘new form of written-content consumption’. They are usually rich and dense with information (of course, depends on your choice of articles). But such intensity of content thrown within ‘5 min reads’ or below 2000 words, has its own issues.
One major problem is- there is not enough time to digest the information. Imagine eating small portions of nutrition rich meals, without having time to digest that.
To be more brutal, that’s like drinking syrup all the time instead drinking a proportionally mixed juice with water.
So, the information you consume doesn’t have the time to be converted into knowledge and put to practise to gain wisdom.
Information → Knowledge → Wisdom
We all know the cycle. But for each of this conversion to happen, you need the required ‘residence time’ as chemical engineers would put it.
An inspiring reader, and writer, Ryan Holiday, provides a lot of motivation on reading. I certainly recommend a look to his articles to feel enthused about reading. Nevertheless, I disagree with some of his strongly put ‘suggestions’. Mainly, the part where he asks you to buy every book you want to read.
It’s really not necessary that every avid reader makes a library of his own.
In fact, as technology has improved, I’d recommend to fully make use of any means of getting your hands on long written reads. Make as little excuse as you can for reading! If you have a phone- Read in that. , if you have a Tab/iPad, or just a laptop- use that. (Beware of your eyes though). Kindle is a good alternative here. If you have a photocopied material — read with that. In anyway you can, you’re just enriching your intellect with every word.
Every book, doesn’t necessarily add to your information-induced knowledge, rather, information-incited knowledge.
That basically means, you think about the stuff you know, differently. To me, that matters more than just being able to answer every question in the General Knowledge Quiz Book.
Fiction is great, but give non-fiction a chance too! After all, it happens to be more real. My starting schedule at the moment is, reading a Fiction and a Non-Fiction contemporaneously. The former is a light read, so useful to have in your hand when you commute, or when you want to fall asleep. The latter, as I use, is when I actually sit down to read. That’s perhaps three quarters to an hour at most in a working day, combined.
At the end of the day, if I can do it, you can do it. And I didn’t even like books that much, and maybe not as much, not yet. After a long day’s work, I would perhaps prefer to enjoy a good movie over a book, but you can still carve time for both, if you don’t want to choose. There is so much time in a day, anyway.
So if any of you who’ve read this is now interested in picking up a book, great!
You can join me in this flexible commonality — The Bookers Club.
Membership Fee: Read a book.
P.S- The Bookers Club doesn’t really exist.
P.P.S — If you have enjoyed a book in the past, or even heard of someone who has, let me know that as a suggestion.
