A Complete Guide on How to Become a Better Reader
Before we get into it
Before I knew the meaning of hobbies, my hobby has been reading. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating but as far as I can remember, reading has been my favorite past time. I have seen myself grow from children's books with a lot of colorful illustrations in them to smaller novels and then reading 500-page hardbound volumes. This habit reflected in my academics, getting my great grades, a lot of prizes, and whizkid status, especially through primary and secondary school. Today, I’m reading 150 pages a day and chasing a 60-books-a-year reading goal.
I didn’t realize consuming the really awesome art and knowledge resident in books could be an issue for people until recently. I get a lot of questions, a lot ‘wow, how do you do it?’, so I decided to put everything I know about reading into this blog.
I’m not Babs Cardini, so I can’t promise you magic but I’ll promise to tell you everything that works for me and answer every one of your questions.
Below is the first blog post where I document a complete guide to becoming a better reader.
Beginning
Reading 30 books in 6 months is no magic, I can tell you because I’ve done it and there’s no halo over my head. I’ve found out that reading a lot of books is just about following certain standard precepts and learning more about yourself.
Set your own soul on fire
A lot of people who are poor readers have a similar excuse: they have other things bothering them than reading some story; they talk about how they are busy chasing money or how school work has cramped their schedules, bla bla.
If this is you, you are just exhibiting traits normal to us as human beings. As human beings, we, under normal circumstances, bend towards our areas of interest or priority. We are able to commit our time and resources to things that we’re passionate about than things we care less about.
The hack to develop a good reading culture is to start by reading towards your areas of concern. Find books that readily prick your interests or help you in fighting your daily battles. The good news is there are hundreds of books around your area of interest. If you are the guy whose head is buried deep in his business, you don’t have to struggle with Achebe’s stories for years, rather opt for a Seth Godin to get excellent marketing ideas or a Robert Kiyosaki to ramp up your business thinking.
So run a Google search now, books on + (your area of interest).
Goals, goals, goals
Imagine football without a goalpost, utterly pointless. This amplifies the already known fact that goals help in everything and reading is no exception. In fact, reading goals are the ultimate reading hack.
Reading goals are usually set on two scales:
1. The lower scale or the daily reading quota: This is the number of pages you commit yourself to read every day. Daily reading goals, even though they are low scale are perhaps the most important, they are the little drops of water that make the mighty ocean.
2. The Monthly/Yearly reading goal: As itself explains, these are the number of books you plan to read in a month and a year. My reading target for this year is 60 books, which implies that I must read at least 5 books every month.
For a start, your reading goals shouldn’t intimidate you but when you make one, do not change them. As I mentioned earlier, the key to hitting your yearly targets lies in completing your daily goals. If you exceed your reading goal, you can transfer it to the next day. In the same vein, if you do not hit your target, make sure you carry your deficit to the next day.
In all, do everything it takes to hit your reading goals.
(Pro Tip: To make sure you don’t feed one part of your interests to full and leave the others starving, you can set apart percentages for each of them, say, you plan to read 20 books; you can plan 5 novels, 5 self-help, 5 leadership, 5 biographies.)
What’s the best time of the day to read?
Surprise! I don’t have an answer! I believe life is bespoke, there’s hardly a rule that applies to everyone. So, you have to go ahead and find out the best time to read. In fact, one of the major characteristics of good readers is that they know the best period of the day to read for themselves.
Finding your best time to read is very important on your way to becoming a better reader because it allows you to plan your day in a way that gives you enough hours to read comfortably. For example, I’m nocturnal, meaning I enjoy doing stuff through the night, especially reading. Knowing that, during the day, I make sure I accomplish my other tasks so I can have time to read at night and I also avoid heavy dinners, so I don’t doze off. My friend prefers to wake very early and demolish her reading goals before breakfast. She makes sure she goes to bed early, so she’ll wake early to read (when I’m dozing away). I have an advantage because I can go about other stuff during the day and still complete my reading goals through the night. But whatever your time is, I’m sure it’ll turn out to be an advantage as it will be the most comfortable for you. So, as you’ll find with most things in becoming a good reader, the best time of the day to read depends on what works best for you.
To read with music or not?
If you ask me, everything gets better with music. As I’m writing this, I’m listening to Burna’s All My Life give way to Kendrick’s Fuck Your Ethnicity. Like I’ve said earlier, most of the things on the road to becoming a better reader are custom-made for you. While a couple of people I’ve met say music interferes with their reading flow, most people enjoy flipping through the pages with some soft(or maybe even loud) music flow through their earphones.
I particularly enjoy reading with music because it allows me to conveniently enjoy two beautiful art forms at once and if you’re a fan of brilliant artistes, you might yourself listening and reading the same message and concepts at the same time. I would have said reading with music is required, but you’re not me. So, for the umpteenth time, find what works best for you.
Best reading posture
How you position yourself while reading matters a lot because poor postures will strain you and that’ll make you get tired in little time. When you imagine someone reading, it might be the image of a lady bent over a library table but in reality, the ideal position to do your reading may differ.
Your posture is a function of what is comfortable for you. Pay attention to your neck though.
Read at a stretch or slowly?
Stretching yourself to complete a book at once is very bad reading habits, just as bad as dropping your book after every 3 sentences. I understand sometimes that a book might get just too interesting to drop, or maybe you just have some extra hours on your hands and you just push down on your accelerator and speed through the accelerator, that’s permissible. However, there’s a much better practice for readers.
You don’t have to stretch yourself to complete a 300-page book in one day or too slow, the real hack is to choose a healthy daily reading goal that challenges yet doesn’t strain you.
It not just about books though, but a lot of them
Reading is definitely not restricted to a 300-page novel, or even writing bound in a paperback. Reading is majorly about the actual act of absorbing knowledge. Blogposts, e-magazines, newspaper articles, music reviews, and even good descriptions are content that obviously count as reading. In fact, it is a known fact that good readers are not just stuck up in their books, they consume almost every type of writing that comes by the.
However, from experience and as a popular fact, the brilliance and depth of knowledge and art invested in books can seldom be found elsewhere, not even the best of music albums. You can’t afford to miss out. So, to become a good reader that you need to be, you need to do books, lots of them.
For the sake of starting small, you should start reading everything from blogs to product descriptions.
So go ahead pick a book that pricks your interest, set reading goals, find the time and posture that works best for you, find your earpieces and read everything that crosses your path, and you’re well on your way to becoming a better reader.
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