The Joys of Reading WithYour Own Style

There is no recipe to find your next perfect read. Only one thing is sure, find your reading style — and you will enjoy the journey.

Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash

I don’t like when people advise me how to read. I don’t like articles about how people read 100 pages per day, book per week, 100 books per year...

In my opinion, if you read exclusively because you want to get better, smarter, more productive, or efficient, you missed a point. Sometimes reading is just reading. It is leisure, hobby, maybe just time passing activity. If you read something useful or enriching good for you. If you don’t get anything useful but are just tempted to be transported into different worlds of blue monsters and magic potions it is ok as well.

You can read one book at a time or a hundred. It depends on your habit, your brain, and your lifestyle. Forcing yourself into something because you think it might be a habit of the ultra-efficient and successful people can shrink pleasure into another task that you accomplish and feel nothing out of it (except exhaustion maybe).

I am someone who read many books at the same time, or what is called a poly-reader. I buy and start reading, maybe a few pages, maybe a couple of chapters, then I might sort it on the shelf and leave it there for a week, month, year. I have a pile on my bedstand, as I read mainly before sleeping. And it doesn't bother me.

It is said that the majority of people are serial readers — they pick up one book and read it cover-to-cover before putting it down. I don’t understand why is it common agreement that it is better to read one book at a time.

Often I hear from others: how can you read many books at the same time, you mix the context and the plot, you lose the idea, you forget. No. I don’t, that’s how I’m used to doing. I don’t forget. I enjoy the diversity and endlessness of the reading process. I never experience moments when I have nothing to read.

“And it’s — I just find it to be a source of great pleasure and delight to know that there’s always something else. Don’t tell me what you’re reading. Tell me what you’re reading next”.

I didn’t have any conscious or logical reason for doing that. I have read an interview with The Chicago Tribune cultural critic Julia Keller and now I have. She read multiple books at the same time because — she finds life is simply better when lived among multiple books. And, yes there is no specific method or formula of super productivity behind it. It just makes you feel good.

Maybe it is coming from an obsession with multitasking or from great curiosity. I can’t just put a new book on the shelf without looking into it. In our world of new books constantly being published adding to the vastness of treasures from the centuries of great literature you can’t just sacrifice a chunk of your time on each one exclusively.

Yes, maybe you read slower when you read many, but … Sometimes magic happens. There’s nothing like the joy of accidentally stumbling on the synergy between two books, says Keller, when a plotline or location in one is enriched by a scene in another.

Wonderful literary synergy when the right mix and match — is never planned. There is no recipe to make a well-cooked bed stand pile. You cannot predict which books will match together. I have just finished reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow after suffering through it for a year. Many other books passed by while I was struggling through the pages of experiments results conducted by Kahneman and his colleagues. And only recently, accompanied by the collection of stories by J.S Fitzgerald Flappers and Philosophers, I managed to finish the book. Learning about human emotions and thoughts and reading about their application in Fitzgerald’s world made the perfect mix for me. It sounds absurd. But it works for me. I’m convinced if I was to read Thinking. Fast and Slow alone I would never finish it.

That it’s not so bad to be reading many, many different things at once. A chapter here, a paragraph there — to kind of skip around. You never get bored, you want to read longer and you’re in a different mood at a different time.

“Different books kind of grabbed your attention and different times just as, you know, you wouldn’t eat hotdogs all day, every day. I say that, having just eaten two hotdogs”.

Some say that reading online we got used to splitting our focus and that people now have very short attention spans.

Definitely, the way we read now is certainly very different than the way we used to read. Firstly, we have much more access to books and generally content to read throughout the day. And secondly, we have less time, uninterrupted leisure time. Less quiet places where a phone or notification can’t reach you.

So what is wrong with adapting? I love what Julia Keller says that by breaking off the reading and going to something else we enhance the contrasts and the difference in voices and make the whole experience only better. I believe the whole point of reading it is to enjoy your experience and a journey. Whatever you do.

So as to my advice on how to become yourself and enjoy reading:

1. Do what feels good and right;
2. Don’t listen for other people advice, nobody knows what is best for you except you, if something feels good — it is right;
3. Don’t worry about productivity and efficiency, enjoy;
4. If somebody criticizes and gives you advice, see 2.