I am 56 years old as of Sunday and have only the fact that I like reading books to point to as being an achievement of mine.
So I thought that I should write about why and how I read. Perhaps it will be of use to some youngster who is making his (or her) way forward.
First point about my reading is that I primarily read for entertainment. If a book does not entertain then I don’t read it.
Noe this might sound shallow for a person who has not thought about this subject. Somebody might think that it is necessary to read to cultivate the mind and we should read out of a sense of duty, as something that needs to be done whether we like it or not.
But I assure you that doing something solely because you enjoy it is perhaps the purest of motives and on its own it is enough to enable you to master whatever it is that you want to learn.
If you enjoy fiddling around with musical instruments, for example, and keep at it for years and decades the time will surely come when despite your not intending it you will have learnt to play music well.
So follow your passion. Try to find an occupation that will pay you for something that you want to do in any case.
Another feature of my reading is that I skim over most of my books. Very rarely do I stop and think and analyse each word and each sentence. This suits the sort of books that I used to buy and read when I was young – mostly crime thrillers and bestselling novels.
Again this is something that mostly is not recommended but the Dhammapada says: We are what we think, All that we are arises from our thought …
My spending time with bestsellers filled my mind with better thoughts than the ones I would have had if I had whiled my time away watching TV and surfing the internet.
A third feature of my reading is that – especially with Dick Francis novels – I used to read the books that I liked repeatedly. I wanted to think like a Dick Francis hero. I wanted to change the sort of person I was and I thought that by immersing myself in this fictional world I would become like a character in the novel myself.
It is certainly possible for a person to change and learn new skills by repeatedly reading books. A full description of how to learn those skills is given in one of my earlier articles in this blog. Link is below:
On the other side I have to quote the teaching of Swami Vivekananda. Swamiji said that only a fool would read anything and everything he could get his hands on. He advised us to read only a few books – the classics – and read them repeatedly, over and over.
Swamiji of course was interested in spirituality and being enlightened. If you have that as your goal then do what he suggested. That was not the motive for me when I was young and reading books. I just wanted to have a good time.
So these are some of my reading habits. Hope you will have learned something that helps you.
I’ll end here. Please explore this blog for more articles on Self Help, Spirituality and Politics. Please comment on the articles if you liked them (or even if you didn’t). Feedback from my readers keeps me going.
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