Are You Reading Book Correctly?

We here at talking concept love reading book, so much so that we dedicated whole section as Book Summary. Reading a book to its finish takes commitment and even if reading is your hobby it does take considerable effort. But how much are you retaining? Is there’s a correct way to read a book.

Read vs Retaining

You sure have read countless books. Perhaps reading was your hobby and you binged through couple of them during vacation or train journey. You may have a favorite writer and enjoy a certain style of writing. But here is a short self-assessment for you. What percentage of knowledge are you carrying right now from those books. A 100% each, great for you genius. 60% each? Perhaps something like 80% of that book you read recently and something like 10% you read last year.

If so let’s pen down every concept you learnt on a piece of paper. Let’s pick your favorite book and pen that one down. It sure was hundreds of pages long, how many points are you able to come up with. 20 points? 10? a humble 5 perhaps? Can’t even recall anything besides the title…

You sure realize where we are going. Even when we are reading books out of shear passion of learning, why are we so poor at retaining what we learn?

Value of a Book

Let’s not be so hard on ourselves. What does a book cost? Surely never a fortune. Most books are very easily assessable and should not cost more than couple of hundred rupees. Even if that bestseller books had best description of that life changing lesson, what kind of drastic change in life you are expecting from few bucks?

Real cost of book is in terms of that time and effort you put in reading. So how much of this capital you spent. This will answer you why we are so poor at retaining knowledge from books.

Take your time

You don’t have to rush to finish a book. You surely can take your sweet time reading the book. Why the rush to finish an average 300 pages book in a week? Take a couple of months instead. Read it, re-read it, revise what you learnt last week again, debate with the writer, see where his opinion fits in your value system. This will allow you to truly own your book as you master each concept.

Practicing = Learning

Best way to retain your learning is to practice it. That’s why in school they made us go through comprehension and numerical. Here, I advise you how to practice an idea and take your learning further. You can practice an idea in following steps.

1. Use the information you learnt to form your own new information. Research them further or discuss your observations about how changing some parameters may affect an idea.
2. When writer is presenting an opinion, see what debating for and the against arguments feels like. See where that information fits in your own value system or challenge your own value system as well. 
3. Write an essay or comprehension where you discuss about the idea, using the idea in practice, its viability, or discuss how you can build further on an idea.

Something to revise

No matter how much time and effort you spent to read a book; your memories will certainly fade away with time. You cannot keep re reading single book again and again. You have other things to do as well. One extra thing I shall ask you to do while reading a book is to prepare something that helps you to revisit every concepts you learnt within few minutes. Something like short notes or summary which you prepared during your exam preparation. A mind map, flash cards or where ever your creativity takes you. Here are quick points to remember

1. These summary notes should be so designed to help quickly revise any and all concepts or information from parent book
2. Notes should be a 100% reliable so make sure to jolt correct information
3. Smart move would be to digitize them so they are never lost and are easily assessable

Fun with ideas

If you are not having fun which your book, you are certainly doing it wrong.

Reading a book should be about educating ourselves and make us better person, it should never put us in rush or stress. Just have your dedication and you sure soon find yourselves suddenly more mind full and sharp after reading a book.