#4 Ultimate guide to reading 100+books in a year

It’s been a long time since I’ve been posting. πŸ‘‹πŸ» Hey friends, today I want to share some tips regarding reading.

Reading is essential because it improves your focus, memory, empathy, and communication skills. It reduces stress, improves mental health and helps you live happily while learning new things to help you succeed in your career or relationship.

I can read more than 60-100 books in a year. It seems a lot at first sight, but you can even read more if you dedicate your time correctly and efficiently.

There are two types of reading πŸ‘‡πŸ»

πŸ“š Explorer reading

We consume information daily and obtain knowledge about ourselves and the world within certain limits. Our goal always is to break these limits and learn more to better understand everything and extend our general outlook. When I read a book for exploration, I expand this limit as much as possible. I skim every book to have some ideas and further explore them differently.

The best way of doing this is listening to audiobooks (1.5x or 2x can boost your reading and listening abilities).

Let’s say you have yet to study or read a book about physics. You can look for top books (on different levels) on Amazon (audiobooks mainly) to explore the topic and see which literature is available for you. If you think one topic is fascinating, you can revisit that book later for deep learning and exploration.

So, as long as you enjoy the process, there’s nothing inherently wrong with listening to many audiobooks in a year. You won’t and don’t need to remember everything. Still, by massively expanding your horizon, you will get the exact value and knowledge from all of them.

πŸ“˜ Deep reading

This is the type of reading where you spend more time reading.

Once a week, I read a book in-depth, highlighting important lines and taking notes. This can take 10h+ per book but investing such an amount of time reverts me back with great value of knowledge.

I do this when I want to understand the topics I’m interested in. It could be about productivity, physics, politics, etc. Suppose a book has a piece of reliable information that’s relevant to my life and interests. In that case, I will always add it to my “deep reading” list. For instance, currently, I’m reading “A brief history of time” by Stephen Hawking, and I’m deeply interested in astrophysics, dark matter, dark energy, black holes, etc. While taking notes and exploring more, this book also led me to dive deep into Quantum Physics.

I invest more time and effort in a book if at least one of these things is relevant:

Reading is the most crucial thing in life to understand each other better and expand our horizons into new universes. It doesn’t matter if you listen to 100 books or take a note 80h+ while reading 10-15 books in a year. It’s more like a funnel – you get a lot of ideas on your radar to explore more and apply the knowledge in your life if the time/condition arrives.

🚨 Warning:

  • Don’t take the reading seriously every time to take notes and understand the whole concept. This will consume your time and motivation to read, and in the end, you will not continue to read more if you are stuck with a book that you don’t like but consider necessary.
  • Don’t spend too much time on a book before skimming the contents, headlines and summary. Maybe in the middle of the book, you will realise you don’t need these notes anymore because they are irrelevant to your interests.

βš™οΈ App of the month

Following this topic, I highly recommend Shortform. Shortform has the world’s best guides to 1000+ non-fiction books. Learn key points and gain insights you won’t find anywhere else. Understand the world’s best ideas. They write short summaries of the world’s best non-fiction books by explaining them in plain and simple ways. In addition, they deliver thoughtful analyses connecting ideas in novel ways and discuss the key updates.

🌐 Useful website

Webpages usually look terrible and oversized when printed and waste tons of paper and ink. Some browsers offer functionality to reduce unnecessary fields of the webpage during printing; however, many websites prevent this functionality due to dynamic elements and ads.

Printfriendly is the best tool to solve this issue and create printer-friendly pages. But there are better parts than this. Printfriendly allows you to customise the page for fresh and optimised content. It can remove images, text or other unnecessary features to print only what you want (and make it reading friendly). Once you are done with your preferences, you need to click the “print now” button and be ready to go.

P.S. You can also save the page as a pdf, which I always use for my research.

πŸ“’ Quote of the week

“Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.”

Alberto Manguel

✍🏻 My latest blog post

In academia, scientific articles are the key element of becoming familiar with current research in that field. And based on the available literature, you have to distinguish between good and bad interpretations of research by reading and analysing primary literature. 

This may sound easy; however, reading and understanding research papers is a complex skill that every person interested in research/academia has had to learn during the bachelor’s or master’s degree. 

Check this πŸ‘‰πŸ» article to understand the fundamental ideas of how to read scientific papers more productively by spending only a little bit of time on unnecessary information.

πŸ’‘ My favourite things

App: Reddit. I’ve been using this app a lot recently. Reddit is a network of communities where people can dive into their interests, hobbies and passions. There’s a community for whatever you’re interested in. The site name is a play on the words “I read it”.

My ideal week: It’s been over one year that I planned and organised every single day of my life using a bullet planner, reminder and calendar app. I developed my time-management, organisational and management skills by sticking to an ordered schedule where I block time for work, workouts, breakfast, blogging, and family.

That’s all for this week, but much more will come later.

Have a lovely week!