Zeeshan Mahmud's Blog - Posts Tagged "100-book-reading-challenge"
Reading a thousand books in a year
I can already see the eyes rolling.
"What are you going to do? Read children's books?"
"All you are doing is skimming."
"Impossible!"
"Fake."
"You will read Dr. Seuss?"
"Where will you get the time?"
These are all valid points. The thing is when the year started I did not plan this. I did not make resolutions. It wasn't intended.
The truth is I used to love reading as a child. I was a bookworm - mainly Bengali translation of "The Three Investigators" and Satyajit Ray's "Feluda" series and "Professor Shonku".
I don't know what happened - whether technology or say, a subconscious impriting that reading is nerdy, or that I shouldn't waste so much time on "golper boi" or story-books or that I will "damage my eyes", but gradually the skill waned.
I could listen to hours and hours and whole day on YouTube on documentaries and podcasts.
This is because I am an uber-nerd who LOVES learning. And YouTube videos were my prime form of consumption.
But then Adblock started to be blocked. And just to extract a 2-minute information which I could have otherwise found from reading, I have to plod through repetitive intro, a litany of "like, comment, and subscribe" and ads every five minutes (sometimes lasting 30 minutes to 2 hours).
Thus I decided to pull the plug on YouTube and go back to my oldschool childhood love of learning.
Problem is: I haven't read a single page in years. I could not force myself to sit down and read. The allure of speedreading page-a-second like Will Hunting was too much of an ideal for me to reach.
So I thought I will force myself to read and learn in that fashion in my question to become omniscient.
Picked up Don Quixote from a used bookstore for a buck and started reading.
Truth be told, again the familiar scoffs came back. Why bother plodding through this borefest? I actually managed to read 100 pages at a stretch despite not getting any returns in terms of pleasure.
Then I forced myself to finish a small novel. "The Sun Also Rises" by Ernest Hemingway. Hated it.
But what I loved was slowly but surely it was changing my brain. Hopefully it will cure me of weed addiction too, slowly rewiring my brain! I thought.
I wanted to unlock the mystery of voracious readers. I went back to my familiar dojo (YouTube) and watched videos on how these people blast through so many books.
Key takeaway?
-Read what you love!
I found out how there is one woman who purportedly read tens of thousands of romance novels and her addiction was she couldn't stop reading. Then a hypnotist needed to be brought out for an exorcism to rid her off this demon!
Just imagine.
I made a playlist on YouTube about voracious readers. I jotted down this quote from the channel "Merphy Napier|Manga":
"When I read it's like the author gives me a floorplan for a building, and they wrote the structure of it they wrote the floorplan...but i build the walls. I choose the color of the pain on the walls... I fill in the corners. They told me what to imagine. But I am the one who gets to create it in my mind.... And we all get the same floorplan. We all get the same book. We build the walls in different way.... Based off on your life views and life experiences, different people read book different ways."
In fact, it seems studies have shown the benefits of reading which apparently relaxes the brain and activates certain parts.
Slowly but surely my childhood love of reading was rekindled. Instead of boring and highbrow texts, I thought I will complete this challenge reading what "I" want and love.
Of course, there is always a way to cheat. But if I cheat, I will be cheating myself.
I mean what exactly is reading? What exactly is a book?
One can flip through Tolstoy's War and Peace under an hour. Does it mean reading?
On the other hand, someone can read pages word for word and still not comprehend anything. (What happened when I read Don Quixote.)
Also what exactly is a book? Does a slim folio of 20 pages count as a book?
I realized the key is to find a reading pace I am comfortable with.
Also I want to interweave slim tomes with good literature.
I am not sure I can complete this challenge. But I fully realize the journey in itself is the point.
I am already 22 books behind and if I shoot for 3 books a day, I can still manage it. Problem is I will be traveling back to Bangladesh this year for 2 months and I may not have access to limitless supply of books - which I get here in USA- if not buy used books for pennies on the dollar. This is why I love America so much as this is the only heaven in the world where you can buy classics for dirt cheap price of 50 cents or a dollar!
As far as the time and my job?
Well, I do not want to disclose my personal and private life or what I do. I actually live with my mother and lead very simple life. I work part time.
Our rent is shared and I try to eat at home. Even if I make a conservative estimate of working 4 hours a day, I still have 20 hours to kill! Now from 8 of those hours are for sleep and other necessities. That still leaves 12 or so hours to kill per day. And this I used to do by bingewatching and bingelearning from YouTube after getting high.
For me, the time is not the issue. The discipline is. And the days when I have the will - where I want to read, my body won't comply. I have astigmatism and my eye starts to hurt. And I get severe tension headaches.
An average person reads 50 pages per hour. If a Jane Austen novel is 400 pages long, one can theoretically finish it in 8 hours - like a dayshift.
Problem is the discipline. And this I hope to overcome because the sole purpose of setting such an outlandish number is to stretch.
For me, reading a hundred books in a year is just too little. But thousand books is just too doggone overwhelming.
But other mortals have attempted such feat. AJ Jacobs read Britannica cover to cover in a year while Ammon Shea completed the mammoth task of climbing the Everest of reading: Oxford English Dictionary.
Yup. Whole 20 volumes or 20,000 pages or so (if not 59 million words in total (not entries) and 350 million characters).
So it's not that it is not doable. It is doable. Just superhuman discipline, structure, concentration and knack is needed instead of burning out after the first few days of intention.
Wish me luck folks. Will I complete the journey? Read on. Thanks for the follow.
The game's afoot!
"Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.”
― Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
"What are you going to do? Read children's books?"
"All you are doing is skimming."
"Impossible!"
"Fake."
"You will read Dr. Seuss?"
"Where will you get the time?"
These are all valid points. The thing is when the year started I did not plan this. I did not make resolutions. It wasn't intended.
The truth is I used to love reading as a child. I was a bookworm - mainly Bengali translation of "The Three Investigators" and Satyajit Ray's "Feluda" series and "Professor Shonku".
I don't know what happened - whether technology or say, a subconscious impriting that reading is nerdy, or that I shouldn't waste so much time on "golper boi" or story-books or that I will "damage my eyes", but gradually the skill waned.
I could listen to hours and hours and whole day on YouTube on documentaries and podcasts.
This is because I am an uber-nerd who LOVES learning. And YouTube videos were my prime form of consumption.
But then Adblock started to be blocked. And just to extract a 2-minute information which I could have otherwise found from reading, I have to plod through repetitive intro, a litany of "like, comment, and subscribe" and ads every five minutes (sometimes lasting 30 minutes to 2 hours).
Thus I decided to pull the plug on YouTube and go back to my oldschool childhood love of learning.
Problem is: I haven't read a single page in years. I could not force myself to sit down and read. The allure of speedreading page-a-second like Will Hunting was too much of an ideal for me to reach.
So I thought I will force myself to read and learn in that fashion in my question to become omniscient.
Picked up Don Quixote from a used bookstore for a buck and started reading.
Truth be told, again the familiar scoffs came back. Why bother plodding through this borefest? I actually managed to read 100 pages at a stretch despite not getting any returns in terms of pleasure.
Then I forced myself to finish a small novel. "The Sun Also Rises" by Ernest Hemingway. Hated it.
But what I loved was slowly but surely it was changing my brain. Hopefully it will cure me of weed addiction too, slowly rewiring my brain! I thought.
I wanted to unlock the mystery of voracious readers. I went back to my familiar dojo (YouTube) and watched videos on how these people blast through so many books.
Key takeaway?
-Read what you love!
I found out how there is one woman who purportedly read tens of thousands of romance novels and her addiction was she couldn't stop reading. Then a hypnotist needed to be brought out for an exorcism to rid her off this demon!
Just imagine.
I made a playlist on YouTube about voracious readers. I jotted down this quote from the channel "Merphy Napier|Manga":
"When I read it's like the author gives me a floorplan for a building, and they wrote the structure of it they wrote the floorplan...but i build the walls. I choose the color of the pain on the walls... I fill in the corners. They told me what to imagine. But I am the one who gets to create it in my mind.... And we all get the same floorplan. We all get the same book. We build the walls in different way.... Based off on your life views and life experiences, different people read book different ways."
In fact, it seems studies have shown the benefits of reading which apparently relaxes the brain and activates certain parts.
Slowly but surely my childhood love of reading was rekindled. Instead of boring and highbrow texts, I thought I will complete this challenge reading what "I" want and love.
Of course, there is always a way to cheat. But if I cheat, I will be cheating myself.
I mean what exactly is reading? What exactly is a book?
One can flip through Tolstoy's War and Peace under an hour. Does it mean reading?
On the other hand, someone can read pages word for word and still not comprehend anything. (What happened when I read Don Quixote.)
Also what exactly is a book? Does a slim folio of 20 pages count as a book?
I realized the key is to find a reading pace I am comfortable with.
Also I want to interweave slim tomes with good literature.
I am not sure I can complete this challenge. But I fully realize the journey in itself is the point.
I am already 22 books behind and if I shoot for 3 books a day, I can still manage it. Problem is I will be traveling back to Bangladesh this year for 2 months and I may not have access to limitless supply of books - which I get here in USA- if not buy used books for pennies on the dollar. This is why I love America so much as this is the only heaven in the world where you can buy classics for dirt cheap price of 50 cents or a dollar!
As far as the time and my job?
Well, I do not want to disclose my personal and private life or what I do. I actually live with my mother and lead very simple life. I work part time.
Our rent is shared and I try to eat at home. Even if I make a conservative estimate of working 4 hours a day, I still have 20 hours to kill! Now from 8 of those hours are for sleep and other necessities. That still leaves 12 or so hours to kill per day. And this I used to do by bingewatching and bingelearning from YouTube after getting high.
For me, the time is not the issue. The discipline is. And the days when I have the will - where I want to read, my body won't comply. I have astigmatism and my eye starts to hurt. And I get severe tension headaches.
An average person reads 50 pages per hour. If a Jane Austen novel is 400 pages long, one can theoretically finish it in 8 hours - like a dayshift.
Problem is the discipline. And this I hope to overcome because the sole purpose of setting such an outlandish number is to stretch.
For me, reading a hundred books in a year is just too little. But thousand books is just too doggone overwhelming.
But other mortals have attempted such feat. AJ Jacobs read Britannica cover to cover in a year while Ammon Shea completed the mammoth task of climbing the Everest of reading: Oxford English Dictionary.
Yup. Whole 20 volumes or 20,000 pages or so (if not 59 million words in total (not entries) and 350 million characters).
So it's not that it is not doable. It is doable. Just superhuman discipline, structure, concentration and knack is needed instead of burning out after the first few days of intention.
Wish me luck folks. Will I complete the journey? Read on. Thanks for the follow.
The game's afoot!
"Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.”
― Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
