When was the last time you picked up a good book and really invested yourself into it? Not a magazine or a TMZ article, not a news update or a blog rant but a real life, paperback, ink on your fingers, read until you fall asleep kind of book. A week, a month, a year?
For me it has been many years since I had bothered to attempt a real book. Excluding the odd comic book (a nerdy pastime of mine) I haven’t read even a handful of books since grade school and I could still probably count the number of books I’ve read lifetime on two hands. What’s worse, the less I read the worse I seem to become at reading.
At a young age I noticed I wasn’t a very fast reader. I struggled to get through pages while my classmates were putting back chapters with ease. It wasn’t long until I was avoiding reading as much as possible as to not have to deal with the embarrassment of falling behind. And just like any unpracticed skill, I progressively slipped from bad to worse.
Slow reading became a insecurity of mine, a flaw I hid from my friends and family not wanting to be judged as unintelligent or incapable. The irony though was that I really enjoyed reading and I always felt like I was missing out on so much cool and interesting content by limiting myself from it. I knew there were these amazing novels and inspirational ‘New York Times best selling stories’ that I was letting pass me by. Every Christmas I would hunt through the local book store for gifts for others but would never bother to take anything home for myself. Even hearing my friends talk about how much better the Harry Potter books were than the movies drove me nuts. It was like an elite club that only smart people could be a part of and even though I considered myself to be a smart person my friends ‘books are better’ attitudes just further cement my exclusion from the club.
A generation of huh?
As I grew up a funny thing happened, I found more and more that I was no longer alone in my detachment from reading. I would often hear the generation below me stating proudly that they “didn’t read books” and that “everything was on the internet now.” In today’s content driven world of Youtube, Facebook, Netflix, and Playstation, reading was becoming something we didn’t have time for anymore. After all, who has time to sit down and go through a 400 page book when the latest season of House of Card just dropped; there was binge watching to do!
Moreover any of the reading we did do needed to be quick and pointed as to not lose the readers attention within the first 30 seconds. Detailed story arcs and character driven plots were being replaced by the ‘internet meme’. We were becoming a generation of high speed, fast paced consumption machines, constantly snacking on garbage media but never really feeling full or content.
Today that mass marketed mentality has infected much more than just written content. Hollywood and the movie industry seems to have bought in heavily as is apparent with the recent slew of ‘shock value’ horror films and big budget explosive light shows disguised as action movies. Almost everything that comes out today is either a sequel or a reboot of an old idea and it’s rare to find a film that invests as much into its writing as it does into trying top the box office.
Save my brain
After years of falling prey to over hyped and under delivered movies, after wasting hours of my life scrolling through social network feeds and reading ridiculous articles titled ‘top 10 ways to tell you grew up in the 80s,’ or ‘why cats are so weird,’ I’ve realized a sad fact, that we as a society are in serious need of some substance.
I felt like my mind had become saturated. Even though I was reading more content then ever before all of it was catered to a short attention span, and was generally underdeveloped and unintelligent. I needed to break out of the fatty content cycle and digest some healthy reading again. I realized that my apprehension to reading had only exacerbated my fall into mind numbing content consumption. I needed to challenge my brain again, I needed to rediscover some deeper detail and substance in my life again.
Like any skill the more you practice at it the better you become. They say it takes 3 weeks to form a habit so I’ve decided to commit to reading 10 books for the month of August (that’s a book every 3 days) in hopes that maybe I’ll not only save my brain from mental mindlessness but that I might finally learn to become comfortable with reading.
#10Books1Month
Here are my list of chosen books for the month. I tried to select a solid blend of new and old, fiction and non-fiction as well as fantasy and reality. I would encourage you, if you are feeling how I have been feeling as of late to take August as your excuse to take control of what you’re feeding your brain and take your intellectual integrity back. Read a book, read 10 books, just read something that challenges you, stimulates you and take you on a journey somewhere new.
- Start With Why – Simon Sinek
- Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
- Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World – Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
- The Girl on the Train – Paula Hawkins
- The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
- Red Rising – Pierce Brown
- Not Fade Away: A Short Life Well Lived by Laurence Shames & Peter Barton
- Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination Paperback by Neal Gabler
- A Dirty Job – Christopher Moore
- The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
Finally I’d like to invite everyone to be part of my #SMLBookClub this month. I’ve chosen The Alchemist as our book review of choice so if you decide to read it this month, you can also join in on live book review at the end of the month (stay tuned for details). Happy reading everyone!
