During prime New Year’s resolution season of January 2024, I made a cliché proclamation; I was going to read more. It wasn’t the first time me and millions of others shared this hollow pursuit. Knowing history, and abhorring the desire to repeat it, I ponied up $45 and paid for Blinkist, an app providing 10-30 minute audio and text summaries for thousands of books. It proved the best $45 I spent last year by an enormous margin. That’s not a paid plug for the app, although if they sent me a few affiliate commissions I wouldn’t deny them. Its exponential value is derived from its role within the process of choosing good books I’ll be outlining in this week’s piece.
Why Should You Read More?
Before breaching the subject of choosing good books, it’s paramount to explain the numerous benefits of consuming more books. I precisely selected that verb to articulate an important premise. Consuming a book can be done in three ways: aurally, tactically, and visually. In practice, via audiobooks, physical books, and eBooks. I’m not arguing one medium is superior. Furthermore, I would argue mixing mediums can be an effective tool for retention due to the differences in brains stimulation.
The loop generated by consuming a book can be generalized as follows:
Symbol Interpretation → Language Processing → Meaning Derivation → Affiliation of Meaning → Conversion to Memory → Repeat
Whether the words feed through your eyes or ears, the brain needs to process them into language. Once understood, it can then derive their collective meaning. If it struggles to derive meaning, it won’t discard the input, but it will be set aside in favor of inputs for which meaning is known. The final stage is the conversion of that input and its affiliation to a new memory, which then becomes the basis for future affiliations.
Choosing Good Books: A Familiar Starting Point
The logical starting point for choosing good books is, like the supermajority of life pursuits, genuine interest. Patrons of Becoming Polymathic have witnessed that horse beaten, reincarnated, then beaten again several times. Why that is can be derived from other pieces. In this context, choosing a good book starts with choosing one in a field with which you have demonstrated intrigue. This stage has potential to present more difficulty than one might anticipate, for every second of every day we’re bombarded with explicit suggestion. Its cousin, implicit suggestion, however, should be leveraged to guide your decisions in this initial stage.
Choosing Good Books: The Next Stages
With your interest identified, you can now move to the next stage of selecting captivating titles. A reminder: the medium through which you research does not matter. Dive down an Amazon rabbit hole, drive to the nearest bookstore or library, listen to a podcast, watch a YouTube video. Just do something.
The penultimate stage is selecting a title. In the same way the first stage is more intimidating than expected, this stage is not. So long as you’ve followed the previous stages, you will be met with a short list of titles you’re excited to begin. Pick one. If you’re stuck, flip a coin, draw straws, or give your list to a friend to choose on your behalf. There are no real consequences; you’re not deciding foreign policy.
Now the final stage – annotation and recall. While consuming your title, assuming you’ve chosen right, there will be a litany of memorable excerpts and takeaway. Whether these items are scribbled on Post-Its (my preferred method), phone notes (also used), or mental reminders (I wish I could use), they must be coveted as the seeds of your future endeavors. Once completed, it’s imperative annotations are reviewed, for this process is where ideation thrives. Removed from input, the brain benefits from detachment gain. The new connections formed are the sparks which fuel its continue learning and subsequent growth.
Repeating the Cycle
The title of this piece is precise. Anybody can consume one good book, but few can develop a systematic way to ensure continued discovery of them. Amongst your annotations are likely to be other titles building upon the one you read. This is where an app akin to Blinkist can offer value by providing external storage and filtering. When I came across a title I found intriguing, I would save it in Blinkist, listen to the summary later, then categorize the title as something I either wanted to read or not. Out of 20 titles, only three or four would make the “want to read” category.
Before the editing process of my first novel occupied the majority of my reading hours in the second half of 2024, this system lead me to read the following titles:
Imaginable – Jane McGonigal
The Extended Mind – Annie Murphy Paul
Zero to One – Peter Thiel
How to Create a Mind – Ray Kurzweil
The Mysterious Case of Rudolph Diesel – Douglas Brunt
The Fourth Turning – William Strauss and Neil Howe
Generations – William Strauss and Neil Howe (currently reading)
Without exception, they are all titles I desire to read again, particularly the last two. More on them later.
Spending money on an app to follow this process is not required, but discipline in annotating your findings is. It does not matter how they come to be, so long as they become. Do not make the mistake of wallowing in choosing the perfect medium. There isn’t one. There’s only what is effective for you and what is not. Get to researching…
Be More.
Become Polymathic.
Quote of the Week: “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.” – George R.R. Martin