How do you transition from page 1 to page last in the shortest possible time when reading?

How to read more books in less time?

А question becoming more and more popular in our hectic lives where reading is often complemented with watching videos and listening to podcasts while, at the same time, we update our social profiles with "clever" threads hoping to evoke more likes and clicks.

The available information is so vast, and there is always something new happening, that we do our best to use all our senses to ingest as much as possible.

The other day I was impolitely interrupted by an ad that wanted to convince me that reading more, and reading faster, was the way to go.

The online course I saw was (supposedly) ingeniously engineered to help me vacuum the words out of books in the shortest possible time. Understanding the content inside wasn't the objective, however. You were to get points for just finishing.

And while there is nothing inherently bad about surfing through some random list post showcasing the best time management apps, or the nicest standing desks, it surely gets tricky when you're reading to actually understand the content inside the title you're holding.

If your goal is to finish books fast, then you most probably dismiss the goal of actually understanding the content inside the book. Priorities shift from understanding to passing through the content - two things quite far from one another.

This got me thinking...

The more books I add on my book summaries page, the more this leads to weak understanding.

For example, the latest book on my shelf is Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams by Carl Jung. The book is incredibly short - around 100 pages. But how long do you think it took me to go through the text? Around 12 days. And I'm not a slow reader.

The reason I spent so much time with Jung's theories is because I paused every other page to let the information sink in.

All of this, at some point, led me to the following question: Am I reading to just say that I've finished a book, or am I reading to actually understand the content inside and hopefully implement my findings?

If you often end up asking yourself the same question while trying so hard to swallow every piece of information landing before your eyes, I'll be glad if you participate in my quick, fully anonymous, survey for book lovers. (It will take you no longer than 5 minutes to finish it if you decide to participate).

Your answers will help me better structure my site and the content that I'll include here in the future.

Take the survey!

Thank you in advance!

(If for some reason your email client decides to clip the email, click here to see the full content).

• [NEW] Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams by Carl Gustav Jung: Arising from the emotional disturbance of our own psyche, the symbols our dreams represent aim to explain better our unconscious to the conscious. Yet, few people attach importance to the fairy tales we form in our minds while our heads are resting on our pillows. We firmly believe that these vague blurry imaginations have little to tell us about ourselves. Carl Jung argues otherwise...
• Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker: A book about why you should go to bed early and never, by no means, deprive yourself of sleep because some nasty side effects might/will occur. Some of these are: you become less effective, less productive, less friendly, attractive, and even more vulnerable to diseases. Walker, a.k.a. the sleep dude, talks in length about various researches he and his friends did in the field of sleep.

Support my work: My newsletter is sponsored by my dearest members. If you want to support my work and to get access to the whole library of summaries on my site, you can consider becoming a member yourself. 

Interesting books I recently added to my reading list (and hopefully will read at some point):

• The Art of Slow Reading by Thomas Newkirk: Friendly, reasonable, intelligent fact-based book on why you should read less, and why you should read slowly.
• The Inner Game of Stress by W. Timothy Gallwey: In this book, the renowned sports psychology expert W. Timothy Gallwey teams up with two esteemed physicians to offer a unique and empowering guide to mental health in today's volatile world. Or in short, get less stressed so you can do more other things that make you feel good.

Interesting words from books and around the web:

• Anodyne [adjective]: Intentionally unoffensive; Sterile; Not likely to cause offense or disagreement and somewhat dull.
• Meraki [adjective]: A Greek word often used to describe doing something with soul, creativity, or love - when you put "something of yourself" into what you're doing, whatever it may be.
• Metanoia [noun]: Change in one's way of life resulting from penitence or spiritual conversion.

From around the web:

• Slow-Reading is the New Deep Learning: "If you’re reading to learn, you need to engage with the content and associate the new concepts with your existing knowledge. But it doesn’t make sense to skim-read when your goal is to acquire knowledge."
• Lost in Thought: The psychological risks of meditation: "The science of meditation has pretty much exclusively focused on the positive effects of meditation,” Britton said. “But if we want to understand the entire trajectory of the contemplative path and everything that that entails, we need to be more evenhanded and more balanced in our investigations, and begin to investigate the full range of experiences, including the ones that would be considered negative, difficult, challenging, or maybe even problematic.”
• The Confidence Gap: "The statistics are well known: at the top, especially, women are nearly absent, and our numbers are barely increasing. Half a century since women first forced open the boardroom doors, our career trajectories still look very different from men’s."

Once again, I'd appreciate it if you can go through my short survey and share your experience with books and reading in general. The form is 100% anonymous.

Thank you in advance!

Regards,

Ivaylo Durmonski