Read More Gooder and Also Fast
Welcome to my website! Again. I’m T. L. Bainter and last year, I started posting consistently both here and on my new YouTube channel, largely focusing on books. I read books, I review books, and I even write some of my own! Today, I want to talk specifically about reading books and how I manage to read as much as I do. I used to read a lot and have been getting back into the swing of it, which I’ve found to be a bit easier than I originally thought. In the first month of 2022, I read about 500,000 words, or a little over 100,000 words a week. I used to read even more than that! So, in today’s post, I’m going to talk about what works for me in this regard. Hopefully, you’ll be able to pull something from one or all of these tips!
Vary Your Mediums
Something that has greatly helped me get back into reading consistently (and assisted with my attention span) is varying my mediums. What I mean by this is that I change up how I am consuming a story, and I do this often. I shift between physical books, audiobooks, and ebooks consistently. For some books, I actually listen to the audiobook while I read the physical work, which has greatly helped with my attention span when it comes to reading. As long as I am changing up how I consume a story from one book to the next, I find that I rarely get bored by the act of reading, because it’s always new.
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Just Read Faster
That’s it, dude. Just read faster. What, you want details? Okay, fine, I’ll be more specific. You need to read more quickly than you do, and I promise that you can read faster. If you’re like me, you probably used to read a lot and you aren’t even sure how you managed to do it back then, but somewhere along the way, you lost that ability. Well, I’m here to tell you that you can get it back with plenty of practice.
When I was reading so many books back then, I had a very particular set of skills that made me very dangerous to my library patronage since I theoretically could have read every book in the library that I wanted to within a year. I didn’t even realize that I had these skills because they were naturally honed through many years of active reading.
One skill that I want to single out is skimming. Some authors can drone on and on about something and often repeat themselves unnecessarily. I’m not calling out anyone in particular here, Robert Jordan fans, so don’t come at me. This isn’t actually a huge problem with the writing, though it can be a bit irritating when it’s excessively done. Well, guess what? You, as the reader, have the power to skim through the information that you feel is unnecessary. You don’t have to actively read every single word in a particular book. No one should force you to do that. You can glance through certain sentences, paragraphs, or even pages if you feel you can get a good understanding of what’s happening without reading each and every word.
Now, I will say that I don’t agree with the idea that you can just flip through chunks of pages and be fine. Maybe that’s true for some books, but in my opinion, you should at least see every word in a book. You don’t have the read it, but the words should enter your vision while you’re skimming, or you could potentially miss something that does end up being new, important information. So when you’re skimming parts of a book that you feel are unnecessary, make sure your eyes have a chance to rest on the pages and scan for the information you need. Don’t just grab six pages and turn them all at once with confidence.
Maybe that’s less true for non-fiction works, but at least for fiction, I make sure I see every page.
Schedule Reading Time
What has really helped me keep a consistent reading rate is scheduling my reading. I have four hours a day, five hours a week, that I have deliberately set aside for reading. I can read outside of those times, but I at least need to read during those time periods. Each day’s four-hour reading block is split into two parts, broken up with some personal project work like filming or video editing.
Having my reading time scheduled means that even on days when I’m extra busy, I know I’m going to make at least four hours of progress on whatever I’m reading, five times a week. More often, though, I end up reading beyond those four hours and thus get well over twenty hours of reading time each week, but twenty hours at a minimum. This can be a tough schedule to stick to sometimes, but the longer I stick with it, the easier it gets. I’m sure that if I can keep up with this schedule through to the end of the year, I’ll finally be close to the reading pace that I had when I was a kid.
Additionally, if you make a schedule for yourself, you’ll become a little more aware of how you waste time. I have my entire day scheduled into large blocks. When I allow things like phone addiction to bleed into reading time (or project time), I’m hyper-aware of that and am more willing to make the corrections needed to prevent myself from wasting so much time. I have blocks of time that I’ve set aside for myself to do things like watch YouTube videos, scroll through social media, and play games. I actually have too much time set aside for those so that I can (hopefully) allow my reading time to take over my free time, rather than the other way around.
Move Around!
I think that almost everyone who is reading this is going to have the same problem I do when it comes to long reading sessions: attention span. You just can’t stay focused on the book for a long period of time. My first tip of varying your mediums can help with this, but I find that moving around can also help! I move from my bed to my reading chair to my office chair to my chair bowl any time I find that I’m getting more and more distracted. If it were easier for me to do, I’d probably leave the house often to read at coffee shops or parks. Vary your location and you’ll likely find it a little easier to read for longer periods of time.
Change Up Books and Genres!
Somewhat in the same vein as many of my prior suggestions, you can keep your attention span going by changing up what book and genre you’re reading. If you find yourself bored with a particular book, switch to a different one! If you’re getting tired of fantasy, guess what? There are other genres! Shocker, I know. I myself get pretty tired of reading the same genre over and over again, so I like to change it up often. I’ll read a science fiction story, then some sort of absurdist work, and then a grimdark fantasy, and then something contemporary… I change it up! Changing up the genre really helps me stay out of a rut and keeps things fresh.
In a similar sense, you shouldn’t feel obligated to finish a book that you don’t like. I usually wait until I’m about a quarter of the way through a book before I decide if it’s something I just can’t carry on with, but some people don’t even read that much. And guess what? That’s perfectly fine. Booktube even has a term for it: DNF. And it’s perfectly acceptable to not finish a book. You don’t have to force yourself to get to the end if you aren’t enjoying it and don’t see it getting better!
It has been a while since I’ve had a book that I was hating so much that I just couldn’t bring myself to finish it, but there have been some books that came pretty close for me. I won’t say what they were since it might offend some people, but I definitely came pretty close to putting down some books I’ve read in the past six months or so. And if I had, it would have been fine. Some of them… maybe I should have put them down.
Gamify It
Okay, this might be something that’s pretty niche. I don’t know that it’ll work for everyone, but I find that it works for me. This is something I learned from the courses that I took on game development. Reward systems are powerful, and it doesn’t take a lot to trick our brains into feeling rewarded. The easiest and most effective way that I’ve found to encourage myself to read is listing my reads on a site like GoodReads (I know, I know, GoodReads has a lot of problems and the website is obnoxiously weird and outdated, but it’s a good example of a site that allows you to do this). I update my progress on a book once every couple of days and, when I finish a book, I mark it as read on GoodReads. That’s it! That’s all I’ve got to do to gamify reading, which adds a reward beyond the built-in reward of experiencing a story. This really encourages me to read consistently because… well, I don’t want to let my six friends on GoodReads down by not updating my reading progress.
Conclusion
Those are my tips for reading more and reading faster! I hope that at least something in this list was helpful for you. If you did find anything in this list helpful, awesome! If you didn’t but have a tip that might help, feel free to let me know! Maybe it’ll improve my own reading rate and stamina! My goal is to get to 200,000 words a week by the end of the year, but that’s a goal that I’ve chosen specifically because it feels nigh on impossible between my full-time job and personal projects. I might make it, though. If you wanna see if I do, the best way to do so is to subscribe to my YouTube channel! You can also follow me on social media; I’m @TLBainter on most platforms and I’ll have links for everything down below.
Thanks for checking out this post and until next time… bye!