This is going to sound crazy, but it’s true. According to Psychology Today, 42% of college-educated Americans will never read another book for the rest of their lives after graduation.
If it's hard for you to wrap your mind around this, you're not alone. It horrifies me on so many levels.
I can't even imagine life without books.
There's nothing quite like the smell of a bookstore. Whenever I walk into a Barnes and Noble, I take a deep breath and smile. Libraries, too. It's that strange and wonderful mishmash of people, paper, binding and glue. There is so much potential in that smell.
Books have so much to offer us, if we only would reach out and take it.
The Benefits: Fiction versus Non-fiction and the Research:
I personally love to read both fiction and non-fiction, often at the same time, and for different reasons.
I primarily read fiction for entertainment and escape.
For the last 6 years, I've lived with a chronic illness called Meniere's disease. It's not fatal, but there's also no cure, and it can make my life difficult at times.
A good book takes me away from it all. One day I get to immerse myself in a beautiful alien world, and the next, I am seeing through the eyes of a missionary in the Amazon. No movie can hold a candle to the power of the imagination.
I read non-fiction to learn and grow. A great non-fiction book can download a lifetime of ideas and experience directly into your brain. Think about it: someone took the time to collect ideas, research, and explore, and distill the concepts down into a form that you can absorb. It’s such a powerful tool.
And there are other less tangible benefits of reading, too. The mental and intellectually stimulating nature of reading has been shown to help keep your mind sharp and possibly even prevent Alzheimer’s disease.
Research has also discovered that reading fiction, and narrative non-fiction, can improve brain connectivity and improve empathy as well. In a 2013 study at Emory University, researchers found that reading creates a lasting increase in brain connectivity. In an interview with The Atlantic, Gregory Berns, the lead author of the study explains:
“The neural changes that we found associated with physical sensation and movement systems suggest that reading a novel can transport you into the body of the protagonist...We already knew that good stories can put you in someone else’s shoes in a figurative sense. Now we’re seeing that something may also be happening biologically.”
How to Develop a Consistent Reading Habit:
If you want to start reading more, and reading more consistently, here are several effective strategies that I’ve discovered over the years to create a strong reading habit that sticks:
1)Listen to an audio book instead:
Not everyone enjoys reading, but that's okay! You can listen to audiobooks instead. And it's not "cheating." In an article by University of Virginia psychologist Daniel Willingham, he explains that our brains perceive regular books and audiobooks in more or less the same way:
"For most books, for most purposes, listening and reading are more or less the same thing."
If you want to give audiobooks a try, you can borrow audio books from the library with Overdrive. Or you can use Audible by Amazon, which allows you to stream and download audio books on demand.
2) Use Goodreads to keep track of your reading:
Goodreads is a social network for readers. It offers excellent book recommendations based on what you have already read and what you are interested in, and allows you to see what your friends are reading. But best of all, Goodreads makes it incredibly simple to keep track of the books you've read as well as the books you want to read.
Additionally, the reading challenge feature allows you to set a reading goal for the year and helps to keep you on track to hit your goal.
3) Try to read at the same time every day:
If you want to read consistently, you have to try to incorporate reading into your daily routine. But don’t try to read for hours and hours, every day, right off the bat. Aim for consistency. Start at the same time and read for a little while every day.
4) Take notes and highlight as you read:
When you read nonfiction, you can get a lot more out of the book if you take notes and make highlights as you read. Once you finish the book, review your notes, and transcribe them somewhere that you can review back easily. I use Evernote for this purpose, and if you read ebooks, this process is incredibly simple.
For example, with the Amazon Kindle app all your notes and highlights can be backed up easily. Once you've finished your book, simply log on to the Amazon Kindle App Website and click "Your Highlights" at the top. You can then pull up all your notes and highlights for all of your books and easily copy and paste them into long term storage.
5) Use idea lists to help remember what you've learned
I picked up this trick from the best-selling author of "Choose Yourself", James Altucher. After you read a book, create a list of 10 things (from memory) that you learned from the book. It will help you remember what you read so you can start applying it to your life.
Books, Books, and More Books – Resources for Reading!
To help get you started on your new reading habit, here are few resources and several of my favorite books for you to explore:
Kindle Unlimited: For $10 a month you can read an unlimited number of Amazon Kindle Books!
Scientific Speed Reading: People have mixed opinions on speed reading, and your symptoms may make this difficult, but last year I discovered this incredible technique by Author Tim Ferriss and was able to nearly double my reading speed. It felt like I had discovered a hidden super power and it only took about 20 minutes to learn.
A few of my favorite books:
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris: A hilarious collection of short stories and essays by New York Times best-selling author David Sedaris. Possibly the funniest book I have ever read.
Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson: The incredible and mind bending story of 3 deep sea divers who discover a sunken German U-Boat 50 miles off the coast of New Jersey that’s not supposed to exist.
The Martian by Andy Weir: One of the best Sci-Fi books I’ve read all year. This book tells the story of astronaut Mark Watney who gets stranded on Mars during a sand storm. A movie based on this book is coming out soon with Matt Daemon as the lead.
At Play in the Fields of the Lord by Peter Matthiessen: I don’t read a lot of literary fiction but this was one of the best books I’ve ever read. It follows 2 characters, one a mercenary, and the other a Christian missionary, as they interact with undiscovered tribes in the Amazon.
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl: Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist who survived the Nazi concentration camps and went on to detail his experience and ideas on the meaning of life. A powerful and inspirational book like no other