the book good for you o not
Earlier this week I shared with The Writing Rundown crew a basic schedule I adhere to that allows me to get in 3-5 hours of reading daily.
While attending yoga classes, meeting friends for meals and hanging out, writing for 2-3 hours…and running Craft Your Content. Needless to say, I like to get a lot of time out of my days, and only occasionally “waste time” to go on day-long Netflix binges during which I never change out of my jammie pants. But oh, believe me, there are days I go on day-long Netflix binges!
The whole message came about after a friend said to me “Your GoodReads account is like my aspirational reading.”
For a minute, I was flattered, thinking my friend was gushing at my discerning tastes and brilliant literary selections.
“How do you read SO MUCH?!”
Ah, yes, the ever popular quantity over quality quandry. As recent American political discussions have shown, bragging about the size of something often evokes a more popular rapture and interest than the quality of what is at hand.
In The Writing Rundown (do you get this delivered direct to your inbox every other weekend? If not, get on that!), I discussed how I was able to make time for reading so much. Which I appreciate, because a world full of people who are making more time in their lives for reading and learning is a world I want to be a part of.
But there is a growing trend, based in part to the rise of self-publishing and Kindle and Audible, for people to consume mass quantities of books without ever really learning anything from them. Or applying the information they have learned.
get asked a lot what some of my favorite books are, which is just about the meanest question that someone can ask a person who reads a lot. It’s like when people ask me where my favorite place in the world is.
You know there are a lot of places in the world, right?
Some I love because they are tranquil and inspiring. Some I love because they are chaotic and exciting. Some I love because the people I love are there.
Same for the things I read.
But, to find a bit of a compromise, I drafted up a little list of some of the most important books I’ve read in my life (so far — I assume I have a fair bit more life to live here!)
I’ve broken the list out into five different sections, so you can compartmentalize your selection process as carefully as I’ve divided my interests. The sections are not even, and some are definitely “I read this book at precisely the right time for it to impact me the way that it did.”
Here’s hoping that you get some good mileage and suggestions out of the list. It may not have a lot of the most popular books of many other lists, though there are definitely some popular ones on there. I prefer to vary my reading to just about anything I can get my hands on, ra
