Skip to main content

How To Read Books

J Oswald Sanders in his book 'Spiritual Leadership' gives five rules that he found made reading more meaningful and of more lasting benefit:
1. Read little that is to be immediately forgotten since that only helps to form the habit of forgetting. Exercise the same discrimination in choosing books as in choosing friends.

2. Read with a pencil and notebook in hand. Unless the memory is unusually vigorous and retentive, much reading will be a waste of time. Develop a system of note-taking, and it be astonishing to discover how great this practice aids the memory.

3. Have a "commonplace book", as it used to be a called, a book in which to put what is striking, interesting, suggestive and worthy of permanent record. One's own comments and criticism can be added. In this way an irreplaceable accumulation of material be preserved and index for use.  

4. Verify as far as possible historical, scientific and other data, and let no word slip past until its meaning is understood. 

5. Let reading be varied, because the mind so easily runs into ruts. Variety is as restful to the mind as to the body.

6. Reading should be correlated where possible - history with poetry. biography with historical novels e.g. when reading the history of the American civil war, read the biographies of Lincoln and Grant and poems written by Walt Whitman on Abraham Lincoln.
I think point 2 probably now in our digital simply means ensure you make good notes on your Kindle as you go along. And probably then export them to some electronic sharing file where your notes are properly index for reference. Similarly point 3 probably can be a form of blog, as I have here where I permanently store things I come along. 

Points 1& 4, if widely applied would help us ensure that we are thoughtful readers not just of book but what also comes through our social media feeds. There is really not much point in taking in information unless we have time to verify the information that comes away. The wisdom here is to limit what what we take in. 

Point 5 is excellent. Variety in our reading is important. This means that it is great for us to read things that we actually enjoy and are of good quality. One of the reasons we struggle to read books is that we do not think much about the quality of those books and do not vary what we read. One way to maintain variety is perhaps to come up with categories of books we like and seek to rotate among those accordingly (e.g. history, business, fiction, etc)

The only point I am sceptical about is point 6. Some people say we should read unrelated content because it pushes the brain harder to help us make connections between what we are reading. Sanders suggests we should read related stuff. I am not sure who is correct here. I will certainly give Sanders suggestion a go and see how I find the experience.
 
Copyright © Chola Mukanga 2020
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I Am Mother

I think it is true to say that the Netflix film I Am Mother is one the most disturbing movies I have watched for a long time. The film is set in a near future. Human life has been wiped out. An artificial intelligence (AI) called Mother is living inside a bunker where thousands of embroyos are stored. It selects an embryo and initiates a program to grow a baby within 24 hours. The AI then goes on to raise the child as its mother over the next few years.  After 16 years, the girl, who now goes by the name of Daughter (Clara Rugaard) is a teenager. She has never been outside because Mother has told her that the air is toxic. Her time is spend being home schooled in science and ethics so that she can become a perfect human being. The bond between Daughter and Mother is unusually strong. To our surprise there does not appear to be any mental or pyschological trauma of having a machine as her mother.  The strength of the bond between man and machine is tested when a nameless Woma...
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →

Pornography as Occultism

There is a kind of helplessness that a man engaged in pornography exhibits. He often speaks of it in terms of a “struggle” or an “addiction.” Now both of those terms are accurate, I believe, but they distance a person from his sin in a soul-decaying manner. Pornography is not just an addiction; it is occultism. The man who sits upstairs viewing pornography while his wife chauffeurs the kids to soccer practice is not some unusual “pervert”; he is (like his forefather Adam) seeking the mystery of the universe apart from Christ. That’s the reason the one picture, stored in his memory, of that naked woman will never be enough for him. He will never be able to be satisfied because he will never be able to get an image naked enough. I say pornography is occultism because I believe the draw toward it is more than biological (though that is strong). The satanic powers understand that “the sexually immoral person sins against his own body” (1 Cor. 6:18). They understand that the pornographic ...
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →

I am what I am by Gloria Gaynor

Beverly Knight closed the opening ceremony of the Paralympics with what has been dubbed the signature tune of the Paralympics. I had no idea Ms Knight is still in the singing business. And clearly going by the raving reviews she will continue to be around. One media source says her performance was so electric that "there wasn’t a dry eye to be seen as she sang the lyrics to the song and people even watching at home felt the passion in her words" . The song was Gloria Gaynor's I am what I am . Clearly not written by Gloria Gaynor but certainly musically owned and popularized by her. It opens triumphantly: I am what I am / I am my own special creation / So come take a look / Give me the hook or the ovation / It's my world that I want to have a little pride in / My world and it's not a place I have to hide in / Life's not worth a damn till you can say I am what I am The words “I am what I am” echo over ten times in the song. A bold declaration that she ...
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →