Finding the Right Books to Read
Learning October 22nd, 2007
I have quite a few great books I’ve reviewed here and its not because I simply get lucky and mostly find 4 or 5 star books. I do some research before I get a book. There is always other people who have already read any book so you might as well use their ratings and comments to determine if you really want to take the time to read it. There is no reason to read a book at random and have no idea if it will be worthwhile or not.
So, I recommend that you never start at the library or bookstore to find a book. Look up the books you want and keep a list before you ever go to the library or bookstore. Its far easier to lookup books online to review ratings and other reader’s comments beforehand that in the store. Unless you read hundreds of books a year and have time to read books you DON’T like in order to find the ones you love, you need a good method to find the books to read. There are thousands of books available and unfortunately a lot of bad books to avoid. If you strictly limit your books to ones that have maximum ratings or are recommended to you personally then you will likely enjoy reading more. I believe this is why a lot of people simply don’t read and instead get frustrated that the books they do read are not worth the time.
There are so many great book resource sites out there including the big stores like Amazon, Chapters and B&N, as well as book clubs and review sites like Google Books and Library Thing. These sites offer excellent search tools to find what you are looking for, related books and of course, ratings and reviews about nearly any book written. If you simply only read books with great ratings and reviews, you will find you get a lot more knowledge and enjoyment out of your time spent. I know that personally all the top rated books on my list were also highly recommended and only a few are ones that are highly recommended but I didn’t really enjoy. So, I’ll continue to review books I read as I hope they are useful to some of my readers, as I know most of the books on my list are there only because I’ve read other’s reviews of them as well and its a pleasure to give that similar knowledge back!
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Mike King
October 22nd, 2007 at 11:19 AM
Great blog Mike – slightly ironic the ID necessary to comment on it though!
After reading a few posts – I have some questions for you:
1. Can you teach me how to read faster? I’d search the internet and find some books about it – but that would take me too long. Seriously – give me the cole notes – actually don’t just tell me 🙂
2. How about I give you a couple books that I’ve know are great but I haven’t taken the time to read – then you can give me the summary and help me decide if I should invest the time! Let’s start with Freakonomics
3. How can get by on less sleep? The 3 hours I got last night are already used up!
let’s go for lunch sometime…
October 22nd, 2007 at 6:37 PM
Oh hey Steve. Hghg.mmmm. I mean journeyon777. I actually had never looked at the comments when not logged in so didn’t realize that was required. I’ve turned that off, not a friendly way to get comments. As for a brief reply, I’d love to elaborate sometime…
1. Reading. I found most of the stuff online about learning to read better and a couple books from the library. I can’t list any one great book as they all seem to offer ideas. I also bought a computer program to test and practice with, and I really liked it. I increased my reading speed from a pathetic 175wpm to about 500-600 so now I actually enjoy reading! How to increase your speed depends on how slow you are so you need to measure that first. I was really bad so had to eliminate subvocalization first (this is saying the words with the voicebox active). Then it is some simple practice with eye patterns and learning to read blocks of words, not individual words. And there are many techniques to help do that and they really do work!
2. I really kickstarted my reading with a huge list of recommended business books that sparked my interest and there are so many great books out there its just not worth the time to read them unless you know they are great from other’s reviews who you have similar likes/dislikes with. As for Freakonomics, I didn’t really post much of a review, so I’ve updated that post with a bit more info. The book I would recommend most is Marshall Goldsmith’s What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There. Its superb and challenges anyone to examine how you interact with others in life and business to make a bigger difference in everything you do.
3. Sleep is only improved by learning more about it and by getting repetitive and consistent with sleep patterns to ‘train’ the body to sleep better. Most people don’t know anything about sleep but you do it so much!! Its crazy! The key is getting sleep patterns and the right state of mind before going to sleep so that you fall asleep more easily and get to that important healing delta wave sleep pattern quickly. Both your mind and body can ‘learn’ to utilize sleep more effectively so after a lot of training, you can actually require less and less sleep over time.