The Problems I faced with reading
How do you decide on what book to read?
Reading is a great hobby to have. I highly admire people who can easily get lost in a book. People who read for fun. I am sometimes jealous of not being able to do that.
I was never a reader. I used to read when I was 6-8 years old. Every time we used to get our yearly results at our school we used to get books as gifts. I used to read a lot then. Mostly storybooks. But I lost touch with reading books for fun as I got older. I don’t know when it happened or why it happened. The only explanation I try to give myself is that reading textbooks for school made me lose interest in reading books for fun. But maybe I am wrong.
Anyways that is all in the past. After graduating from university in 2019 I decided to get back to reading. But it wasn’t easy for me. I tried picking up books but I never managed to finish one. I quickly lost interest or felt like reading. I couldn’t point out what was wrong. Then around the end of 2019, I was given the book ‘The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck’ by my girlfriend. She read that book a few years back and had it with her. I was trying really hard to get into reading and once I picked up that book something clicked.
I finally felt what most avid readers talk about. I was lost in this book. I finally found a book that I could relate to. It was the book that I needed at that stage of my life. I was very lucky that the stars aligned when I started that book. That one book lead me to read more than 50 books in 2020. Most of it was in the self-help genre because I was having a lot of fun reading books in that genre.
Ever since that one book, my reading has developed a lot. I understood a lot about my reading habit and also understood what problems I was having in 2019. I found 3 key problems:
1. I was trying to read for the sake of reading. I was trying to read maybe to show people I was a reader. I was interested more in the idea of being a reader instead of actually wanting to read. This I believe was a major issue for me not being able to read.
2. I wasn’t reading books in different genres. I tried to read books that friends close to me recommended. Those were books from genres that they liked. Not being able to like them wasn’t my fault. I was just not interested in that genre. I should have experimented with different genres and also should have stopped reading whenever I didn’t like a book. You don’t have to complete every book you pick up.
3. I should have tried reading both physically and digitally. I started reading paperback books. But it wasn’t for me. I ended up reading PDFs mostly in 2020. Slowly I transitioned to paper books. But at the beginning, I should have tried both.
That does it for today. It’s midnight now. That’s 6 days of blogging and I don’t think any of the blogs have made sense so far. They have been really bad but at least that’s a start. If they are bad do let me know. You can reach me on my Instagram @rash__eeq or just comment here.