How Do You Read So Fast? ...and Other Commonly Asked Questions

hey what's up bookworms mike here i got a couple of things i want to talk about with you today this is really just almost like a commonly asked questions video these are the questions that i get asked numerous times during the week over the course of any of my videos no matter what they're about i get asked these 10 questions over and over again so i kind of want to take a minute to address some of those because i think it'll be fun let's get to it [Music] all right so we're just going to jump right into them but the number one question that i get asked on this channel is how do you read so fast i guys there's no secret to this i've actually had people ask me can you teach me can you tell me what your secret is there's no secret i've just read constantly for like 35 years the only thing's going to teach you to read faster is to read more and i did that for a long long time and so it's never really been a problem there's no secret there uh as far as how much i'll be able to consume it's just it's it's simple when you get this age you start to abandon the social life you stop going to bars and things like that i stopped watching as much tv and movies my kids are the age where they're old enough to leave you alone but they're not old enough where you can leave them at home alone yet so i started reading even more than i usually did and that's when i started this channel so really there's no secret to it uh practice makes perfect but i know some people it just you never get faster reading and i don't think that there's really a race involved with it you shouldn't you shouldn't feel like it's a race to read where's the fire you know uh to me it's just uh i read fast and that's one of the reasons why i can't really listen to audio books because one they're too slow and two i don't have reading add but i do have listening 80d and that brings me to question number two and it is uh do you think that audiobooks count as reading i get people all the time if they don't tell me to listen to audiobooks after i tell them that i really can't and my thing with that is just it's just a it's just i don't retain anything when i just listen to it it comes from years of blocking out your children and you can't turn that off after a while i think i don't know because i feel like a lot of epic fantasy you get a lot of names a lot of locations a lot of regions a lot of nicknames a lot of you know different languages and i feel like you need to i need to see those i need to see those things to draw that correlation whereas when i'm just listening to it i'll be like what did he say i don't know at one ear out the other so that's why i don't listen to audio as far as do they count i think so i think any way that you can consume a story i'm reading harry potter to my kid right now do i think that counts as him not reading it i mean he's listening to it i think he's consuming the stories for sure it counts i don't who cares if it counts if you're getting the story i don't think it really matters i i do wish that i could do the audiobook the things that people do because i think about all the times during the day if i you know take a walk or i'm doing the dishes or i'm doing any kind of mundane chores they don't require a lot of brain power it'd be really cordless that me i still listen to music when i do these things so i'm fine i'm not looking for a void to fill there but yes audiobooks very much account i mean think of someone who obviously is you know vision impaired or just you know they have add to where they can't read and there's someone like me that's the opposite where they can listen but they can't read very well when it comes to retaining that information so sure it counts i think it's really stupid to say it don't count but to me as long as you're consuming the story it doesn't matter right i mean look at what joe abercrombie said uh he said with his uh with the last book that came out a little hatred that there was more audiobook sales of it than physical book sales that shows that it's a very very big part of the reading community so yes it absolutely counts the only time i get annoyed at uh at audiobook readers is when they tell me i need to hurry up and read the book faster because they're already done because they listened to it while they were at work for nine hours that day obviously those don't those don't those there's no one by one comparison there but yes it automatically does absolutely count as as reading and uh i don't see any reason why you would say it's not next up [Music] where do you get your coffee mugs uh this one is uh has a different layer of answers i think i've got a lot of them off amazon i've gotten some just you know i'm at a rent fair or something like that and i see one that i like and i'll pick it up got a couple off of ebay uh some people there's gifts or i was traveling or whatever but there is a special little one that i want to kind of mention here to me as a stephen king fan i think the stunning shock of lack of stephen king merchandise out there is actually kind of amazing especially if you think about how the guy just kind of had like a third renaissance here this late in his career due to the success of the box office success of it so this guy everything that he's written is either being remade or it's being optioned if it hasn't already been or like i said it's being remade so i was stunned that i was not able to find a bunch of merch so i went out looking for a stephen king mug a coffee mug because if you don't know i stopped drinking beer about six months ago and it was around the time my wife had said no new beer glasses because if you ain't drinking beer anymore what's the point of having a beer glass that's okay so i counted with coffee mugs so i started out just looking for this and i found this lady called lee who runs a site called creative crafts and are created creatively crafts and so i saw this and then i just kind of fell down the rabbit hole there and found a couple others of hers i love the red rising saga and she did this one gory damn good coffee and of course uh the witcher toss a coin to your witcher and a good old mine from the tv show uh so she does that she has bookmarks pendants coffee mugs and things like that i'll put the link down below for you it's a really great site she does incredible work uh in the future i'm gonna have her do one of these uh uh jro tolkien ones for me right there and then you know i got something like this which i got from the dusty wheel the the tv sorry the tv show the youtube show uh so good guys check them out but yeah really just i see a coffee mug i like i want to get it but yeah now that i've found a site that does like book themed ones uh yeah i think that'll probably be expanding here in the near future if you've ever visited one of my live streams i think a question i get about every four minutes is you love stephen king so you can tell me where i should start i've even made a video on this channel about where you should start with stephen king but still the question i get the most especially if i do a new stephen king video where should i start where should i start uh it kind of feels like a program response to me at this point but i just keep telling people lately different seasons is the place to start because not only is it for uh novellas so it won't be anything that requires a a heavy commitment uh two of them are very very familiar in our pop culture and that is of course the body which you might know as uh stand by me the movie and shawshank redemption so i think this is a good place for people to start with them because it's not a heavy commitment they're easy to read they're there's not real scared they're not real scary or anything like that but then i tell people if you're scared you know what go for pet cemetery you want to be scared go for pet cemetery cemetery or salem's lot uh if you want like the coming of age story i would definitely say the body in different seasons or if you want the coming-of-age story with the scares it is by far the uh the number one answer if a length doesn't bother you uh i would say the stand is very very good same with 11 22 63 so there are it really just depends on what you're looking for is always the answer i've been giving lately if you want to be scared there's something for that if you want a detective mystery series there's the mr mercedes stuff it's there's there's he's not just like everybody assumes that he is like the reputation that he has which is deserved you know he made his name off of so i get why people always assume everything he does is horror but it's not so really it just depends what you're in the mood for if you want to be scared like i said go that way if you want drama go this way if you want coming of age yourself go this way but again different seasons will be the best stepping ground for you i did a video recently on the dark tower a lot of people since there's a lot of fantasy viewers on this channel wanna know if uh dark tower is a good place to start i i said that i wouldn't recommend it because there's a lot of references that you might not understand if you haven't read any other stephen king but you know a lot of comments i got in there was you know hey if you reach if you read darktar first then you get those references when you read those other stephen king books i guess that's fair i guess that's fair so really uh your mileage is going to vary on that one so that's where i would probably start there different seasons i can't say enough about it the bigger the channel gets the more i get a question of what do you think about this big booktube channel on this big booktube channel i was like i don't really have anything to add to those guys i mean they're doing very well on their own they don't need my endorsement to keep going so what i've told people is i like to try to help some of these smaller channels that i feel like have good content and they're you know just getting started and they're still growing and i i'd like to either help them you know to because there's a lot of people out there that make really good content and they don't get a lot of views at first i mean like it took me three years before this channel took off so uh they don't they give up you know and i want to encourage them not to give up so i try to watch a lot of the uh the smaller channels or the you know the the the new people and so the night the follow-up question is always well who are they who do you recommend i got five of them here i want to talk about uh brian lee durfy that's a published author he wrote the five warrior angels series which i haven't read yet sorry brian he sent me the books and i haven't read them yet uh he has a really good i mean published author given his take big stephen king fan uh he's going through basically the whole multiverse before i am because he's uh i'm doing one a month that he's doing like you know he did like one every couple of days there for a while but he does a lot of energy high energy videos and he does like a lot of countdowns like 40 best science fiction books stuff like that but hearing these things from an author's perspective is really really cool i really appreciate that another one is raven bell books i discover her on the discord she uh just posts some of her videos on there i like what she does is she's doing wheel of time and she's going she's doing videos like by chapter sections you know i just did one for each book and she's going by chapter section i feel like that kind of helps eliminates all the uh the people that would jump on there be like hey but you forgot to talk about this this this this and this and i'll be like look this is like a these are big books so i miss some things so i really appreciate that she she does that and uh i think she has a very approachable channel as well knickknacks corner front of the channel this dude is a reading machine uh he's probably the only one who doesn't ask me how i read so fast because he reads faster he works in a bookstore i think he's told me before that basically his channel his paycheck at that bookstore is just basically direct credit to buy the books but uh uh he's well he's the one who's encouraged me to to keep going with witcher and finish witcher because he really liked that but i think you'll like his channel and also uh a newer channel he's about 2 000 subs so i don't know if i'm ready to say uh he's one of the lesser channels but uh it's karjarik i plan to start reading malazon sometime next next year and i think for newbies to malazon it's a really good channel because he has the you know basically like i do with the why you should read it why this is something that's going to relate to you non-spoiler kind of encouragement to help you get going because apparently it's a big heavy read and uh but you know then as you you start he's doing like kind of like my friend raven raven bell there did where they're just kind of going by chapter sections of each book spoilers basically it's something to help you know a support group to keep you going because a lot of people tap out on malazon really early and apparently the payoffs are really worth it so i i think that's a really good start and his his production quality is really good and uh he could tell he spends a lot of time on his videos researching and stuff before he presses record and he doesn't ramble like me so that helps right how many rock teas do you own you know i not someone who really goes out and buys a bunch of rock and roll t-shirts or comic book t-shirts or star wars t-shirts or whatever i can't remember the last time i actually bought a t-shirt to be honest with you thing was in september 2018 my wife and i decided we were going to try keto if you don't know what keto is that is a eating plan and it worked for us like crazy and combined we lost like 160 pounds together and i all of a sudden found this back wardrobe that i had from when i was a teenager where i was buying a new rock sheet shirt every week you know so it might look like i have like this infinite supply of rock and roll t-shirts uh they're just from when i was a teenager so now i can fit them again so it's it's like finding a new casual wardrobe that you didn't even know that you had i do still buy chuck taylor's though so i guess that counts oh this is a good one why don't you like the why a genre now what i've said is look i don't care if you like it i think it's awesome that people are reading of all ages i don't care if you're reading the reader's digest while you sit on the toilet as long as people read because less and less people especially in the states are reading less than ever before so i am always going to encourage reading and if y a is your jam awesome i'm happy for you i think it's excellent it's just not for me and here's the thing there is some y a that i like people argue that the star wars eu novels were ea people argued that brandon sanderson is why a so i'm not saying i'm completely averse to it what i'm saying is i don't like certain y a tropes like the love triangle like the uh the the insta love like the overpowered characters and the wish fulfillment that makes no sense whatsoever and most times the agenda that is shoved into a lot of ya books especially nowadays it's not what i when i read fantasy man i want that escape world i don't want something so unrealistic it just takes me out of it so uh that's been my problem with why a over the years and i know that you know one of my earlier videos on this channel was me talking about the inheritance cycle by christopher paolini and uh and you know i love uh harry potter so i mean i i guess you you would say that i don't hate the y a genre it's just i hate specific tropes of the y a genre and i think that's true with any genre you know i mean fantasy has those tropes you can't stand sci-fi has it i mean it's not something that's just exclusive to why it's just it's certain writing mechanics that i don't like and i feel like y a does them way more frequently than that and also i'm just i'm over sexy vampires just i'm just not into it anymore sorry guys i got out of that i got over that during the anne rice years oh i get asked this one er at least once a video and it is do you ever plan to write your own book i think i might be the only youtuber out there or booktuber rather who has no interest in writing their own book because the reason that i read as much as i do i could not tell a story to save one of my children's life i have no storytelling ability whatsoever if i tried to write a book although it would be a straight plagiarism of dune and star wars and something else i'd throw in there or some fantasy elements i would throw in there to try to make my own story and a lot of people say that's all anybody does yeah well i just i don't want to do that because uh the last thing i want to be called is an unoriginal hack you know so i know i'm definitely i'm not ever going to write my own book unless it's uh my memoirs which i think would be interesting to no one at all so yeah no i will not be writing my own book this is a good one if i had a channel about something other than books what would it be about uh it would be what this channel was before it switched to a booktube channel i ran a podcast for three years called geek media core where we just talked about nerd culture and things that were popular now and then and things that we think are popular maybe in the future comic books movies tv video games cartoons you name it that's just that's all we talked about uh so it would be just doing that because honestly guys running a podcast much easier than running a youtube channel really much less post-production but uh i think that's what helped me not be afraid to talk in front of the camera like some people when they first get started you can tell that they're stuttering a lot they're having a lot a lot of problems with their speech and they're nervous and stuff like that whereas i didn't have that because i podcasted for like almost a decade before i did this and i think that helped me fill out the the blank spaces so yeah if i had a channel other than that it would just be straight nerdy stuff just straight nerdy stuff but uh you know i've come kind of jaded on a lot of that stuff but that's a conversation for another time but really that's why i do the weekly update videos is so i can talk about something other than books once in a while because i try to stay on brand my mission statement here is stay on brand which is talking about books but the weekly updates give me a little bit about hey i did this i watched this movie uh there's this news about this actor being cast in this here's my thoughts on it things like that that's fun that's fun i love talking about stuff like that i love geeking out with you guys about books but i love geeking out with you guys about anything it's it's just fun to talk about any form of entertainment really and the last one i've been getting this one since i started reading wheel of time and that was when are you going to read malazon well you're in luck january january of 2021 we're starting a group read on the channel and it's got a lot of people already on board in fact we're doing another group read as a leader to that we're doing the uh the great code series by sebastian de castel as kind of a uh practice round i usually speak so we so we don't have any you know glitches and we're trying to fix it on the run with that reread or that group read so i figured that was the best way to do it but the malizon question gets answered we're starting in january it is going to be a slower read because it is a group thing i don't want anyone feeling like they're left behind but again watch that video if you want explanation for why that group read is going to last two years so uh it's going to be very ambitious and very fun but i'm glad to finally be checking the malazon box off of the request list that that one and i think robin hobbs run with the elderlings which i'm also starting but i don't have a real hard schedule for that i'm just starting with farseer but uh those two i get asked about the most but i'm starting robin hobb at the same time next year in between those malazon books so that really is the most pretty much the most common questions that i get almost every video on the channel it's not a i'm tired of answering these questions kind of thing i'm just trying to kind of compile them in one section for people if they wanted to know what some of the questions i get asked a lot are you know not necessarily before they ask them because i know i'll still get them but i figured it'd be a good talking point because i know this week was really heavy with dresden file stuff and not everyone's into dresden files not everyone's into stephen king so i wanted to get something up to talk to you guys about besides those things but uh that's it guys uh we're gonna do the weekly update tomorrow and then next week you got a few surprises on the channel make sure you watch the weekly update on friday to know what those surprises are gonna be and i will talk to you there [Music] you

Channel: Mike's Book Reviews

Views: 28,399

Keywords: Review, Reaction, Reading, Books, recap, commonly asked questions, faq, frequently asked questions, read faster, audiobooks, audible, coffee, coffee mugs, stephen king, malazan, red rising, young aduly, ya fantasy, wheel of time, pierce brown, different seasons, shawshank, stand by me, the body, apt pupil, pet sematary, salem's lot, IT, pennywise, dark tower, witcher, sapkowski, booktuber, booktube, writing, author, publish, greatcoats, steven erikson, sebastien de castell, read along

Id: WF5yJz4lr-A

Length: 19min 14sec (1154 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 16 2020