How to Motivate Yourself to Read (20 Tips & Mindsets)

how do you read great literature how do you read difficult literature how do you read more of it and get more out of it well today i'm going to share with you some tips strategies and mindsets to do exactly that i'm going to share with you how i read and some of these tips might be unconventional some of them might be intuitive but i'm sure you will find something helpful to take into your deep reading today okay let's start by talking about difficult literature a mindset that i would like to give you that i find personally very liberating when it comes to breaching difficult literature is this idea that confusion is only prologue to understanding not understanding is preface to insight now what does this mean firstly if you think of a really difficult book you probably think of james joyce you probably think of ulysses or finnegan's wake you might think of thomas pynchon yeah gravity's rainbow it's interesting that instinctively when we talk about dense and seemingly impenetrable or indecipherable literature we think of the 20th century we think of modernism and we think of post-modernism and it's interesting why we immediately think of those works and it's typically because these works are incredibly elusive and layered if you go back a little further a few hundred years if you go back to shakespeare if you go to the victorian novels if you go to the romantic poets yes there is difficulty there but they're not nearly as elusive and deliberately confusing as the modern writers now the difficulty with shakespeare for example is linguistic first and foremost he was not trying to confuse his audiences now he did enjoy a good pun we all know that he enjoyed word play and there are layers of meaning in his works so you can watch a shakespeare play time and again and you'll always get something new out of it but he's not deliberately trying to be difficult and joyce is now a lot of readers will mistake that deliberate difficulty for contempt and joyce had anything but contempt for his reader he loved his readership but he acknowledged that the circle of readers who would get what he was doing was necessarily going to be rather small but these works they have a reputation not only for difficulty but for greatness for artistic accomplishment and we want to see what these works are all about we want to see if we can get something out of them but there's a wall there's an obstacle there's a barrier now the barrier for again we use the example of shakespeare the barrier when it comes to shakespeare is language but if you get used to the language if you acclimatize to the elizabethan and jacobean style you can get shakespeare very easily joyce on the other hand takes a little bit more work and because it might take longer to wrangle with a writer like joyce or a writer like pinchen readers can very frequently become frustrated they may even fling their book across the room but i would implore those readers because i have been that reader i have flung many a book across a room in my time many a modern book i must say i would encourage those readers to go and pick up that book dust it off and persevere with this mindset confusion is merely preface to understanding we are not supposed to get everything immediately and that goes for everything that goes for everything in our lives not just literature if we understood everything immediately divine inspiration comes down from the skies and hits us and we have perfect clarity all of the time then there would be no sense of growth no sense of progress because difficulty means growth any time you have gone through a hardship anytime you have weathered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune anytime you have suffered or experienced pain there is typically growth at the end of that hardship at the end of that painful journey and the same goes for literature too if you're struggling then you're growing and giving into frustration is a perfect way to cheat oneself out of growth and embracing difficulty is the first step to overcoming it so if you tell yourself hey i don't get it right now but i'm going to continue and at some point i will get it then you have a wide and exciting expanse of literature before you to enjoy i've been asked whether there's any point in teaching school kids shakespeare it's difficult right at the age of 14 15 you're not going to understand macbeth or romeo and juliet or hamlet or king lear how can you it's not just an intellectual thing but you don't have the lived experience yes you're not as well read at that age but it's the lived experience that means those texts are cut off from you if you're lucky you'll be able to glean maybe a fraction of the potential understanding from those works but i believe strongly that we should continue teaching shakespeare we should continue teaching difficult works in school because that period of not understanding having that memory of not understanding is instrumental to having an aha moment 10 years down the line it's a really exciting way to mark your own growth your own intellectual growth spiritual growth emotional growth and one way to mark your growth is by noting that something that you once struggled with you now no longer struggle with it's very similar to following a well-tuned athletics program being able to finally lift the weight or do the movement or run the distance that you once could not so for me when it comes to deep reading difficult literature that's one of the most important mindsets and it's something that helps me forge forward it helps me to keep going and now i'm at a position in my life where i really relish difficulty when i encounter something that i don't immediately get i love it i love unraveling it i love sitting with it and i love that crystallizing moment that does eventually come okay my next tip is about the books that you bring to your bedside your bedside table and using your bedside table as an exercise in hardcore curation screening and selection an exercise in putting thought into what you're reading allow me to explain recently a book club member noted that she has upstairs books and downstairs books upstairs books are those books that are well firstly they're fictional and they also have a very pleasant world that you just want to live in that you can slip into very easily and it's something soothing and relaxing it's a little bit of escapism to enjoy before bed it helps you wind down at the end of the day a downstairs book on the other hand is a lot more challenging these are the books that you won't bring to your bedside table because they'll keep you up or they'll wind you up before bed and i thought this was a really nice way of phrasing it upstairs books versus downstairs books and i noted that this was something that i do instinctively myself so what's a good example of an upstairs book and what is not a good example let's take two examples from the hardcore literature book club a book that i personally love but i would never have it on my bedside i wouldn't read it right before bed is blood meridian by cormac mccarthy now a book that i adore that has a world that i could just live in forever is george eliot's middle march that is a perfect upstairs book george eliot thomas hardy jane austen these are all fantastic choices for upstairs books i really like that phrase differentiating between the books you have on your bedside table and the books you have lying around the house the books you have on your shelves it's an acknowledgment that our reading can and should be timed and that we should read different things at different times we should read different books at different paces and that's okay i like to put a constraint on the books i have on my bedside table if i have too many then it will topple over anyway but i like to keep it at three maximum this is just a small way of forcing yourself to be selective screening deliberating choosing not being frivolous with your book choices and of course the macro is in the micro the miniature is important because how you do anything as is often said is how you do everything and of course if you don't already have bedside books then put some thought into it it's an easy win when it comes to clocking more pages because if it's within reach before you go to bed you'll probably read a page or two here and there at the very least i also like to have books lying around the place deliberately i deliberately choose which books i'm going to have in plain sight at the moment i have proust i have volumes of proust lying around and i inevitably pick up proust several times a day whilst i'm doing other things and so i'm always reading proof shakespeare is another one i have copies of shakespeare lying around everywhere and that's an easy way to get yourself reading more books just having them strategically placed around your house now the next tip i would like to offer you comes from julia cameron's the artist's way it's a manual for stoking creativity lots of writers swear by it and julia cameron has two fantastic ideas in this book and one of them that i would like to encourage you to embrace is known as the artist date the other practice in this book is known as morning pages it's where you wake up in the morning and the very first thing you do is you write three pages by hand stream of consciousness and just get the cobwebs out essentially the other key to stoking creativity and refilling the well is to regularly schedule dates with yourself that will inspire you they'll relax you they'll give you ideas for whatever you're working on i still like to do this by like to schedule artist dates that involve a trip to a second-hand bookstore specifically why secondhand bookstores there are so many great reasons to favor second-hand independent and vintage bookstores over the big commercial bookstores one of them is that you are instantly connecting with other readers if you go to a secondhand bookstore you're likely to find volumes that have the marginalia of previous readers in them now some people might not like this they might not like to discover that the book they've just picked up is covered in scribblings and scrollings but i love it recently i picked up a little haul of biographies i fell in love with a biographer who's little known today this biographer is called hesketh pearson and i picked up a biography of shakespeare dickens and oscar wilde now the oscar wilde biography was stuffed with goodies the previous owner of this biography was clearly a wild fan because the pages were stuffed with newspaper clippings really old newspaper clippings about the great irish writer's trial about his plays and his poetry about the man himself so whoever owned that book clearly loved the subject they clearly loved the book they loved learning about their favorite writer and they used it as a storehouse for all things wild and then they gave it away and now i have it and so it's a nice way of connecting with who that reader was before i don't know who they are i don't know anything about them all i know is that we share a love of wild and that's something that ended up stoking my love of wild even more seeing someone else geek out and enjoy the writer that i'm enjoying now that is really motivating to keep reading it makes you want to keep reading but i like finding marginalia i like finding what things previous readers have circled scribbled on underlined i love seeing notes there's a really interesting book called s that i enjoyed some years back which built upon this love of marginalia it was a story that essentially took place in the margins it was a library book or it was designed to look like a library book and there were two readers writing messages to each other back and forth in the margins stuffing clues to each other and that was a good that was good fun for anybody who likes marginalia i would highly recommend that book regularly scheduling visits to secondhand bookstores is also good for those of us who want to be patrons of the arts we can support the things we love on an individual level the small things add up and what the individual does makes a huge difference we want to keep these stores alive we want to keep these bastions of literature thriving one of my favorite second-hand bookstores i go in there regularly even if i'm not intending to buy a book i will visit and i'll almost buy a book for the sake of it to keep it going it's a family-run business i like the owner the bookstore is wonderful and i think it would be awful if in years to come we're all lamenting the downfall of these independent stores and then we think ah there was more we could have done on an individual level to keep that going another thing that i love about secondhand bookstores is it builds in regular excitement into your life yes you have to be a bit geeky to find it exciting but hey that's what i find exciting it's something to look forward to it's also a means of getting affordable book hauls because you can go into a bookstore still today with a tenner with 20 pounds in your pocket and you can leave with more than one book and one can't always say that for the big bookstores but you can walk in and you can find some tremendous deals and another thing that i love about regularly visiting secondhand bookstores is you're building serendipity into your reading and your life so often you'll go to a secondhand bookstore and you will leave with something that you didn't even have any idea about going into the store the secondhand bookstore is where books leap out at you they leap off the shelf at you and you find your next favorite writer what i'm imploring you to do essentially is schedule regular downtime cal newport in deep work wonderful book tells us that downtime aids insight and it's so true if you're feeling burnt out the best thing you can do for your productivity is take a day off go unwind go play a little go relax and you'll find that you return to your work you've returned to your studies with more energy and more passion sometimes when we've got a ton to do the best thing we can do is take a little bit of time out for ourselves very often we don't do it though if you're type a if you're a little bit of a workaholic like myself you might need to force yourself to do that and schedule in time for yourself dates with yourself like you would with someone else now those trips to the secondhand bookstore will help with my next tip to improve your reading and that is to gift books to others now you might be thinking how is gifting book style the people going to help with my reading but it really does what i'm encouraging you to do is to pounce on any mild interest that somebody else expresses in a certain book and hold them hostage with your good intentions for example if you're reading a book if you like to regularly read if you've got books lying around you will inevitably encounter someone else picking up on the book you're reading they'll say oh that looks interesting or what are you reading what's it about now a lot of the time people are just being polite and it doesn't always work if you pounce on that mild interest and try to exploit it they're not always going to go with it but when they do it is worth it so if somebody in your day-to-day life a friend a family member notices something you're reading get them a copy of the same book and insist that they read it people are less likely to turn down an offer to read a book with you if you have burdened them with the guilt of knowing that you have gone out and specially picked that book for them because you want to enjoy the book together now when it works and when people go for it and they do start reading the book with you there is nothing better in all the world nothing brings two people together like discussing a book or having a shared love of the same book it really is magical when it happens it doesn't always happen but it's worth it it's worth trying to instigate that for when it does a book is a gift that brings people together i have lost count of the amount of book club readers who have told me how reading these books has helped their interpersonal relationships there are so many incredible stories at this point of how the books we're reading helped improve or even start a good relationship a friendship in their real lives you learn so much about another by sharing a love for the same thing the same book one book club reader mentioned that our reading of clarissa helped her form a relationship with her neighbor she hadn't gotten to know her neighbour too in depth but they started to talk about clarissa now clarissa yeah a lot of readers people who know literature know clarissa but for the most part how many people in your day-to-day life i'm not talking about students studying literature how many people in your day-to-day life are even going to know what samuel richardson's clarissa is for most people it's going to be rather obscure but it turned out that this neighbor had majored in or specialized in 18th century literature and clarissa was a favorite novel of hers and so they ended up talking about clarissa and they ended up having a wonderful chat how often does that happen in our lives i would wager that that neighbor probably hadn't had that happen to her before in her day-to-day life how exciting and it's instantly going to endear you to somebody else and the more books that you read the more you share with other people the more your interpersonal relationships are going to improve another story that i remember just off the top of my head was another book club reader i believe they said that they went into the hospital and they were talking to a nurse about macbeth about shakespeare's macbeth and they ended up having a great chat so you never know where you're going to find like-minded lovers of literature and very often we are hiding in plain sight it will feel like there aren't people in our lives who love literature but people who read books are typically quite shy and introverted we're probably not always shouting about it we're probably not always overtly given the opportunity to talk about it i say seize the opportunity yourself and you can begin by gifting those in your life who express mild interest in what you're reading gifting them the book that you're reading now my next tip for you is about consistency how to keep a consistent reading habit and it comes down to one page have a one pager a one page quota for your reading every day now you might think if i'm reading one page per day i'm not going to get through many books am i but the one pager is a really liberating mindset because firstly boundaries do create freedom and giving yourself an easy prescription is one way to overcome any initial resistance any starting resistance for example if you tell yourself every day i have to read one page let's say before bed i have to read just one page it is so much easier to pick up that book when you're tired when you're not feeling it very often you might not be feeling it at the end of the day a long day you might not be in the mood you probably just want to go to sleep or just chill out but if you tell yourself i only have to read one page well what happens maybe you find that one page really interesting one page is achievable and so you read another page and another page before you know it you've read a chapter so you've actually read more than one page the internet abounds with book a week reading challenges good reads challenges and this is all well and good but if you're using quantity as your primary metric of success you might end up sucking the joy out of your reading not always this isn't true for everybody some people are incredibly voracious i'm quite voracious but if first and foremost i had to hear a challenging page quota every day some days i wouldn't even bother if you had to read 30 pages every single day then there are some days where you think i can't do 30 pages and you'll end up doing nothing or if you end up trying to clock those 30 pages and you fall short and you read seven pages you'll feel like you've failed if you set yourself the quota of doing one page anything beyond that is a success setting up easy wins is the key to everything really but definitely with reading minimum effective dose that's what that is the one page per day quota is a minimum effective dose and some days you might only read that one page because you genuinely are tired if you don't go beyond that one page you might end up putting more care and attention into that one page alone and so it's a win no matter what happens you either end up reading more or you read a small amount and you give it a little bit more care and attention then you might otherwise have given it if you'd had a much bigger quota you might add more pages in and more pages might become more manageable more achievable consistently one page becomes three pages three pages becomes three in the morning three in the evening and if you're reading three pages in the morning three in the evening then you've read anna karenina in just a few months really it's all about breaking things down into manageable chunks read a chapter a day of moby dick and you'll have that book read in less than a year a lot of readers want to read war and peace by tolstoy but war and peace is huge how do you read such a huge sprawling work well war and peace is perfect for the chapter a day approach because those chapters aren't too long you could even do a page a day slow and steady and consistency over the long term is absolutely key when it comes to deep reading okay my next tip involves a lifelong reading assignment read poetry every day of your life this tip actually comes from ray bradbury who advised budding writers to read one poem one short story and one essay every night for the next thousand nights i call this the bradbury trio and it is a magical reading experience it's rather intense perhaps more intense than it might initially sound but if you want to follow this reading exercise then a good anthology of poetry is key a good short story anthology is key a good collection of essays is key because the thing that will take the most time with this isn't really the reading it's the searching out what you're going to read but if you have some good anthologies that's sorted out for you but i think the poetry is the easiest win from this prescription from this little reading program because poems so long as you're not picking an epic poem like milton's paradise lost or william wordsworth's the prelude if you're picking a shakespearean sonnet if you're picking an emily dickinson poem which are compressed like diamonds every word is pregnant with meaning if you're picking these poems then it's a very achievable reading goal and you can become insanely well read very very swiftly with this one tip if you read one new poem every day by the end of the year you know poetry you know poetry because you've read 365 different poems now some days you might want to reread the poem from the day before one of my favorite things to do is to reread the same shakespeare sonnet every day for multiple days and i always get something new out of it it's the same for emily dickinson but pick a great anthology and try to get a new poem each and every day there are some anthologies that are even specifically set up for this poem of the day i believe it's called it's an anthology that gives you a poem specifically for each day of the year i've been through multiple copies of each myself reading poetry regularly is also incredibly instrumental when it comes to learning to think in metaphor it's also a great mini masterclass in appreciating beauty everything that language can do is done best in poetry another thing that i personally love about poetry is many of my favorite poems are inextricably linked to the great outdoors i read poetry and then i go outside and i look across the landscape and it's a nice break now talking about the great outdoors my next tip is to pair listening and walking the best way to forge and maintain a new healthy habit is to scaffold it onto a pre-existing habit or you can create two new habits simultaneously and bind them up link them together listening to an audiobook and going on a hike twins two incredibly positive habits not only are you listening to literature but you're also exercising i encourage you to build and cultivate your own personal digital audio library and get yourself some walking companions some go-to walking companions for me a go-to book that i like to listen to whilst walking is james joyce's ulysses also finnegan's wake but there are plenty of books that i love to listen to whilst walking i also love to listen to talks and lectures and podcasts now many of our favorite writers were walking companions of one another there are plenty of examples to choose from i immediately think of tolkien j.r.r tolkien and c.s lewis they were walking buddies and they would walk they would ramble and they would talk walking and talking or walking and listening really does something magical when it comes to creativity and insight and something that i did back when i was studying for my exams was i would link that which i needed to remember to exercise so i would sit on the stationary bike for half an hour and i would drill whatever it was i needed to remember dates and facts and ideas and i found that it went in easier and it stayed in we have so many walking companions at our fingertips today we can curate a stable of people that we love to listen to and we can take them on a walk we can have them tell us a story or explain some ideas and concepts and keep us company in spirit as we're walking through the great outdoors and appreciating nature we truly do live in a marvellous time and i've found also that pairing listening to literature with outside experience makes that literature more resonant and there are passages of proust and joyce that are for me inextricably linked with physical locations out in the big wide world in much the same way that proust can smell some varnish and it immediately throws up a childhood memory i can alight upon a specific passage in a novel and it immediately throws up a physical location that i've visited and so it's more resonant but at the end of the day it's a big win to get more walking in and get more literature in and that's a great way to do it twin you're listening and walking okay my next tip might sound like a little bit of a strange one but let's go with it i encourage you to every year draft your baker's dozen what does that mean well a baker's dozen means 13 doesn't it bakers would be subject to a flogging if they were found to cheat their customers so they would bake a dozen but they would want to have a little more left over just in case just to ensure that they had all the right materials and that they weren't accidentally cheating their customers and subject to a flogging and so they would bake a little bit too much so they would have 12 of their product but that little bit extra that 13th would be a little bonus now applying this to reading every year draft a list of 12 books that you would love to have read what books do you really want to win what books intrigue you the most what books are you most excited to break into and understand now i think 12 great books per year is a good number it doesn't mean you're only going to read 12 you'll probably read quite a bit more on top of that too but it's also a bit of a stretch goal there are book a week goals i think that's a little bit too fast especially when it comes to great literature reading 52 great books a year is going to be hard to manage many of the great books are very long and they deal with themes that take a bit of digesting multiple sleep cycles you have to kind of live with the book for a stretch of time one book per month is a nice loose goal and some books you'll read in a couple of weeks some books will take several months but overall over the course of the year if you get a dozen great books read then you've done a tremendous job now you might want to cut it down a little bit more six great books per year these are the difficult books these are the books that people want to read before they die either way draft a list of 12 books you absolutely have to read this year and then give yourself a bonus it's a baker's dozen so you've got 12 you absolutely have to read and then you've got a 13th and that extra book is a special book because it's going to be an esoteric book it's going to be a book that you typically wouldn't read maybe it's a book or a work that has been flagged up to you recently maybe you were interested in a passing way and then you dismissed it you thought maybe i don't have the time for that book i'm not going to follow it up it's a little bit out there but this is the time where you schedule in approaching those books that you would typically dismiss for whatever reason maybe the book is controversial maybe the book comes from a part of the world that you know nothing about you know nothing about the culture and so you think it might be a bit too difficult for example if you're a western reader that 13th book might be the bhagavad gita maybe you know a little bit about it maybe you've seen that book written about maybe the title alone is somewhat alluring to you but you don't embrace it maybe you think i don't know too much about indian culture but here with the baker's dozen approach you would embrace picking a book that is a bit different from what you normally read is a bit of a challenge for whatever reason maybe you've developed an interest in gilgamesh maybe you find yourself intrigued by the old chivalric romances the breton lays the chances digest from france and from england whatever it is for that extra bonus read really pivot into whatever is esoteric whatever is out there whatever is a little bit of a challenge whatever is different for you so your list for the dozen probably contains all the big books the the books that you should have read the books that you need to read the books that have a reputation that precedes them but having a baker's dozen builds a sense of play into your reading program and it makes it unique it makes it a special thing for you it's just another way to introduce a little bit of excitement into your reading program as a whole now let's talk bonus projects bonus self scholarship projects every year i like to have one language learning project and i like to change it every single year i like to learn a little bit of a different language each year and now this isn't an all or nothing approach you don't need to be fluent in the language by the end of the year but just follow up your interest in a specific language in maybe a small way because you are increasing your verbal fluency now a great place to start is with etymology now if you've ever gone on an etymological dig an excavation for meaning you'll find that our language goes through many permutations over the years it changes meaning quite significantly and depending on the word depending on what we're talking about quite rapidly and startlingly one of the most fun things that i like to do on a regular basis is to go down the oxford english dictionary and look at how different words have changed over the years philology yeah the study of language is a fascinating area because the study of language is actually the study of the human spirit or the development the evolution of the human spirit over time it's the history of the human soul in a particular breath in a particular language so starting with a focus on etymology is is great but you also might find that that leads you to say anglo-saxon if you're interested in english literature you might want to read beowulf you might want to read the really old stuff now that really is a completely different language but that's a rewarding path to go down you might find yourself interested in latin i have recently dusted off and begun resurrecting my school boy latin i took latin gcse while studying my a levels just as a bonus qualification but mainly because i wanted to know latin and i stayed after school to learn latin and we translated virgil the aeneid we read ovid and it was fascinating i really loved it so recently i've been making efforts to learn latin and what i found is my knowledge of english has improved immensely latin ostensibly like ancient greek is a dead language and so a lot of people won't see the reason for learning it because you can't communicate with other people in that language but you can communicate with it you're communicating across time and you're able to revive some of the greatest literature most of the world's literature is written in latin and only a very small fraction of it is actually translated and if it's translated then you are beholden to the translator reading it in the original is a an incredible pleasure so latin is really interesting that's what i'm doing at the moment my past language learning projects have included japanese i actually lived in japan for some time and they also included german i lived in austria vienna for some time my future language learning projects i'm really excited about include french italian i'd love to have french and italian because the writers that one can enjoy in the original well there are so many of them i'd love to learn irish gaelic just as a way of connecting with my heritage i'd love to go back to angelo saxon i'd love to learn icelandic funnily enough i'd love to learn russian again for the literature chinese hindi is another one that i'm really interested in i've been interested in the past in swahili and i thought that would be an interesting gateway into another culture pick a linguistic passion project each and every year and you'll find that your reading of great literature deepens my next tip is to embrace commentaries and guides use them not only to illuminate certain works but use them as motivational tools i like to draw an analogy from the running world a few years back i started training for my first marathon i was using hyde park in london as my training ground as my running track essentially and at the beginning i could run one side of hyde park but then i would get winded i found that i didn't really know how to run everything from pacing myself to how my feet were falling rhythm that sort of thing i just wasn't used to it but with some perseverance and learning how to run reading guides listening to guides i could then lap hyde park but i wanted to do multiple laps and then i wanted to start shaving my time down i wanted to get better and so i started embracing different tools i would load up on gear running shoes after i learned a little bit of technique i invested in some running shoes i got them personally fitted for me and that made quite a big difference i ended up experimenting with running gels i'd treat myself to a new running belt i would spend time loading up my playlist for the run picking and choosing what music i was going to listen to all of this had a positive effect on my running firstly it kept me motivated to keep going but secondly it really did also help me discover how to become a better runner too the thing is we love getting goodies it's excitement we love getting things that keep us consistent keep us motivated we like giving ourselves little treats and if they help us to continue doing something that's good for us so much the better ultimately my buying of that running gear was it was motivational but it was also an investment in myself and there are two areas that are extraordinary investments health and education investing in your health investing in your learning these are two areas that will never be a wasted investment people like to talk a lot about investing today but the first thing everybody should invest in is themselves and so if you can regularly justify self-care goodies that keeps you consistent doing something that's good for you keeps you consistent doing something that's an investment in yourself then that's brilliant and when it comes to reading critical commentaries guides talks these are all great avenues to keep your reading habit consistent and make it all the more rewarding now i've spoken about having a language project each and every year i would like to give you another assignment and that is to have an author speciality each and every year when i studied english literature at university one of the papers was an author specific paper in addition to the syllabus we were supposed to choose from a list one author to really deep dive into and we were expected to read pretty much everything that that author put out and to become an expert on that author we couldn't choose shakespeare because shakespeare was already mandatory for our final year we had a special shakespeare paper which was good fun in my first year i took a special interest in thomas hardy and in my second year for my dissertation i took a special interest in joseph conrad and i read everything joseph conrad put out and it was really rewarding but you can do this each and every year yourself too and each and every year you can become something of an expert on your favorite authors and that means you'll just read as much as you can of that author all of the writers all of the works that we discuss in the hardcore literature book club are brilliant springboards they are perfect jumping off points so if you fall in love with any of those works you have a really exciting adventure ahead of you for example george eliot if you find yourself enjoying reading middlemarch at the moment we are reading george eliot's masterpiece following the original serialized publication schedule so we're reading it over the course of a year if you enjoy george eliot then pick up the rest of her novels and make your way through them pick up her essays learn more about the great writer i'll run you through some of the options that oxford asked us to choose from for the author specific papers so they broke it down by era and per era they assigned three writers and you could choose one of these writers and it changes every few years there was a victorianism option and you could choose tennyson dickens or wild there was a romanticism option you could choose to specialize in wordsworth austin byron there was a modernism option with conrad yates and virginia woolf and this leads me on to my second assignment for you give yourself a subject assignment or a topic assignment again at university we had a speciality topic paper and i chose the beat generation which meant that i spent hours and hours and hours in the stacks reading jack kerouac reading alan ginsberg gregory corso and all the beat generation really good fun but you might note that you have developed a special interest in the gothic you might find yourself intrigued by the sublime you might find yourself interested in meta theatricality you might find yourself really intrigued by the short story form how does it work the mechanics of a short story there are endless options but i would give you the assignment of deep diving into an author and deep diving into a special topic and again the more you do this over the years the more well-read you will become and you become more well-read quicker than you might think now another tip make sure you are befriending the biggies on a regular basis go down your reading program and ask yourself if you are dedicating enough time to the really big writers the iconic writers we do shy away from these writers sometimes we hear the name shakespeare and we groan because school hasn't dealt the bard the best service but we all know who the biggies are shakespeare tolstoy dante homer milton the quicker one befriends these big names and the quicker one integrates them as part of your day-to-day life or as part of your weekly reading just chipping away at them on a weekly basis a daily basis regularly dedicating time to the biggies the quicker you do that the quicker you'll be able to assimilate so much more great literature because the biggies really do teach us so much about how to enjoy literature as a whole so any project that you can construct that excites you that will help you get through the biggies will be a boon to your reading in the hardcore literature book club we are moving through the plays of william shakespeare but we're doing so in a seasonal way so we aligned our reading with the seasons you can jump on at any point of course but we begun reading the tragedies the high banquets of blood in winter so we began with king lear and hamlet and macbeth now that it's summer in england at least we're reading the comedies which are a lot lighter we're reading a midsummer night's dream as you like it much ado about nothing and so that's a good way to get through shakespeare i also like the play a month approach each and every month have a new play a new shakespeare play if you're feeling really ambitious that could be a play a week shakespeare is shockingly easy to get through many of his works are very slim and digestible if you find a very good production there isn't much difference between reading shakespeare and watching a movie the michael fassbender adaptation of macbeth by the way i would defy anybody to watch that and not be utterly engrossed so it doesn't really feel like work when it comes to tolstoy we've mentioned war and peace with the chapter a day approach that's a great approach to get through that big one when we're talking about homer you might find it useful to aim for reading a book a week one book of the odyssey one book of the iliad each week and you'll get through those epics over the course of a year the same is true for milton's paradise lost it's all about breaking it down into manageable chunks and finding fun ways to integrate these writers with your day-to-day life my next tip is to make sure that along with your reading you are scheduling in artistic cross-pollination so this is quite similar to the artist date but essentially what i'm asking you to do is take regular trips to art galleries maybe visit the theater but seek out those cultural experiences that aren't confined only to the page you'll find that visiting an art gallery spending a lazy afternoon wandering around an art gallery can be really instrumental for breaking apart whatever you're reading at the moment develop numerous artistic loves look at art listen to great music explore different genres of music and you'll find that all of this has a really positive effect on making your reading all the more rewarding watch good movies too now recently i decided to start watching more good movies more good television i like trashy tv i really do i get a lot out of it i like the sort of tv that i would be embarrassed to say the titles of the shows here but think real trash but i've moved through a lot of garbage a lot of guilty pleasures but the thing is even with my trash i do demand some cohesion i demand a story i demand a little bit of drama it can't be completely brainless and what i've noticed is i've essentially worked my way through the good trash and now it's just empty calories a lot of the you know latest tv shows a lot of it is empty calories and i found it really unsatisfying and so i decided to consciously move back to the classic movies move back to the musicals from the 1950s move back to the old black and white films if you want to be a person of substance then you need to ensure that what you're inputting for the most part has substance or is quality because what you put in then comes out and you can tell what somebody puts in by what comes out input equals output so i don't mean eradicate all the trash and all the frivolity but also take care to ensure that now and then you are feeding yourself good things things that are good for the brain and good for the soul now my next tip is to make a list of books that you're not going to read i'm talking about those biggies which big works are you not going to read this year we're talking about delaying gratification we need to have more conversations about delayed gratification and also embracing boredom but delayed gratification is a lost art and it can be an avenue to meaning and resonance but what books are you going to delay because perhaps you're not ready for them now but you think you will be in a couple of years what books are you really excited to read and you don't want to spoil that excitement what big book do you want to put off in the distance almost like a reward there are so many works where we definitely won't unlock even a fraction of the power until we've had a certain amount of lived experience proust is one writer but that's certainly the case shakespeare king lear i read king lear as a teenager i also read proust when i was very very young it's only recently that i've started to unlock the power of these writers and i'm cognizant of the fact that with a work like king lear there's still so much that i'm not fully integrating because i'm not old enough simply put so i'm looking forward to unlocking that meaning when i'm older but there are texts that maybe we put off coming to and we think i'm going to store that away maybe you store it away for a milestone birthday maybe you store it away for a specific time and you just quietly peg that maybe you have one book that you're working through that you deliberately don't finish it's delayed gratification i've said before that i'm doing that with musashi by aji yoshikawa great book maybe you're following a serialized reading approach like with george eliot's middle march like with any of the novels of charles dickens delayed gratification is a lost pleasure and a lost art and i highly encourage you to embrace it now here's a fun one when you are reading great literature you are meeting great characters something that i have started to do recently is i've tried to ascertain what personality type different characters are in fact i noticed that there are certain characters that really resonated with me i felt really insympatico with them and one day it clicked these characters have the same personality type as me now when we talk about personality types we're typically referring to the myers-briggs personality indicator test that breaks your personality down into 16 types gives you a bunch of different letters i'm an infj and characters like dorothea brooke from george eliot's middlemarch characters like clarissa harlow r i n f j's 2 or i would contest that they are now there's a lot that goes into personality we're not just a cluster of traits there's a lot more to it than that but i do find that these patterns are really helpful and help us get even more meaning out of the work that's something that i like to do i like to figure out what personality type a character is and it helps you get closer to that character it helps you get into the work and you get a more intimate understanding of the work that you're reading essentially you're treating these characters as though they are real people now another tip is to keep files of things that interest you i've mentioned before that i keep a file of beginnings and endings first lines and last lines and i like to write around them i also keep a file of narrative devices that i find pleasurable if you notice a passage in charles dickens that is cinematic maybe it seems like a montage you can file it away and you can start collecting montages in literature pre-cinematic writing if you are reading some virginia woolf and you notice that she stops time you might want to collect that passage and start collecting similar passages that's a really rewarding way to journal around your books another rewarding thing that i like to do is to read fiction as though it is non-fiction this was a really foundational mindset to breaking open great literature when you read nonfiction you're reading for not just sustenance but you're reading for practical advice life advice something that you can apply to your life you're trying to find solutions to your problems and you can get that from literature too you can get that from fiction when you read nonfiction you're more likely to underline highlight scribble notes but you should be doing that with great literature too so when you're reading these great works of fiction take notes slow down try to find the message that you can take into your life now another tip is to read as if or play what if how we read is as important as what we read so for example if we have a poem before us what if it wasn't a poem what if it was a prayer how would we approach that poem differently what would it tell us what would it help us with we're talking about scriptural reading now or just say you have a contemporary novel in front of you if you play what if you might ask yourself what if this contemporary novel in 50 years time will turn out to be the great work of our age now it might not it might not be that good but if you read as if you might find some things that you otherwise wouldn't have found or let's say you have a short story that you're reading and if you're playing what if you might ask yourself well what if this short story had the solution to the problem that i'm facing in my life today again you might not find the solution but if you approach it that way you are more likely to find a solution but the last tip that i would like to leave you with today is to ensure that whatever you're reading you bring your passion to it or you read that which makes you passionate passion is key to everything you need to have a fire there needs to be a spark there needs to be excitement go towards that which excites you if you were to draft a list of books right now that you would like to have read in a year's time you'll find that some of those books some of those names leap out at you more than others maybe that particular writer is special to someone close to you maybe the name of that writer or the novel in question summons up really specific and vivid images that you find alluring that you find enticing ultimately with great literature like with life follow your gut follow your bliss follow your love and with that approach you'll do all right so those are just a few tips and mindsets for how i like to approach reading great literature i'm off now to go sit down with a coffee and a good book but let us know which of those tips you were most intrigued to put into action yourself thank you very much for watching today i hope you have a lovely day and happy reading bye for now

Channel: Benjamin McEvoy

Views: 119,575

Keywords: how to read more books, how to read great literature, how to motivate yourself to read, reading motivation, how to read, book reading challenges, book reading motivation, how to read poetry

Id: ExyXDVM7IK0

Length: 54min 14sec (3254 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 20 2022