How To Read Critically and Engage More With Books

just like you i love reading when i first started reading avidly there were so many books that i liked and disliked but i could not tell you why and i had such a hard time articulating my opinions but over the years i learned to read critically and here's why that's great you'll be able to form more coherent opinions and understand your own thoughts more you can become a better writer you engage more with every story that you read and i can have more meaningful discussions with you guys on this channel so today i'm gonna share with you how to read more critically and engage more with the stories you consume but first let me say this so maybe you're thinking right now i can't do that that's not for me no one's interested in my opinion i just want to say here's the thing with media critique historically rational debate on media has had a specific fix and if you grow up never seeing yourself represented in these kind of rational conversations you're gonna start self-censoring you're gonna exclude yourself from those conversations because you think that you're not good enough you've internalized this insecurity that it's not for you or that you're going to fill when in reality you probably have a lot of interesting things to add to the conversation so back to critical reading maybe critical reading sounds very daunting to you or you think it's not for you or you haven't even considered it as an option for you in this video i want to show you guys that reading critically is accessible to anyone anyone can learn it and you also can contribute something to the conversation about books so in this video we're going to be talking about subjectivity versus objectivity we're going to talk about the gold the story and why that's important we're going to talk about just some general questions that you can always ask yourself while reading i'm going to share some tools very serious video there are tools and then last but not least i want to talk about meaning and how to find meaning in books which i think is something that we could talk about a little more often here on booktube and this by the way is just how i approach critical reading obviously different people are gonna have different approaches but i think this video is just gonna be a clear scaffold for you to latch on to maybe you're thinking right now critical reading what do you what do you mean with that what i mean when i say critical reading is just analyzing the story that you read and instead of letting it passively wash over you you are actively engaging with the story you're asking yourself why do i like this why do i not like it this is just a great way to make the most out of your reading experience at least in my opinion okay so let's begin with class number one it's not it's really not that serious but let's begin with objectivity versus subjectivity if anyone ever gives you the advice that you need to be as objective as possible in your review that's terrible advice don't listen to them it's impossible to be completely objective in a review seriously your brain is wired to be biased and subjective especially when it comes to something so personal as a story you're gonna be subjective so being as objective as possible is not really good advice in my opinion i think the best advice is to learn to be aware of your own subjectivity because people who think that they're being objective are not going to give very helpful reviews because different people experience stories in different ways but if you know how subjective your reading is you can empathize with how different people might enjoy different things in books now that is going to lead to very helpful reviews and it can also teach you something about yourself about why maybe you like certain things and why you don't like other things a good example of this in my opinion is a murphy napier's reviews i really like her reviews because she always gives i think three pros and three cons so even if she really likes the book she can still come up with possible cons possible things other people could not like and if she doesn't like a book she can still come up with things that you actually might like i think that's the most helpful way of reviewing is being aware that yes different people are gonna like different books so what about this book is not for me but could be for other people and the other way around and even if you don't review books for fun it's i think it's also very helpful just for yourself you know instead of reading books thinking oh this is just you know objectively bad or objectively good it can really teach you something about yourself to think about huh why is it that this type of story blows me away and that type of story just doesn't do much for me next up we're gonna talk about understanding the goal of the story if you're gonna analyze a book i think it's very important that you understand what the author was trying to do you can't hate a romance book for having too much romance and you can't really hate teenage characters for acting immature of course you could still dislike those things but then it's on you and not on the book because maybe the book did achieve the goal it was trying to achieve this is a really helpful way of trying to differentiate between when something is on you and when something is on the book like is it a flaw in the book or is this just something that you personally don't like i'll just give an example with characters i see this happening often with morally gray characters do you dislike the character because you just can't get yourself to root for a character that engages in morally great behavior or do you dislike the character because you think they are written in an implausible way or do you think they're maybe too over the top or anything else that was specifically caused by the writing of the book so keeping in mind the goal of the story is a really great way of differentiating between what you could see as a flaw in the writing style and the way of constructing the story and what is just like your personal preferences because i think it's perfectly fine to like or dislike a book completely based on your personal preferences okay now that we have the basics done we can talk about some basic questions these are the questions that i ask myself while i'm reading and they are the questions that help me make up my eventual opinion on the book they kind of guide you to analyze the story the most fundamental question that i always ask myself when i'm reading a book especially if i'm not really enjoying it is what should change to make this book perfect to me and then the answer to that question is your critique on the book i'm gonna give some examples i really enjoyed spinning silver but i knew that it wasn't really a five-star read so i asked myself what is it that keeps me from really absolutely enjoying the story and then i realized it's because there are two out of the four povs that i just didn't care about at all and i thought about it a little further and then i realized oh that's because i personally have the problem that when there are multiple povs i tend to pick my favorites and it's very very difficult for me to care about all the povs so i'm aware that that's kind of a me thing and i should definitely say that if i tell someone about this book then we have an amber in the ashes one of the biggest reasons that i didn't absolutely love this book is because one of the two perspectives what's her name leia lia i didn't like lyap's perspective because i thought it was too cliche and full of tropes that i had already seen way too many times but i am aware that another reader who actually doesn't really care about these cliches or actually really likes these tropes could still really enjoy this book so i should say that also those kind of books always make me think about how there are certain tropes that i can read about a gazillion times without getting sick of them and then there are other tropes that i'm sick of after a few times subjectivity and then there are a bunch of follow-up questions that you can ask yourself to further analyze the story here are just a few examples that you can keep in mind why do i feel connected not connected to these characters are the events plausible are the plot twists foreshadowed or did they come out of nowhere am i immersed in the world and why why do i root for or not root for this romance why do i never want to pick up the book again when i put it away or why do i always want to keep reading does this story subvert common tropes what makes me feel excited about this story does it have any tropes that i'm particularly fond of maybe and what are my thoughts on the writing style and they're probably a lot of more questions that you could ask yourself but this is the type of questions that you could ask yourself while reading i know it may sound like a very intricate plan with all these steps but these things will very quickly come naturally to you at least i think so yeah i'm pretty sure i'm pretty sure i believe you you have to think about what you find important in books you know like some people may really focus on what they thought of the world building but if you are like well i don't really care about that then you don't have to focus on that the whole thing over reading critically and analyzing is that you decide for yourself what you find important in a story and then you can focus on that because you do reading for yourself and your own enjoyment and your own development next up tools i'm just going to quickly share some tools that can help you engage with the story more and actually remember what you read because i forget what i read so easily tabs they are the most quick and easy way to tab certain scenes or things that you find interesting or want to remember i love this because it helps future me to easily find scenes that i like and quickly re-experience my reading time then we have a bullet journal or a reading journal or any kind of notebook where you write down your thoughts on every book that you read i guess you could also technically do this on goodreads but i really like it in a journal because when it looks cute and you have like a physical remembrance of the book that you read and two it's personal so it's just for yourself you don't share it on goodreads and i find that just a little bit more helpful and in this i just write down my thoughts of the books that i'm reading and my opinions on them and like things that were very remarkable to me or for the things that i really liked and that way i can very easily remember every single opinion that i had on a book by just looking it up in this book then we have note-taking apps i use notion but you can use any kind of note-taking app the great thing about an app is that you always have your phone on you so whenever you're reading a book wherever you are if you suddenly have an idea or a thought of a book you can immediately jot it down which will make you able to document the most raw reading experience especially when i read non-fiction i use a note-taking app because whenever i have like an idea or thought sparked by reading that non-fiction book i write it down in this app and the fourth thing is to write in your books i personally don't do this but i do know that for a lot of people this is a great way to engage more with the book that they're reading also i can imagine it's super fun when you re-read that book i maybe want to make a full video in the future on all the different ways i used to annotate so if you guys are interested in that let me know in the comments and now the last thing that i want to talk about is meaning i think we've all heard about how reading can make you more empathetic and how reading can help you learn things about yourself and about others and i think that when we're reading books whether it's non-fiction or fiction we should put a little bit more emphasis on the personal meaning that it has to us you don't have to share this publicly if you make public reviews but if you're reading and you're analyzing it for yourself i think it's really great to also think about what the book means to you so instead of just focusing and analyzing the story structure and how it is written also take some time to focus and think about why a book touches you or why you love a certain story so much or why you have such a strong aversion to other stories especially if you're writing down your thoughts on a book in a reading journal or an app take some time to not just focus on like the analytical story structures of the book but also talk a bit about what that book meant to you at that stage of your life that way i guess you can kind of journal using the books that you read is that what that is i really think that is a great way to really emphasize what reading means to you and really make the most out of every story that you consume by also focusing on what that story means to you in your life and i understand that not every book facilitates this like most of the time you're just reading books and you're just having fun and it doesn't have some kind of grand meaning to you but i do think it's something that we can maybe think about a little more more often because especially in like the review sphere on bookturnet we mostly focus on like story structure and if it's a good book if it's well written but that doesn't mean we should not think about what a book means to us personally and maybe what we can learn from it because you can really find it in unexpected places you know you don't need to read some kind of philosophy classic to learn something from it you can also get a very deep personal message from hawaii contemporary it just completely depends on you because that's the great thing about stories is that they mean something different for every person oh this became like a motivational video new channel name just gonna be my name and i'm gonna make videos about minimalism now alrighty so just to round it up i think there are two keys to reading critically the first one is learning to understand when something is on you and when something is on the book and the writing and the second key is to always ask why and i want everyone to remember that you're not reading critically just to make a review or just so that you have something profound to say to your friends you can read critically for yourself for personal development because you can learn something about your preferences because it can teach you to be more critical in other areas in your life also you don't have to read critically all the time like i very often when i'm reading just kind of take off my critical reading hatch because i'm just like well now i just want to enjoy the story and let it passively take over me and that's completely fine but i do really hope that this video was helpful and hopefully maybe i don't know inspired you to think a little bit more about the books that you read and learn something from yourself i guess yeah if you enjoyed this video give it a like and subscribe if you haven't already you can follow me on all my social media at the book leo and the links are in the description i really hope you enjoyed this video and i will see you soon in another one goodbye [Music] you

Channel: The Book Leo

Views: 187,725

Keywords: book, books, booktube, reading, booktuber, peruseproject, paperbackdreams, review, book review, critical reading, book discussion, reading critically, deep reading, critique, media critique, self help, personal development

Id: tLcp7hKEu7E

Length: 15min 2sec (902 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 22 2020