My Bad Reading Habits

lately I have been frustrated with my reading habits my reading habits haven't changed too dramatically since I started this YouTube channel just over a month ago but the way that my mental process approaches reading has changed and so I've decided that it's time to reassess my habits reassess my mental process and so I've left the bookshelves behind and I've come out to the lake today to talk about my reading habits and maybe to come up with a new plan now firstly I want to say that I understand that being frustrated with my reading habits is a first world problem this is not a crisis but it is important because reading is a coping mechanism for stress and for anxiety and I cannot allow Stress and Anxiety to be a product of the thing that I use to relieve stress and anxiety I can't allow that to happen reading is the thing that I turn to when I need comfort and secondly I want to say that by the time this video comes out Major League Baseball will have started up again in America and it is the most wonderful time of the year so I'm out here repping my team so anyway what are my reading habits first of all I tend to read too many books at once between the audiobooks that I have on my phone and on CD in the car I still have a CD player in my car and the e-books on my phone and on my iPad the physical books on my shelf the stuff that I own the stuff that I borrow from the library the owners I get from Friends you know I get books from all sorts of sources and every every time I get a new book in I start reading it I can't I can't wait you know so um I feel like I can manage one more book I can put one more book on there what's the difference between reading six books and reading seven books add to that I have a TBR that is completely lunatic it is over 780 books long every time I hear of a book that sounds good I add it to the list but once it's on the list I almost never read it because I feel like well it's there now I'll remember it I can read it anytime and so something else comes along and it just preempts whatever's already on the list so so a lot of the time the stuff that's on the TBR never gets read add to that I have all these trackers I have an Excel spreadsheet I have a reading log I use scrivener to write in a reading Diary online trackers with the library for the books that I read they use Goodreads of course there's other apps that have tried to get my attention so like I've got all these places that I keep books logged in and I started using notion to track books because now that I'm producing videos about the books that I'm reading I need to track the the workflow that I'm that I'm producing and stuff that's coming down the pipeline there's just so much all the time to think about and to keep in my mind that it starts becoming very overwhelming Now by some people's standards in 2019 I managed all this really well I ended up reading 138 books it's the most books I've ever read in a single year but to be honest I never want to read that many books again and in fact I really found myself doing it just just to brag you know for once in my life I found that there were people in my Social Circle who actually cared about what I was reading or at least they said they did and you know I go down to the coffee shop and have a coffee and a muffin and they would ask me yo hey Eric like how many books are you reading how how many have you read all year so far and you know I would thrill to tell them you know I've read 70. I've read 80. I've read 90. I've read over 100 books this year they would at least pretend to be impressed you know I would give my little mini book reports on these books and everything but it was all very surface level and what I never told them is that over half of those books were audiobooks all of them listened to at one and a half speed and none of them better than half remembered reading over a hundred books which I've done in a couple other years makes me feel crazy because I can't hardly remember a single thing that I read but I've spent a thousand hours reading but I can't remember hardly anything that I've read now if there's one thing I truly hate it's when somebody brings up a book like Lucy elman's Ducks Newburyport or Cervantes Don Quixote which two books that I read in 2021 and they'll be like yeah I read those I loved them but in point of fact I listened to the audiobooks and now just two years later I can barely remember them I mean I can recount a basic plot summary and I not that there's much of a plot in Duck's Newburyport there's about a whole short stories worth of plot in that book and that's not really the point but listening to the audiobook especially of Duck's Newburyport just went in one ear and out the other and it was just a way to pass the hours I want more out of the books that I read than just something to pass the hours books to me are not mindless entertainment they mean more than that to me and I legitimately enjoyed listening to Duck's Newburyport and I really liked Don Quixote I found that to be accessible and funnier than I ever thought it was going to be but I can barely remember it now there's stories within stories in Don Quixote and I can barely remember what those are about and I feel like had I read a physical copy of the book slowed down re-read certain passages maybe marked them took notes while I was reading even just brief notes remember the story about XYZ and that's all that I would have to do but I don't do that with audiobooks and so my memory is very imperfect I don't have a steel trap up here but outside a surface level understanding of these books as far as just plot summaries and I don't absorb very much about the book I don't I don't retain the themes I don't remember characters very well it's it all just kind of Fades away if you've watched any of my book reviews on this channel you'll notice that I don't tend to dwell on book summaries very much because for me personally I find more value in character development character arcs the themes and the lessons to take from books what was the purpose of the book why was it written in the first place now I first started listening to audiobooks I think in 2011. the first audiobook that I listened to was Coraline by Neil Gaiman and I was I was just totally Enchanted by the whole process actually I cannot tell a lie the very first audiobook that I ever listened to was the Old Testament as read by Sir Lawrence Olivier my mom had the entire Old Testament on cassette tape she must have gotten that in the 80s and I found it in the in the basement I don't know why I was a weird teenager man I thought it was funny to listen to the Old Testament instead of Pearl Jam and Aerosmith anyway the first proper audiobook that I listened to in the modern era was Coraline by Neil Gaiman and ever since then the number of books that I've read every year has gone up however with the increase in Reading totals my actual reading comprehension I've noticed has started to decline and not just with my physical books so I've lost a little bit of the skills involved in Reading physical books but my ability to comprehend and concentrate on an audiobook has also declined over the years I don't know why I don't want to say that laziness begets laziness because I don't think listening to an audiobook makes you lazy and I'm not here to say that nobody should be listening to audiobooks I'm not here to say that I'm never going to listen to an audiobook again and I'm not even saying that audiobooks are the sole cause of all of the problems that I'm having I'm just saying that at this stage in my life right now I am relying too heavily on audiobooks to get through my reading list oh there's a speed boat coming down the way hopefully you can hear me hopefully it's not too loud I'm just going to talk over top of it but anyway recently I had to stop listening to two different audiobooks one was fenbog and swamp by Annie Prue and the other was Babel by RF Quang am I saying that name right I think I am and it's not that these books are exceedingly complex it's just that they are complex enough that I have to pay more attention that I'm capable of paying attention to an audiobook these days my mind wanders way too much both of these books are so rich in detail that every little thing the narrator says in these books makes me think of a million other things I don't think I'm actually ADHD thank goodness and I feel for people who are but I really struggle with concentrating on audiobooks because the littlest detail in the book will set my imagination spiraling so I went out and I borrowed a copy of fenbog and swamp from my public library and I've got that at the house right now and I also own a physical copy of Babel so I'm going to switch over and read that eventually but I'm going to have to clear a lot of other books off my plate before I get to that one I am really trying not to load up too many physical books at once but we'll get to that in a minute wow look at that hair it's probably time for a haircut pretty soon so enjoy my Bozo locks while I complete this segment all right so this actually brings me to my worst reading habit which isn't listening to audiobooks which isn't tracking my books it's reading too many books at once whether it's audiobooks or ebooks or physical books it's just piling too many on at one point last year I was actually listening to 24 books at one time by anybody's standards that's completely idiotic I think I only ended up actually finishing eight of those books and I had to lay the rest of them aside for a while I'm I'll probably come back and finish them at some point I even made a special tracker for those books here it is look at this thing this is a monstrosity and it's complete with like a status for each book The Blue is how many pages I've currently read this is totally insane so right now I think I'm currently reading five or six books which is still more than I want to read it's it's still enough to create a sense of anxiety it's still you know I don't even get to each one of these books every week and at that point I don't even feel like I'm reading them anymore so in an effort to help me kind of manage my reading list I've already mentioned that I've turned to notion but is that really helping now in order to get one video out per week on my channel I've like I said turn to notion to help me schedule my workflow notion is not sponsoring this video and they are not about to after they hear what I'm gonna say about it now I don't I don't hate notion um and for a lot of people I can definitely see how it can be a very effective tool but for me all it is is a tool to set up unrealistic expectations for my time I get overly ambitious and I schedule my ambitions in notion and when I inevitably don't live up to those Ambitions to those lofty goals that I set up well in advance months in advance My All or Nothing thinking kicks in and I immediately think that I failed this isn't really Notions problem this is this is a me problem for sure but notion just isn't the tool that I need to use to keep track of anything in my life because I just use it to self-destruct another problem I'm having adjusting to making these videos on this channel is that now every time I pick up a book I start telling myself what am I going to say on this channel don't mess this up you know instead of just let's enjoy this book Eric let's have fun with this book and it's turned into like I said before a source of anxiety and stress I just can't let that happen and you know like you know I need to be free not to produce a video on a book that I've read not every single book that I read is going to end up on this channel if I Read 50 or 100 books this year I need to have the wiggle room and the freedom to pick and choose which books I talk about especially since I don't want to get in the habit of doing negative book reviews I mostly want to focus on the books that I enjoy reading and unless I have a really good reason to talk about a book that I didn't like I'm going to probably keep that off the channel for the most part anyway so if I haven't even read the book yet how could I possibly schedule it for a future video these are all pressures that I'm putting on myself nobody's doing this to me this is all something that I'm doing to myself and so this is something that I need to work on and I'm sure a lot of us have experienced stuff like this where we do it to ourselves we make our own problems like a lot of avid bookworms I have a lot of books at home I'm not sure what the current count is last time I counted was about 600. it may be more it may be less at this point but a rough estimate told me that if I never read another book anywhere else except for my own bookshelves all of the unread books that are currently sitting in my house on my shelves collecting dust will take me about 10 or 15 years to get through if and that's if I read at my current pace of 50 to 70 books a year so obviously I'm buying more books than I can read and this is not a unique problem a lot of people suffer from this I watch book haul videos on YouTube and by the way you'll never see me do a book haul video on this channel not that I think there's some you know toxic consumerists blah blah blah blah I don't go in for all that but for me personally I buy books all the time and um I'm not exactly proud of amassing more books than I can possibly read I've seen some booktubers talk about how they only want to buy one book for every one book that they read and they have to impose rules upon themselves in order to prevent runaway amassing of books it is so easy to let your book collection just run completely wild and I'm actually really nervous about standing here this is just a straight drop into the water it's about 10 feet straight down right here and it's just like right there point is I need to learn to accept the fact that I am going to die before I can read every single book that I want to read oh I don't want to admit it I don't want to admit it no I don't want to admit that one more bad habit I want to talk about before I start wrapping this up is a long-term bad habit of mine and that's the habit of not reading a book Because of its length now this bad habit started developing when I started using Goodreads to track my books it wasn't the tracking that did it but Goodreads asks you to set a reading goal every year and so I started setting a goal whether it was 20 books or 50 books or whatever it was when I first started I started making decisions whether or not to read a book based on how much time I thought I had left in the year and if a book was too long I wouldn't read it and now with this channel this bad habit is only starting to get worse because I've got a video production schedule of trying to get a video out every week and and that usually includes doing a book review and I'll be damned if I'm going to keep making decisions on whether or not to read a book based on how long it is at least not in the context of how much time I feel like I have to read based on how much time is left in the year that's an arbitrary start and stop date January to December who cares about any of that apparently I do apparently I care but this is a reading habit that I want to completely eradicate so the question is if I cut out that part of me that likes to brag about how many books I've read What Becomes of my reading ambition what does it look like then so where does that leave me so I've been thinking about this a lot for the last couple of weeks and in that time my reading has slowed to a trickle and it's actually been kind of a relief to slow down on the reading in fact I've stopped listening to audiobooks entirely and I started listening to more music I've been listening to a lot of stuff that I haven't listened to sometimes in in some cases decades I've listened to some new stuff and I've just been rekindling my love for music and this has just been a wonderful way to spend my time in the car and you know cleaning up in the house and times that I would normally be listening to audiobooks I'm just vibing to my Tunes now so at least for a little while no more audio books this isn't a permanent thing but it will be a temporary thing the other thing is I'm going to try to reduce the number of books that I read to about three a physical book maybe two physical books and maybe an e-book on my phone but honestly if I can keep it to one book at a time at least for now that would be great there's definitely an advantage to reading multiple books at a time which is why I've always advocated for doing that and I'm usually able to differentiate the books in my head and keep them all straight keeping 24 books straight in my head is a bit of a challenge but keeping two three or four books straight in my head isn't that big of a deal but that's really not the issue here the issue is being able to focus on one thing being able to enjoy it from beginning to end and move on from one thing to the next also my video production schedule you know traditionally YouTubers try to put out one video per week and that sounds great that's all well and good and if I can keep up with that I will uh but if it turns out that I can't because I'm not reading the kinds of books I want to do videos on that I'm just not going to do a video and that's just and that's going to have to be okay and I know you I like I don't I don't think anybody's gonna give me a hard time about it it's all going to be coming for me so this isn't a criticism this isn't anything directed at anybody else this is something that I'm doing for myself I'm telling myself that it's okay not to do a video but I'm telling you that I'm telling myself that it's not okay you see what I'm doing here this is a pep talk for myself that I'm doing publicly the other thing is I'm going to stop worrying about my reading goals at least as far as a numerical reading goal instead of trying to get through x amount of books per year or per month I want to focus on just trying to read 60 minutes a day that's not really a lot for me if I just give myself a manageable number of minutes to read per day that's something that I can accomplish and I can feel good about that but also I'm giving myself permission not to read at all at least for now for for a little while I'm taking a little bit of a break and in fact and in fact I've actually worked ahead on this channel so I've got several weeks worth of videos already uploaded and they're just waiting to release every Saturday so I've got about a month before I need to start worrying about coming up with another video and that's going to give me time to take a break and reassess everything and in fact what I'm going to do for a little while when I'm not reading is I'm going to play balloons td6 I've played all of the other balloons games and I tell you what I absolutely love this tower defense game and the sixth one is out it's been out for a while I haven't played it yet my son is way into it and he's been begging me to play it so I'm gonna start playing balloons td6 and I'm gonna get good I'm really looking forward to doing something with my time that isn't reading at least on a temporary basis and finally when I do pick up a book again and I start reading it's going to be with physical books at least for now and the goal there is to be spending more time with each book that I'm reading not to fly through them I want to take better notes on the books I want to read Associated works I want to you know look stuff up I want to look up author interviews and just make a better study of all these books can you hear these frogs that's pretty cool and I'm not going to worry about how long a book is or how short a book is or how difficult because I'm not going to worry about how many books I'm reading so it's not going to matter how long it takes me to get through it because I'm not worried about how long it's going to be between videos that I'm producing the whole toxic productivity culture that I've been consuming recently on YouTube has really gotten to me I didn't realize that it was and so I'm really gonna detox from all of that and just take it easy I'm going to do this on my own terms I got into making book reviews because I thought this was going to fit in naturally with my interests this isn't something that I wanted to add stress to my life for God's sake so the last thing I want is for this channel this venture to blow up in my face and for it to ruin my one of my favorite hobbies so I'm not going to let that happen anyway I know a lot of this flies in the face of a lot of things we're hearing on YouTube about how to read more books and how to read 100 books in a year right but don't let anybody tell you how to read your books okay you know you read your books you read at your own pace oh spooky tunnel if you only read if I only read 12 books in a year One book a month but I made a study of those books and and they they meant something to me and I felt really good about each one of those books how could that not be a good year of reading who cares if it's only 12 books what if it was two books if you if I really enjoyed those books and got a lot out of them if I maximized my time with those books and really enjoyed them who cares if it's only two who cares it doesn't matter there's a bunch of ducks over here anyway my phone's about to die I'm down to about five percent so so I've got an Instagram channel it's called gronsky books you can go over there and keep up with the books that I'm currently reading make book recommendations for me I'd love to check them out and go ahead and subscribe to this channel if you like what you're seeing more videos to come and uh you know until next time I'll see you later my feet are all wet from walking around the Soggy soil at the lakeside so now I have to walk all the way back to the car with wet muddy socks

Channel: Gronskei Books

Views: 188

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Id: iuNAf9F6TjE

Length: 24min 32sec (1472 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 01 2023