How I read books?

Salman Maken
4 min readAug 4, 2021
Image by Jilbert Ebrahimi on Unsplash

It’s been a long time since I started reading books. Reading books is the best hobby that I found in my life. Every person has a different approach to reading depends on his or her mindset, interests and taste. My approach to reading is quite different then what often people read. So here I wanna share how I read books.

Let’s get started…

No one told me to read.

I started reading on my own. I started when my cousins went to the college book fair and bought some books back in 2015. When I saw new books, I wanted to read these books even though I do not understand English much at that time.

Once started reading I become addicted to the books and I ended up reading all the books including religion, history, fiction, science and whatnot. Reading is the thing that I choose according to my choice. No one told me what to read or what not to read.

What I read.

I read whatever I found interested to read. I read about literature, history, science and other stuff. Once I develop the habit of reading I read almost everything that I found in my house. Whether it’s a book, a magazine or a newspaper. Whatever the topic maybe, I didn’t ignore anything that comes in front of me.

When I got my first smartphone, I have access to a lot of unending content on the internet.

Due to this, I have now more things to read than I have even time.

You can also develop the habit of reading it’s very easy. Start reading from what you like the most unless you like to read everything.

Go into the detail that resonates with you.

If you find anything interesting, it may be a sentence or a paragraph or a certain topic then don’t ignore this, go into the depth of that topic and find out the detailed explanation for the topic.

Such as I read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari and in it, I found something interesting. So I go to the internet and found out more things regarding that topic and the lectures of Yuval Noah Harari where he further explains everything in detail.

Don’t just read what others are reading.

I often do not care what others are reading. Many of my cousins read ‘Imran Series’ daily and they recommended me a lot of time. But I never read this book not because it is in Urdu but I do not like to read this sort of genre.

Secondly, we don’t have to read what is the best selling books at the time or what are people giving reviews on.

I read books that are either available to me or recommended by someone on the internet. If I like the book then I read again and again and write notes. But if I don’t like the book then I left reading it.

I re-read books a lot.

I often re-read books that I already read. Such as The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. For the last six years, I am reading this book and every time I have enjoyed it a lot.

Rereading is not a waste of time it’s even more fun and engaging.

It can be anything. I reread every book that I like before. And whenever I reread a book, I discover something new that I don’t know before.

Taking notes

Before I only read books but then I came with the idea of taking notes from the books and write it down and even better if you publish your findings on the internet in the form of book reviews, takeaways, summaries or whatever you like.

First I came across this idea through Ali Abdaal videos. Then I continue to do so in almost every book I read.

While reading a book sometimes it is difficult to take notes because it seems difficult to understand and organize your notes in a sequence while on other times you find the book so easy and engaging that you want to take notes and make summaries of every topic but it will take too much time to take notes from every topic.

Conclusion

Reading is the best thing in the world.

Every successful person in the world read books. If you will develop the habit of reading books then it will unlock so many paths in your life and you will never see the world in the same way again. People often argue that they don’t have time to read. This means it’s not a priority. You have plenty of time to read every day. You just have to make it a habit.

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