Reading: Quality versus Quantity

Do you often come across reading challenges that say a book a week or a book a month or 100 books a year? Do you feel overwhelmed to see such challenges? 

Do you see people flaunting how to read a certain number of books within a week or so and you are sitting there staring at that unfinished book on your bookshelf?

You are not the only one! 

But, to be honest, when it comes to reading, quantity hardly ever matters! What matters is how well you have read and understood a book and implemented it in your life, not how many books you have read.

It's not about how many books decorate your bookshelf — read or unread. It's about how much you learned from them and how much you remembered.

Often, while chasing the challenges of reading a certain number of books, people speed-read the books without extracting a thing from them. What's the use of wasting hours skimming through the gems of information when you retain none of it later?

A book requires not only your time but also requires all your heart and attention. If you are reading for the sake of reading or finishing books, you are turning reading into a joke.

Reading, understanding, learning, remembering and implementing it in your life is the process that a reader has to go through in order to do justice to a book and it's only possible when you actually read a book thoroughly.

If you don't implement what do you read, especially if it's a non-fiction book, no number of books read in a year would matter.

You don't have to pick bestsellers or hyped books just to add them to your 'read' collection if they don't interest you. Read the books of your interest that will make you fall in love with reading.

Always remember... quality over quantity.

Reading one book a year properly is better than reading a book a week in a hurry.

If you really like to take up challenges then challenge yourself to read for half an hour daily. It will keep you more focused and attentive to what you are reading.

When you set a goal to read a specific number of books or pages under a given period of time, you tend to hurry things up in order to finish the task in time, making you remember little to nothing from the contents of the book.

I always set my reading goal on Goodreads low, around 5 to 10 books a year because I know that setting a higher goal would either make me read too fast or kill my urge to complete that challenge at all, leaving me too slow-paced. The goal on Goodreads is editable. When I cross my primary goal, I edit and set a bit higher goal to stay motivated to read.

I had said the lowest goal this year because I had thought that I won't get the time to read in my new life (now that I am married). My reading challenge was set to 1 book this year and guess what? We still have two months of the year left and I have already read 9 books this year and I had edited and set the goal to 5 books but I crossed that as well.

Out of those nine books, six are e-books! I did not like e-books earlier, but now, I see them as a great option to read at places where I can't carry a physical book with me.

So, stop chasing reading challenges and start reading like a reader. Extract the juice of a book, don't just taste many books.

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