In high school, I didn't take AP English solely because of the amount of reading involved. Reading wasn't always my enemy, though.
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

In high school, I didn't take AP English solely because of the amount of reading involved. I wrote a paper about my disdain for reading for my non-AP class after being subjected to Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, a perfect example of intellectual torture in the form of "required reading."

I struggled through readings in college and disliked much of my academic experience largely due to that. I was in classes like intro level politics that were, perhaps literally, mind-numbing because of the sheer volume, repetitive nature, and dullness of [most of] the reading. In my speech to the Freshman class at their orientation, I warned them about the importance of course selection to avoid these pitfalls.

Reading wasn't always my enemy, though. When I was a wee youngin', I used to read quite a bit -- Goosebumps, a series of sports books whose title I can't recall, and abridged classics. I even read Michener's 1000+ page The Source for fun ... during the summer! I liked to read.

After graduation, I subscribed to the digests of Mashable, TechCrunch, and VentureBeat and didn't consider them "reading" [I still don't actually] -- but I do/did enjoy reading them [or at least the relevant articles]. I also read a few books here and there [s/o Malcolm Gladwell] and also watched quite a few instructional videos -- e.g. Derek Sivers' "Uncommon Sense."

It was from these post-grad experiences that I realized maybe I don't hate reading. Maybe my dislike for reading was because what I associated "reading" with was mandatory and endless monotony. I needed to redefine reading as learning from and engaging with content I actively sought out because it was relevant, interesting, rewarding or all three. In my retrospect blog post last year about my interesting expedition out West, I [in bold] wrote "I should have really spent more time reading..."

Over the past year in NYC, I've received excellent suggestions from Shahed, Carter and Seth. I have a Trello backlog of books to read [I guess I could do this in Tracker too] and have been going through one every two or three weeks. I read the Hunger Games series in about 24 hours [half of which was time spent sleeping or eating] right after the sick movie trailers came out [I couldn't wait].

Among the books that I've read [by suggestion of the guys above] and re-recommend are Getting More by Stuart Diamond and A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. Currently reading Let My People Go Surfing by the founder of Patagonia by suggestion of Jared -- who also suggested this handy link for future readings. As mentioned, I also count watching instructional videos as "reading" which, along with blog posts, tutorials, etc. have been a primary resource for helping me learn to code.

I've learned a lot and enjoyed the books that I've read and view it as a valuable resource for edification, growth and fun. Some of the books on my list for the future are Imagine, The Great Gatsby [I know, I should have read it by now] and a long stroll through The Philosopher's Notes [a great find by Shawn!!]. I hope I can up my book per week count and definitely recommend that you go out and read. If there's interest I'll post a running list of books I've read and recommend/have in my list.

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot