Read as much as you can
Reading is a major source for learning, so one must cultivate a habit of reading all the time, anywhere and anything. Nassim Taleb in his famous book ‘The Black Swan’ says how he gave up reading several newspapers in the mornings and it helped him read about 100 extra books a year. When reading, obviously we use subject area text books but if you limit your reading to those you will stunt your intellectual growth as well as possibly bore yourself to tears most of the time. Reading is about getting your brain working and so read anything that you can get your hands on from newspapers to novels to major text books to great works of literature and even comic books. Just as a little illustration some years ago now I struggled with how to help students see the difference between the notions of induction and deduction but light eventually dawned not when I was reading a learned text on logic but when I was reading a crime thriller called "All the Colours of Darkness" by Peter Robinson, so if you shut your mind into compartments you will miss great moments and deep insights.
A first step is to know the main authors and Journals in your particular subject area but then get going on anything that interests you. Consider the tiny list of available authors shown below and if you have never heard or read some of them then you will most certainly lose out by such neglect. You might note that many of these authors were banned, the knowledge in their books was regarded as forbidden knowledge, or suffered in some way for what they wrote, for example, Rushdie, Mahfouz, Voltaire, Machiavelli to name but a few. Some of these authors wrote almost 3,000 years ago and others are still living but these authors wrote for you, so don’t disappoint them.
If you read these authors or others you will often find the best times in reading is when you find something (and it will be often) that really speaks to you and it’s as if the author reaches out his hand to you with a precious gift, as if he or she wrote it just for you so be ready and eternally grateful for such gifts and if you miss them then you will miss out on some of the really great moments and thoughts that this life has to offer.
Aeschylus, Aristotle, Augustine, Austen, Francis Bacon, Balzac, Berkeley, The Bible, Boswell, Carroll, Cervantes, Chaucer, Chekhov, Christie, Cobbett, Conrad, Dante, Darwin, Descartes, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Doyle, Du Maurier, George Eliot, T.S.Eliot, Emerson, Euripides, Faulkner, Fielding, Fitzgerald, Gibbon, Gibran, Goethe, Grass, Haggard, Hardy, Hegel, Heidegger, Hemmingway, Herodotus, Hobbes, Homer, Ibsen, Ishiguro, Henry James, Joyce, Kafka, Khayyam, Kierkegaard, Lucretius, Machiavelli, Mahfouz, Mann, Manning, Mankell, Marx, Melville, Milton, Moliere, Nabokov, Nietzsche, O'Neill, Orwell, Pasternak, Plato, Poincare, Proust, Popper, The Quran (Koran), Qabbani, Racine, Rushdie, Rousseau, Shaw, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Spinoza, Sterne, Swift, Thoreau, Tolkien, Tolstoy, Twain, Virgil, Voltaire, Waugh, Wittgenstein, Wilde, Woodhouse, Woolf, Zola etc.
The vast majority of books are written and produced in the Western world with books in English from the UK and the United States amounting to more than half of all books published but wonderfully, other countries are catching up fast. In 2008 the estimated number of books published was about 950,000 for the whole world. It is a good idea to tell yourself that these books were written just for you!
Do not fall in to the trap of saying only books in English or Arabic or German or whatever are any use or suggest that they are somehow the best because they are in a particular language for that would be to make available knowledge equal in measure to your own small mind - if a book is any good it will in my view be good no matter what language it get translated into, if that is not true then I doubt its value and so should you.
Sadly, some countries severely restrict what can be published and there is no doubt there are bad books but education is the answer not banning and burning. One might recall what Geothe said when a friend made moral objections over a simple romance he had written called ‘Elective Affinities’, Goethe replied "But I didn't write the book for you, I wrote it for little girls!" Meaning the book is altogether wholesome and romantic and that only a moralizing old man could find anything in it to object to!
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