← The Read Well Podcast
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
Eddie Hood
You can grab any book off of your bookshelf and look at it and wonder if you'll actually understand it and if you read it, what you'll retain from it. There are a lot of problems with reading comprehension, and today I want to talk about the four levels of comprehension. Every time you pick up a book, you have four different levels you can achieve with that text. I've grabbed a couple off my shelf. I've got Uncle Tom's Cabins. We have a fictional book here on Writing well by William Zinsser. This is a nonfiction book. And then I'm going to be sharing some lessons with you from Michel de Montaigne's life in this book from Sarah Bakewell titled How to Live. Let's get into it. Welcome to this week's episode of the Read well podcast. My name is Eddie Hood and I'm your host, where I believe it's more important to read well than to be well read. So grab your favorite book, open up your notes, and let's get ready to learn something fascinating. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Read well podcast. My name is Eddie Hood, and I'm going to tell you a story about climbing a mountain in which I nearly died. I live in Utah, which is surrounded by what we call, and you call the Rocky Mountains. They're beautiful. If you've ever been to Utah, you know that these are these big, majestic mountains that are just capped with snow in the winter, and they are picturesque and they just call to us as Utahns. In fact, most people in Utah love to spend some of their time, if not most of their free time, hiking, skiing, doing whatever they can up in the mountains. They're wonderful. The problem with our mountains is that they do call to us, even when we are young, maybe especially when we are young, foolish boys, which I once was, believe it or not. And my story begins like this. My best friend and I, we were sitting at the dining room table and my friend said, we should climb that mountain today. And he pointed to this massive mountain out the back door of his kitchen. He opened the door, we stood on his porch or his deck or whatever. He pointed at this mountain and said, we should climb that today. I being, I think maybe 12 at the time, said, absolutely, let's go do that. We had no practice, no tools, no judgment of any kind as to what we were doing. We just literally got actually, we made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich first. We started with a PB&J and a bottle of water and felt that that was all of the supply. We would need to protect us in the Rocky Mountains. Now, this journey was harrowing and scary. I'll tell you some of the more terrifying parts as we go. But we'll also apply this journey to the four levels of understanding or utilizing and comprehending what you get out of any book, be it fiction or nonfiction. Okay, so the first level of understanding a book relates to the first part of any great and treacherous hike. It is what we call base camp. Base camp is where you sit at the bottom of the mountain and you look up at it and you're excited about this hike. You think, wow, we're going to scale this thing. We're going to have adventures. We're going to do new and amazing things with our lives. We're going to climb a mountain. That's kind of what it feels like to start a new book. You're excited about it. You are excited about the things in it, what you'll find and so on. And so you begin to just read through the book. And if all you do is read the book right, we're going to call this level one. This is subsurface learning. At its best. It is to look at the words and let them syntactically sit with you. And all, I mean, there is that you are doing a little more than engaging with the text, right? It's a lot like looking at the base of the mountain and envisioning it. You don't do anything with the information, you don't apply it. You just look at it. You just look at the words on the page. Or you just sit at base camp and you look at the mountains and you envision how great it will be to have this mountain in your life. There are a lot of books in my life that I have done little more than sit at base camp with. I have done a little more than look at the words on the page, closed the COVID of that well worn adventure, stuck it back on the bookshelf and done nothing with that information. Well, my buddy and I pull up to the base camp of our mountain on our bikes and we. I'm sure we had a bell that we rang on our bikes and this was back in the 80s and we parked them against a tree. I remember this tree specifically. It was a big pine tree. We have lots of pine trees in Utah. And we just started climbing. We had no plan of action. We had no route on this mountain. We didn't even stop to say which way is best. We just went up. We just started climbing up. Up was the goal here. And that's what it's like to begin a new book. You have no route, no map. Quite often you don't do what you know you should, which is look through the table of contents, get a sense of where you're going, make a plan for the book. You just start on page one and you begin to read. This, of course, applies more to nonfiction, which has a table of contents and will help you know the lay of the land. You don't get that luxury in fiction like Uncle Tom's Cab. You have to kind of start on page one. That's not always true, though. I like with my fiction books to do a little reading before I start. Try and find non spoiler information on the Internet where people can tell me how to prepare my mind for those characters and those stories. If I can't find it, that's fine. I can go straight to page one and just begin there. But yes, this is what it's like to climb a mountain and to start a new book. Now, about an hour into our hike, I remember regretting life's decisions. I got very, very tired. I started getting that stitch in the side of me, that cramp where like, everything just hurt. I couldn't breathe. I was sweating. In Utah in the summer, it gets over 100 degrees. We're in the desert, plus we're at a really high elevation, so the air is impossible to breathe on a hot day. I am, I don't know how many feet up on this mountain, and I'm huffing and I'm puffing and I'm thinking to myself, this might have been a bad idea. So this is what a lot of books feel like to me at times when I start kind of getting into them and I hit level two of comprehension where I have to decide if I'm going to actually finish this book or not, if I'm going to get through it and put the work in. And I want to point out there are two kinds of work in a book. If you're really going to get out of the book, the information, the lessons, the tips, you're going to have to put work into it. And again, two kinds of work. There's the work that's worth it, and there's the work that's not worth it. Some books should not be read. They're not worth your time. They're overly convoluted. They're. They're just condescending or whatever it might be. Other books are written really well and they're absolutely worth your time. But you're going to have to put some energy into it. Even fiction books, let's say you're reading Uncle Tom's Cabin or Harry Potter or whatever it is. If you speed read through it and you don't put in the work of imagination you're going to miss what it's like to walk in the hall halls of Hogwarts or to sit at the fire next to Uncle Tom and watch as the family gathers together and has these really meaningful discussions. You have to put in the work, right? So the decision has to be made for you to get to level two of comprehension in a book. You have to decide that you're going to do. I think that's why books mean a lot to me because they ask something of me. It's nice that they're entertaining, it's nice that they're there to help me escape. But even books that escape again require imagination on my part, right? I have to put energy into the thing to get something out of it. So if you're not making that decision, if you're not putting yourself into the book, then you're not going to comprehend it and you're going to stay at that level of base camp where you're just looking at words on a page, you're just looking at the mountain and that's as much as you're getting out of the experience. Okay, so you've decided to do the work. Now once you, once you start to kind of continuing to push up the mountain like me and my buddy did, we decided that we were going to push on. Now as we pushed on some bad things happened. There was a point in our trek where there was this really long uphill battle of rocks. It looks like a bunch of rubble had collapsed and what have you and created this big slide of rocks. Who knows how many thousands or millions of years ago. Our job was to climb up all these rocks which as a 12 year old boy looked like a ton of fun. All of that work and worry went away. I stopped thinking about sweating and being out of breath. Now because I had chosen to do the work. This was actually getting interesting and fun. So I was beginning to be in the hike. Does that make sense to you? Right. I was beginning to be there mentally and be present with it. The problem was as I was climbing up this sort of rocky pattern thing, I was halfway up and I heard a rattling sound below me. It's a very terrifying thing to be in Utah in the Rocky Mountains to hear rattling next to you, that means there's a rattlesnake. This has happened to me several times in my life as a kid as I've gone out and explored the woods, which we love doing because we have our mountains, I've ran into a lot of rattlesnakes and they're terrifying. You cannot see them until you're right on top of them. They don't make a noise until you're right on top of them. It is immediate danger. And what happens in that moment when, when it's a critical moment of the hike, I remember pausing and my heart was starting to beat and I, I had to make the mental decision. Even at 12, I was of a state of mind to do this, to just relax and slowly look around me and try to find out where the snake was. He was about 3ft away to my left and he was looking right at me. And I stood there and I had a conversation with myself about what I should do in that moment. I knew that moment was critical. I knew that my life depended on that moment. If I got this wrong, the only person who could help me was another 12 year old boy. And we were up on this mountain, which by the way, our parents had no idea we'd left. We told nobody, we left no notes. We were not the smartest of young men. So if that snake were to have bitten me, I would have died and we would not be having this conversation right now. Here's the lesson from that moment though. I learned that in crucial moments, your brain knows this is a crucial moment. Your brain is really good at identifying. Hey, pay attention right here. This thing matters. There's a sense of adrenaline at times. There's a sense that like mentally you're just aware that you are in the presence of something you should care about. And for me that was the rattlesnake. But when you're in a really good book, there is going to be a point where your brain goes, hey, this thing right here is really important. Now you have the next decision to make. Do you remember the previous decision was to decide if you were going to put the work into the book or not. You made the decision, you're sticking with it. Now there are going to be several points in that book where you're going to have rattlesnake moments. Something is going to happen in that book and your brain's going to go, hey, this matters right here. This is important to you and your life. Don't screw this up. Unfortunately, most of us screw this part up. We just be like, ah, I'm just going to keep reading. I'll remember this part. It's so important to me, I will remember it. That's not going to happen. What you need to do is become a committed learner. You can take notes in your books. I personally believe it's just fine to write in books. In fact, for me, a book is a friend to think with. It is somebody to have conversations with. So I write in my books. I flag my books. I have a whole highlighting system in my books. I love to have conversations with my authors. This book here, William Zinser, he's one of the greatest writing teachers ever. This book cost me $24. No, $19 and 99 cents. Now, I get that that's a lot of money. It really is a lot of money. But for $20, I can sit with one of the world's greatest writers. I can learn at his feet. I can write notes and take direct annotation to the things he's saying. And then I can keep this little packet of information with me everywhere I go. Anytime I want to write, I can open it up and I can learn from one of the best. So I believe that books are tools, not museum pieces. Yes, there are some books that are far too beautiful to write in. I have some of those books, by the way. They're behind me. But anytime I find a book that's worth reading, if I have the beautiful copy, I'll buy the paperback copy as well. And I won't feel bad at all. All about writing all over this thing. So books that I read, I don't know if you can see this online, but they are chock full of notes. I've got my tabs sticking out that mark all of the important parts in the books that I read. And any page I turn to, again, fiction or nonfiction, I have those parts outlined. This is a fictional book I'm looking at right now, Uncle Tom's Cabin. And yeah, there are notes in a fictional book. So I'll answer really quickly. How to think about notes, fiction versus non fiction, in just a minute. I know you're probably thinking about that because I get a lot of questions. But before I do, I want to point this out. Every book has rattlesnakes in it. Now, rattlesnakes conjure up a negative image. That's not what I want to do for you. I want to conjure up an important moment, a critical moment that is life or death for you. And I'm being completely outlandish right now, hyperbolic in saying that these books can save or ruin your life. They can save your life if you read them and Apply what they're teaching and they can ruin your life. If you read them and do nothing with it, how is that ruining your life? Well, other than maybe distracting you from some hard day's work, it really takes a lot of time to read a book. And if you do nothing with what you read, you're just letting your life slip away between the covers of books. Right? They really do mean more than just entertainment. Harry Potter has lessons galore in it. Stephen King has lessons galore in it. You can learn from all of these books and actually apply what they're teaching. Okay, so in a book, when you feel that rattlesnake looking at you dead in the eye and you have to make a decision, what do I do? Right now, what you do is you employ your note taking system. And I cannot tell you how to do that. Although I have. I have lots of YouTube videos on how I take notes. All I can do is tell you how I do it, right? What works for me. And if that works for you, great. If that doesn't, that's fine. Just start experimenting to capture your best ideas. I wrote an article a couple days ago about this and made the comment that my son's basketball coach often says, you miss every shot you don't take. And I would adopt that and say, you miss every idea you don't capture or you lose every idea you don't capture. So if you're reading a great book and you think, wow, that's beautiful, or I could use that to teach my child something, or I could use that in my work, right? If you don't take the note, you will lose this. You will not retain that information. It will be stuck between the covers of these books. When you put them back on your bookshelf, they will be gone forever. And all you'll have is some sort of vague idea that this book has some pretty great stuff in it. And you then begin to beat yourself up because you can't remember any of it and you're not using it. So the next level of comprehension is the decision to become a note taker, to actually be a student of these books. Now, if you're reading fiction, what the heck do you take notes on? Well, for me, fiction is learning about how to be a human. It is the process of learning love and learning empathy and learning how to deal with loneliness and rage and all of the emotions that make us us. Right? Fiction's just wonderful for that. You get to live in the shoes of random people and heroes and goblins and all sorts of random Things. Right. But all of them teach you something about the human experience. So I love to go through and anything that's particularly interesting or beautiful, I will highlight it and I will keep track of those interactions between characters. Because I want to be a better father, I want to be a better husband, I want to be kinder to myself, and so on. Fiction is about how you can be a better human. So don't worry too much about it. There's no formula. Just if something is a rattlesnake for you, pay attention and create a note for it. Nonfiction, of course, makes a lot more sense when it comes to making notes. Nonfiction is educational for the most part. It comes with a table of contents. There are ideas laid out in a specific format for you to begin to consume. So yeah, non fiction, it's far easier to figure out how to apply your notes and you should be able to begin that in your own fashion. Okay, we began climbing up this mountain. I got past the rattlesnake because in that moment I made the right choice. I stopped. I recognized it was an important moment. I took a deep breath and I let the rattlesnake calm down and I slowly moved away and walked up the mountain. If I had panicked or freaked out and acted incorrectly in that moment, I would have gotten bit and that would have been game over for me. Okay, so we're moving up the mountain now. And here's the funny thing about climbing the mountains in Utah. You look up and you see what you think is the top of the mountain. It's what you think is the top of the mountain. So you're setting goals for yourself and you're thinking, okay, in about 30 more minutes we're finally going to be to the top of this mountain. But guess what happens when you get to that bit? It's just a plateau. The darn mountains in Utah just keep going. They are bigger and bigger and every time you get to a plateau and you realize you're not even close to the top, you have this moment of like, ah, like self critical examination, like why am I here? Why am I doing this? What is happening? Those moments happen in books as well. You could be reading a really challenging book that is asking a lot of you mentally. It's making you really struggle with the concept, with yourself. Maybe you've got stuff happening in real life that feels challenging and that's pulling you away from your reading habit. The whole point of this section, of the climb of understanding is just to give yourself some grace. You cannot comprehend and remember and use what's in a book, if you're being critical of yourself the entire time, if you're always being negative about why you're not getting it, why you're not good enough, why it's not making any sense, if you've got that talk happening in your head, you'll slide back down to base camp. Because all you're doing now is just looking at the mountain. You're just looking at the words. They're going in one ear, one brain, left brain, out the right brain. Whatever you're just interacting with, with print on paper. That's it, okay? So you have to really control that narrative in your head. If you can do that, and every time you come to a plateau, you allow yourself to breathe and enjoy the view, then you'll get something out of the book. Now, here's this lesson really applied. I think you'll enjoy this. Rock climbers really make use of their plateaus. If you were scaling a mountain, right, and you're like, professionally climbing this rock, and you've got rope and carabiners and everything, when you get to a point where you're not hanging for dear life and you're not, like, you know, just hoping to, like, survive and you can stand on a ledge for a minute, what should you do? You should take time to anchor in at that point to, like, put in extra carabiners and really set yourself in well so that when you get up higher, if you fall, you'll simply fall to that point, right? You will have set a place for you to reset, which is important when you're climbing something hard, whether it's a mountain like we have in the Rockies, or a book that is really challenging you. So when you get to that sort of plateau, it's a really good time to hit pause and say, what have I learned so far? What has happened in this book that matters to me? Now, here's the fun thing. If you can anchor yourself in at that point by just getting out a journal and for even a paragraph, writing what the book has meant to you so far, the most important points you've learned, the things that you want to use in your life, you'll start to take that sort of universe of ideas and make them your own. And all of the sudden it becomes very concrete and you have now become a different person because you've internalized it. If you never stop to anchor in at all of those plateaus, if you just keep climbing and keep climbing, you never take a moment to appreciate and use what you're learning. Okay, so I like the end of each chapter as a plateau. For me, it doesn't matter what I'm reading. I like to always at the end of a chapter, just take a minute, just hit pause for a second and say, what was that about? What did I just learn? What were the big key takeaways? If it was non fiction or if it was fiction, how did the characters develop? What did I learn from them in terms of being a better human and so on? I'll write a little note and then I'll keep going. Now, finally, if you keep climbing this mountain, eventually, if you don't give up, you'll do what me and my friend did. We actually reached the top of the dang mountain. And you know what we did? We planted a flag. We planted a flag at the top of one of these mountains near our home. It's still there, I'm sure. And it was a chance for us to say, yes, we did it. And here's the beautiful thing about being on top of a mountain in the United States or in Utah. The view is magnificent. And very few people have experienced that view. It really is something spectacular to stand at the very top of a mountain, one that you've earned, right? I mean, if you drive up to the top of a mountain, that's different. If you take a helicopter up to the top of a mountain, that's different. If you have to climb up that mountain, it takes all day and you're fueled by nothing more than peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and water. When you get there, Even as a 12 year old boy, you will have your breath taken away. A good book will do that for you. When you get to the top of that book and you've put the work in and you've taken notes, you're going to stand there and you're going to look around and you will understand why this book is so important and you'll know what to do with that information. And that is the last part of comprehension. You have to take everything that you've learned in that book and do something with it. You have to do something with it. I think one of the biggest shames we have in the reading community is to read a great book like On Writing or How to Live a Life of Montaigne. Read it. Go. Wow, this was a beautiful book. I took my notes, I made the decision to work hard. I anchored in at all of the right points. But then when you're done, to close it and do nothing more than open the next book and keep reading. No, you need to hit pause and to really retain what you've read, you need to take some key ideas from that book and convert those ideas into action steps for yourself. So I'll give you an example. All right. On writing well, this is an easy one. It's non fiction. It's a book on how to write well. Shocker. I know. But this book helped me in my daily blogging attempts. So I have a blog@the readwellpodcast.com I write almost every day on the art of reading, slowly, reading well, and connecting with books. I took what I learned in here, made a series of tasks for myself related to my blog based on this book, and I applied them to my daily writing practice. It has affected how I write each morning, how I edit my work, and so on. So that is how this work has stayed with me and how I've remembered what Zinser taught. The harder one is Uncle Tom's Cabin. This is a book about slavery and how it's affected and torn up families. This is not a situation that I can relate with. I've never been a slave. I'm in Utah in 2025. I'm a white male. How on earth do I relate to this story? The way that I relate to the story is there are several ways here. One is it shows the story of love and how human beings can interact with each other and really care for the person themselves, irregardless of skin color, gender, or what have you. And that is something that really means a lot to me. It has taught me to. To try and work hard at really being open to everybody I meet, to not make snap judgments about people, which has been great because, you know, as you meet random people, it's very easy to like, make decisions about them based on the way they dress, on how they speak, where they come from, and so on. Trying to not do that, trying to see the world as Uncle Tom sees it, has been really helpful for me in my relationships with people. So that's how I have retained this book in my heart. Okay, those are the four levels of comprehension. Now I want to give you a quick lesson from how to live or a life of Montaigne in just a moment here. It's going to be very helpful. But I want to recap the four levels just in case you didn't get them. First is base camp. Base camp is where you open the mountain, the book, and all you do is look at the words and then you close the book and you set it away. You do nothing with it. You don't put work into it. You just sit there and look at it, right? You look at every page. That is comprehension level one. You don't get a lot from that. Then comprehension level two is when you begin to climb the mountain and it gets hard. Every book is going to have a moment where it gets hard. You start to think to yourself, do I want to stick with this? Do I want to put the work in? The answer, if it is yes, is the next level of comprehension. You are deciding to put yourself into this book, if it's fiction, to pay attention to the characters and use your creative imagination. Also to take notes. If it's non fiction, you're deciding to really take notes, to become a student of the thing. Now, the third level of comprehension is to watch out for the rattlesnakes once and to set your plateaus right. So once an important moment happens in the book, not to tell yourself I'll remember it, that's a lie, you won't. But instead to hit pause and to make a good note that you can keep with you in the book, okay? And at the end of each sort of plateau or chapter, to take a moment and write a passage, just a simple paragraph, about what you learned. Finally, the fourth level of comprehension is to be at the top of the mountain and to see how beautiful it is, the things that you've learned. But to take a few lessons from that hike and begin to turn them into real action points for what you do now. Every month in my community here, I always recommend one book. We are in February 2025 right now, and the book I have recommended is how to Live or A Life of Montaigne. This is a book written by Sarah Bakewell. Now, Michelle de Montaigne, that's this guy on the COVID was an essayist in the 16th century. He lived in Bordeaux, which is southwestern France. And he was this interesting guy because he began to understand the world and understand himself through writing. And he's often credited as being the person who created the essay. So if you hate essays, this is the guy you get to thank. I love essays. I don't care much for the high school ones I had to write. But now that I've left high school, I really understand the power of essays because they are short, succinct, and they get a specific point across. He wrote about everything. He was just so honest about himself. He would write about, like, embarrassing things that happened in the bedroom and why, to political things he couldn't figure out, to why his face looked funny, to just cruelty and kindness and all of this Random stuff. He was very authentic, and that's why he's fun to read. But the lesson I want to share with you. I'm going to pull a lesson each week out of this book through the month of February. Today I want to Talk on page 124. This is an essay in specific about skepticism and how Montagne used the philosophy of skepticism to approach everything in life. All that means is that he came up to everything realizing he didn't have the answer, and that's okay. Now, we don't do that very often. We all come to every situation thinking we've got it figured out. I know the answer. I've got it figured out. I'm well educated. Well, whatever. Montana practiced this form of skepticism, and there's a specific word called apeko E, P, E, K, H, O, apeco. It's a Greek word, and it essentially means, I suspend judgment. Now, Montana believed in suspending judgment and really trying to understand something before he would write about it. In fact, he used his writing to try and figure everything out. And even in his writing, he would often say, it seems to me that things are this way, or maybe it's this, but I don't know. He was very open to ideas. That's the lesson today, is no matter what we're doing, to be open to ideas and to suspend judgment until we've learned enough to be critical in our thoughts. All right. Hey, everybody. I hope you got something out of this week's episode of the Read well podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And until next week, as always, remember to read slowly, take notes, and apply the ideas. I'll see you next time. If you'd like to take your reading to the next next level, then head on over to thereadwellpodcast.com there you'll find daily posts on how to read well. You'll also get access to all of my book notes and tools for becoming a better reader. And as always, don't forget to read slowly, take notes and apply the ideas. Thank you for listening to the Read well podcast.