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You know, when I first started reading deeply, or at least trying to read deeply, I got really frustrated with myself because I felt like it was something I could not do. I felt like my brain was left, right, and center, couldn't stay focused on a specific idea for longer than a few minutes. But what I found was that through practicing the act or the habit of deep reading, it did, in fact, get easier. And today I want to talk about a question I got from a great member in my reading community. He asked, does this get any easier? I feel like my brain is scattered. I don't understand how you guys are making connections in these books. I'm just impressed that you are all finding ways to bring ideas from other books into this book and how you're applying it to your life. I can't seem to do that as a reader. Does it get easier? My answer to you is a resounding yes. And in this week's episode, we're going to talk about why. 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, everybody. Welcome back to the Readwell podcast. My name is Eddie Hood, and I have been on a freaking emotional roller coaster. I'm going to get a little authentic and raw this fine week. So here's what's going on. So this episode is going to be done in parts. First of all, I want to talk about this great question from this member. Does deep reading get easier? I'm going to talk about why and how. Then I'll give you an update on the bookstore, which, spoiler alert is not a great update. But that's okay. We soldier on, and we will fight the good fight, and it's going to be awesome. And then, of course, I will give you a book recommendation, as I love to do. Here we go. Let's get into it. All right, so first of all, here's the thing. I like to think about reading as a skill, not as something that you can innately do. I think a lot of us feel like because we learned how to read in second and third grade or whatever it is that we learn how to read, that, that is. That has been accomplished, and now we can read and we can read well. But the truth is that just because we can, you know, sort of decipher these things called letters and turn them into words and process Them. That does not mean we're reading deeply or well. It really is a skill. It's like playing the guitar. I used to play guitar a lot when I was a kid. I actually had a scholarship playing jazz guitar when I was in college. And I found that the act of sort of being a good guitarist definitely took a lot of effort on my part. I had to sit down and I had to run through the scales and I had to put my time in as a guitarist, and I had to really go through a program in order to advance myself. Reading is the same way. When you first sit down with a book, it can feel completely daunting to read something like Shakespeare, a foreign language. And it kind of is a foreign language, to be honest. That old Shakespearean English is difficult, to say the least. But it does get easier. And after a while, as you sort of sit with these books, they start to make more and more sense. And here's the interesting thing. You kind of come to a book like an empty glass, right? And you don't have a whole lot in that. That vessel or that glass to lend to the book that you're reading. But as you start to read, you begin to fill up that glass with thoughts, visions, ideas, interests, disinterests, all sorts of things. And they'll sit in that glass and you'll take that with you to the next book, and some of it will spill out and you'll forget it, but there will be a few things left in there. And when you open up the next book, you'll start to add to those ideas. And after four or five books, you're going to start seeing things change about your thought process. And it's really exciting. It's super cool to start to see yourself calming down, to start to see yourself making connections, learning new words, learning new ideas and concepts. Case in point. I don't have the book here. Oh, I do. We're reading an immense world in my book club right now. It's a book by Ed Young. It's a fantastic book about how animals, ourselves included, perceive the world. And there's a term in there by a German biologist from the early 1900s who came up with a term called the Umwelt. And the Umwelt is sort of that sentient being's perception of their environment based off of what they're capable of sensing and experiencing. So, for example, some animals can see in the dark, some can't. Some can smell things, some can't. Some can see colors, some can't, and so on. We as Humans are limited to our perception of this world based off of how our senses work and also who we are as a person. We have our own umvelts that we're carrying around with us. It's really great, really philosophical idea. That's a principle that, although I'm not fully grasping all of the scientific details in here, the unveiled is something I will keep with me for the rest of my life. And I will be thinking about how I am sort of engaging with my environment. It's a very philosophical idea. I share all of that to say that the unbelt is now in my glass, right? I'm carrying it with me and I will take it to my next book. I will take it to the essays that I write. I will take it to my conversations with my friends and family and so on. And so this is what it means to be a deep reader, is when you sit down and you start to really try to choose the act of practicing reading, you will become better. I wrote a post this last week about how reading must be chosen. I'm never going to accidentally read books, right? It's not going to just happen that I'm like, oh my goodness, I read all of these great books. This is fantastic. I actually have to make the choice that I'm going to have a reading hour of some kind. I'm going to study with my notes and my highlighters. Otherwise, I'm going to do the least frictioned thing. I'm going to choose Netflix or scrolling on my phone because it's easier. But the conscious choice gets me in this chair, gets me with my books, and that's part of practicing. As a guitarist, I had to choose every day. I'm going to practice for 30 minutes my scales, and then I'll practice for 30 minutes songwriting, and so on. So think about how you're trying to get better at something in your life. Maybe you are a guitarist. Maybe you're trying to learn to sing, maybe you're trying to learn to watercolor, or perhaps you're trying to learn to code. And you're a programmer. All of these skills you've always seen as something that needs practice, something that requires probably a teacher of some kind, probably a course to hold you accountable, and definitely some sort of rubric to keep you moving forward by sort of leveling up your ideas. Reading is exactly the same. Why don't we see reading as a skill that needs to be practiced? It absolutely is. I think if you ever sit down at a table with somebody who is a true lifelong reader and they Just live in books. The conversation is entirely different than somebody who just simply doesn't read books. Doesn't mean it's a better conversation or a worse conversation, but it is different. There is a layered sense of the fact that this person has practiced something. They've practiced ideas, they've practiced thinking. And that is just fun to talk to those people. I have a couple friends that are very storied in reading, very practiced in the art of deep reading. Man, I could sit and talk with them for hours. So to my friend in the community who asked, hey, this is really hard. How on earth do I get better at this? I want to be a good reader, but I'm just not making connections. It's not making sense. Does it get better? My answer to you is yes, a resounding yes, as long as you treat your reading like a habit that must be practiced. Okay, on to the bad news. We all want bad news, right? As you all know, I'm currently under contract to purchase a building in Bountiful, Utah, to turn that into a bookstore. Well, part of buying a commercial space is that you need to go through what's called the due diligence period, where you have inspections and you make sure everything is what it is because you don't want to buy a lemon. You don't want to buy something that is going to be a money pit. And so you do your due diligence up front to protect yourself. Well, I've been doing my due diligence. I've been hiring inspectors. We've been touring the property, and two weeks ago, I had a roofer come to inspect our roof. Well, there is a major hole in the roof, and this building has been having water leak into it for who knows how long. It's a large hole, by the way. And water has gotten down into the walls. It has seeped down into the floorboards of the building. And so then I had to bring in a mold expert, and he ran scans and did tests and all of his stuff, and there's just mold everywhere. And I cannot have mold in a cafe, in a bookstore sort of situation. And I thought, well, maybe we can fix this. Maybe we can have the seller pay for it, and because it's his building at the moment, he needs to fix it. But what I found was that, one, he doesn't want to fix it, which, that's his call. But two, I simply cannot afford to hope it's kind of done right and then bring customers in and get people sick and all of that stuff. And what I found is that this building, which was built in 1933, was built at a time when weatherproofing and weather siding and all that stuff that keeps the water out wasn't required or even used back then for the most part. And so because water's been flooding in, it's probably. If we take the siding off this building, we're probably going to have a host of problems. That was issue number one. The second issue was that the parking lot for this building has always been my biggest concern. There's not enough parking. I've mentioned that in several videos. And I thought and justified to myself, well, we can have customers park on the main road. I poured some. Some concrete for two other spots and thought, maybe that'll help. But then the seller is currently in a position where he's able to claw back some of those parking spots. He owns the property next door as well, and he's trying to claw back some spots in order to retain them for that other property. So now my parking lot just got smaller than it was before, and I'm already losing sleep over it. All this to be said, guys, I have been losing massive amounts of sleep over this building. My anxiety has been high. I have not been happy. And so yesterday I decided to pull the plug on the building. And I say that with a heavy heart. And here's the thing. I don't want you to feel bad for me, okay? It was a beautiful building. I have a dream. I'm going to achieve my dream. In fact, right now, with you, I am achieving my dream. I have an online bookstore@edgewaterbookstore.com that is thriving and doing well. We're teaching people to love books again. We're teaching people to take notes. We're teaching people to be thoughtful. We're spreading the joy of authors in my community. We've got live authors like Timothy Shafric coming to visit us in a couple days. So excited, right? And I will stay on the lookout for the perfect building and try to move forward with that when the time comes. Now, for all of you who helped me with my Kickstarter campaign, know that those funds are not going to waste. Those will not be frivolously spent. I'm not going to go to Las Vegas and, you know, throw them all on a roulette table. That's not going to happen. That money will sit in a savings account and it will be vested into the building in the future when I find one. Now, if by chance, I can't find a building because real estate costs are quite high, in Utah. Then I will commit to turning those funds into making the book club better, this channel better, anything I can do to make your reading experience better, and absolutely dedicated to turning this space into a place that is safe and inspirational in terms of helping us be thoughtful readers. So anyway, that's where that's at and I love you all. Now on to the book recommendation because it's been a heavy week and because I've been stressed and a little sad. If I'm being honest, I needed a laugh and I was wandering around Barnes and Noble a couple days ago and I came across this book. This is. I've never recommended a book like this before, but it must be shared. It is so good. It is titled All My Friends Are Dead. All My Friends Are Dead has a picture of a cute little dinosaur on the front of it, written by Avery Monson and Jory John. Now here's the thing. I picked it up because on the back it says here in accessible cartoon form, are the amusing existential predicaments of clowns, cassette tapes, dinosaurs, zombies, snowmen, houseplants and others as they each face the inevitable. Right. I'm in philosophy right now. I'm getting a degree in that for fun. I say that like a little oddly, because homework is homework, but I am enjoying the process. And I'm currently in a class on the philosophical concept of existentialism. So this book, paired with the fact that I'm in this class was the perfect fit for me. And it's just a short, like cartoon based book. I read it in all of two minutes standing in Barnes and Noble, laughed loudly because it made me feel so good. But it's all about different entities, from humans to bugs to trees to zombies to missing socks in your laundry drawer. All of them eventually having to face their inevitable end and how they're dealing with it. I just think it's hilarious. So I've got it available for you@edgewaterbookstore.com all my friends Are Dead. And by the way, there is a companion book titled All My Friends Are Still Dead. Okay. Hey, that's it for this week's episode of the Readable Podcast. Keep your chin up people. It's going to be a great week. We're going to create a great reading community here. And one day, yes, we will have a bookstore. Do not worry about that for now. Let's stay on path. Let's continue to read slowly, take notes and apply the ideas. See you all next time. If you'd like to take your reading to the next level, then head on over to thereadwell podcast.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.