← The Read Well Podcast
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Eddie Hood
Hey, everybody, let's chat about books and whether or not they make us smarter. Now, this is a fascinating topic because I think we all go to the bookstore hoping to improve a little, right? We want to get better at life and being human. And so we buy these books, one, for diversion and entertainment, but two, because we actually want to improve at something. And the question today is, do these books actually make us smarter or are we just reading for our egos? 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. All right, welcome back to the Read well podcast. This is Eddie Hood, and I think we're on episode 93, 94. I'm not sure. But what I do know is, is that on May 7th, which is a Wednesday, I will be releasing episode 100 of this show, and I'm gonna do that live. And if you're interested in attending that, there's gonna be free gifts from my bookstore. I'm gonna be giving away coffee and all sorts of fun things. So stay tuned for that. And if you like the content and it has been helpful over the years, please take a moment to like and subscribe if you haven't already done so. Okay, let's talk about how reading actually makes you smarter. It doesn't. Actually. Reading doesn't make you smarter. Now, before you hang up or. Or leave or whatever, hear me out. It's not the book itself. It's not the process of reading the thing that makes you smarter. It's obviously the act of using the information that you're getting in it. But there's a problem that is preventing you from doing that, from getting the information out of the book. Couple reasons. One, we have been programmed by, I don't know, the social media and other influencers that we need to read a lot of books in order to equate to being a good human, an effective human, a successful human. And so we think that we have to read 50 books a year, one a week, 52. Or if we have to read maybe 200 books a year, which sounds like mass chaos, we don't have to read that many books in order to learn something. And so what happens is we get in this trap of having to care or caring more about the quantity of books than what we're actually getting from them. And if we are going from. I don't know if you've noticed this. Here are my James Baldwin books. These new editions that have come out are fantastic. I'm on a Baldwin kick. But let's say I just got done reading Go Tell it on the Mountain. Great book, by the way. And I don't take time to think about it because I've got a big goal and I want to get to, you know, 100 books this year. So the moment I get to, like, I don't know, 90% through the book, my brain is already thinking, hmm, what book am I going to read next? I've literally mentally skipped out of the last 10% of this book because I'm so excited and curious about the next thing. That's a real big problem. And what I find for myself is as I get to the end of it, I sort of stop paying attention and I start making plans for the new read. And as soon as I get done, I immediately pick up the new read and I go for it with sort of a fresh excitement. And then the cycle starts all over again. And it's a bit of a bummer, at least for me, that a couple weeks later, I don't really remember what was in Go Tell it on the Mountain. Now, I've actually read this book four times. It's very good. But anyway, here's the problem. If we're just going from book to book to book, we're not giving ourselves enough time in between to simmer in the book, right? To sort of marinate in the thing. That's maybe the wrong image, but you get the idea, right? You really need to sort of sit in that text. And here's a beautiful thing. Let's take Go Tell it on the Mountain. This is a story about a young boy who is raised in a very religious family, and he's trying to find himself sexually and doesn't know where he lands on the spectrum and how he fits into this family. And it's this beautiful book. It's a scary book. It's really great. One of the reasons why I love Baldwin is because he was so courageous in his writing about hard things, whether it was sexuality or being race or whatever, at a time when those topics weren't very open for people. So when you read this book, this is a text that is written by James Baldwin, right? I'm just using it as an example. I can pick any book on my shelves, but it is not yet my text. I haven't made it my own. And if I read the book, I Still haven't made it my own. I've simply read it. Now, if I were to close this book and quickly go on to the next one, I would miss a really big opportunity here to make the text my own. Now, what do I mean by that? To make something my own means to sit with it like you would a friend. Think about this. Think about the last person that you met and had them become your, you know, associate, friend, colleague, whatever. You know nothing about that person in the beginning, right? You might ask what their name is, what they like to do for fun. And then if it goes well, you start asking more questions about perhaps their kids, where they came from and so on. And if it goes really well, you might have lunch. And then that continues in a pattern until six years later, you're best friends and you're doing everything together. But to get to know that person, that relationship starts off at sort of a zero state point. And then it requires effort on your behalf of asking really good questions and paying attention. Have you ever been in a conversation with somebody where you're asking all those questions but you're not paying attention and you're just like. They're telling you your name or their name and what they like to do, and you're just sort of nodding, trying to think of the next question to ask, and then it dawns on you that you can't remember this person's name or what they like to do, and now you feel really stupid. This happens to us all of the time as we get to know the characters in our books, or if it's nonfiction, the concept of the book. So when you approach a book as a text, you have the option of leaving it as James Baldwin's text again in this example. Or you can make it your own. And here's an example of this. So I have read Macbeth by Shakespeare probably three or four times in my life. And every time I've thought, oh, that was fun. That's pretty cool. It's a. It's a story about a guy's sort of murderous ascent to the top, right? He kills the king so that he can become king and so on. There's a really cool spooky element with some witches. His wife is clearly manipulating things. Lady Macbeth is crazy, great, fun story. And I left it at that. I left the text in Shakespeare's world. I didn't do anything with it. Well, if you know anything about me, I'm currently in my madness because I'm not busy enough taking a Shakespeare college or a course in my local college and was given the assignment to do a deep dive into Macbeth. Of course, this was music to my ears. If you're going to give me homework, let me dive deeply into a text. I don't want to read 85 Shakespeare texts. I want to read one really well. And so my teacher gave me Macbeth and I dug in and I really duck in and had a great time with it. I put probably 20 to 25 hours of work into researching the play. I've never taken enough time. Macbeth this time annotated it. Then I watched three different movie adaptations and I watched three different plays, productions that you can watch on YouTube. They're out there like full production plays that have been recorded. Then I found over 20 different literary critiques on different productions. And my assignment was this. In specific, we're looking at the character Lady Macbeth and how her character has been played and projected over the years from Shakespeare's time to today, and how she's changed. Although the text hasn't changed how people interpreted it and made it their own. And it's fascinating what people have done not only with her character, but with this play. The deeper I got into this hole and I began researching the history behind it and what's really happening here, the text slowly started to become my own. Now what does that mean? It means that I can draw on that information for the rest of my life. First of all, it's like ingrained in my brain, much like the English language. If I need a word, I can think for a minute and usually I can find a word that will tell me or the people I'm speaking with, what I'm trying to say now with Macbeth in any kind of situation, if I'm talking about relationships or greed or politics or dishonesty or marriage, so many themes in this story, or we're talking about how theater has changed over time or so many other concepts. Right. I can now sort of dip into that bag and I can think about what Macbeth means to me and I can pull out the important things and I can use that information. So here's what I learned from that experience. That I can read a book, whether it's fiction or nonfiction. Try not to get hung up on that because you can learn from both. Again, I'm using James Baldwin and I'm using Shakespeare's examples. I didn't pick my non fiction books for this episode on purpose because I want you to know you can learn from fiction as well. Anyway, when you sit down and you open up those texts, you have a choice to make you can literally just read the book and then check it off your to be read list and quickly get onto the next one. Or you can decide to make it your own and you can do some studying. And if you choose to do that now, you don't have to do this level of work on everything. I don't, I don't deep dive like I did into Macbeth or into some of Baldwin's works the way I do in other books, right? But when you come across a text that is particularly meaningful to you and you really want to expand with it and make it a part of your life, not just entertainment, but to actually grow from it, then here's the decisions you can make that will help you first of all decide that you're going to read this book slowly, that you're not going to speed through it, that you're going to give it the time that it deserves. By that, what I mean is that it's like baking a cake, right? If you were to put the eggs and the chocolate, I'd have no idea how to bake a cake. But if you put all the ingredients in a bowl and you whip it up and you set the oven to 350, there's a certain amount of time that those ingredients have to sit in the oven or else this is going to go horribly wrong. If it requires 20 minutes, we'll say to bake the cake and you get impatient and you pull it out in eight minutes because you want to be effective, then the cake is going to be gooey and gross and undercooked. You can also sort of leave it in the oven for too long. Maybe you're baking this cake for an hour and then it comes out burnt and you've sort of like ruined it for yourself because all you've done is think about this thing. So there's an argument that you can probably do too much study on a book and now you've prevented yourself from being with some other texts that are important as well. But first of all, make that choice. You're going to give the book the time that is required. There's a certain amount of time built in to understanding the book. Well, you can't speed it up. There is no fast forward button. And if you're thinking to yourself, I'm just going to rent my book on Audible and I'm going to listen to it at 4x speed so that I can be super fast and efficient, that's not the way to do this. If you want to truly get something out of the book and make the text, your own. Okay, so you've made the decision that you're going to slow down. Well, now what next would be to get your note taking supplies out in whatever fashion? I think we're all caught up on, like, what's the right way to take notes? How am I supposed to do this? And my message to you is that it's going to evolve over time. Your note taking system is going to grow with you as a reader and as a thinker. And the way that I take notes is great for me. I have videos on that which I can post up here somewhere and I can put the, the links in the show notes for you, but take those as examples, not as, you know, biblical reference as the only way to do it. The most important part is that you start to do it and figure out what's working for you. But take your notes in your system, write down your thoughts, and then the most important part is at the end of this reading session when you're done with the book, it's again, not enough to acquire knowledge or to look at knowledge. You actually have to use it. So try and take something from that text and figure out how you can use it. For me, in Macbeth, it is going to always be that I'm currently trying to write my own novel, right? I'm writing a book right now that one day I hope to go out and get published. But the conflict that I found in that book, I'm using Macbeth and I'm studying the drive, the relationship between Macbeth and his wife and finding that very fascinating and using some of those elements in my own story to make it better. That's how I'm going to use Macbeth. Whatever you're reading, there's something in that book that you can use in your own life to make things better. Okay. Hey, I hope you got something out of this week's episode. If you liked it again, please take a moment to give it a like. Or if it's on the podcast, I would really love it if you could go give the podcast a rating of some kind. Let me know how I'm doing and stay tuned. Again, I'll be announcing soon, soon the books for my book Club. In season three, there will be 11 books we'll be reading together. And if you're interested in that, it's a small monthly fee, just covers the cost of the software so that we can meet together. Right now there's roughly 30 people on that meeting. It has grown. This year there's over 100 people in the book club, but there's always about 30 people online with me every Tuesday night, and it is a blast. So if you're looking for a good group of friends to hang out with right now, the cost is just $9 a month. It's not bad, and it's a great time. So again, thank you for listening and supporting the community. And until next week, as always, remember to read slowly, take notes, and apply the ideas. See you guys. If you'd like to take your reading to the 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.