Skip to main content

How to Read Many More Books in a Year: A Short Documentary Featuring Some of the World’s Most Beautiful Bookstores

You don't have enough time in life to read all the books you want to. But if you change your habits just a bit, you'll be able to read many more books in the time you do have left than you otherwise could have. Filmmaker Max Joseph learns these and other lessons about reading in this short documentary, Bookstore: How to Read More. In it he travels in search of not just the advice of some of the world's most expert readers (or at least some of the most expert readers in America), but also in search of the experience of the most beautiful bookstores in the world (or at least in western Europe and South America).

Wait But Why blogger Tim Urban tells Joseph he would need to read for only half an hour per day to have read more than a thousand books by the end of his time on Earth, versus the single shelf he might read through with his current habits.

Eric Barker of Barking Up the Wrong Tree suggests that Joseph redirect his social media-viewing instincts toward whichever book he feels most excited about reading in the moment, and that he begin by setting his daily reading goal so low at first — say, just one page — that it's practically easier to meet it than not. (To quote from Moby-Dick, "What cannot habit accomplish?") Then Howard Berg, who holds the Guinness World Record declaring him the fastest reader alive, breaks down the techniques that can theoretically make each page go by in seconds.

But how fast do we really want to read? For counsel on the what and the why, Joseph visits the office of Ruth J. Simmons, president of Prairie View A&M University and former president of Brown University. She emphasizes the importance of reading not just frequently but widely, a condition that shouldn't be terribly hard to fulfill given Joseph's travel and shopping habits: in the video we see him visit a variety of highly Instagrammable (and drone-filmable) bookstores everywhere from Brussels and Maastricht to São Paulo and Buenos Aires. One of them, Lisbon's Ler Devagar, tells him to "read slowly" with its very name, echoing Simmons' description of reading as "forced meditation." That framing is apt, but just like visiting a new bookstore, meditation makes the true bibliophile think of only one thing first: all the volumes out there still to be read.

Related Content:

7 Tips for Reading More Books in a Year

The Last Bookstore: A Short Documentary on Perseverance & the Love of Books

A Secret Bookstore in a New York City Apartment: The Last of a Dying Breed

What Are the Most Stolen Books? Bookstore Lists Feature Works by Murakami, Bukowski, Burroughs, Vonnegut, Kerouac & Palahniuk

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

How to Read Many More Books in a Year: A Short Documentary Featuring Some of the World’s Most Beautiful Bookstores is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/2ROMYFW
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zamrock: An Introduction to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psychedelic Rock Scene

The story of popular music in the late 20th century is never complete without an account of the explosive psychedelic rock, funk, Afrobeat, and other hybrid styles that proliferated on the African continent and across Latin American and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 70s. It’s only lately, however, that large audiences are discovering how much pioneering music came out of Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and other postcolonial countries, thanks to UK labels like Strut and Soundway (named by The Guardian as “one of the 10 British Labels defining the sound of 2014” and named “Label of the Year” in 2017). Germany’s Analogue Africa , a label that reissues classic albums from the era, puts it this way: “the future of music happened decades ago.” Only most Western audiences weren’t paying attention—with notable exceptions, of course: superstar drummer Ginger Baker apprenticed himself to Fela Kuti and became an evangelist for African drumming; Brian Eno and Talking Heads’ David Byrne ( who ...
Post a Comment
Read more