intro

Hello everybody. In today’s blog, I’ll talk about why you should read and its benefits in general from both facts and things that some speaker people had told me in some of the conventions that I’ve been in and obviously my personal thoughts about the topic.

I hope you enjoy today’s post 🙂

Benefits and Reasons for reading

Let’s say there are 3 reasons why people usually read. The first one is when you have to read for any kind of school or work, that type of reading is not considered leisure reading(obviously), it is something you have to do.I’m not going to get into details with this kind of reading.

I’m going to focus this time with the other two leisure types. I’m going to name them recreational and self-growing reading. The recreational reading is when instead of watching series and movies you choose to read a book or any written entertainment. This hobby can work your creativity, can stimulate your mind and can also improve your writing skills, that’s why if you are learning any kind of language you should start reading some books in that language first. You should read some books of your interest.

In my case, when studying English I ask one of my professors what book I should read. She recommended me a really good book called “American Gods” from the author Neil Gaiman. That book is my travelling companion. I started it 3 years ago and I only read it when I’m in an airport. In my opinion, It’s a very good book, it falls into the categories of the genres that I usually watch series and movies. Even though I travel back and forward from Toronto to my hometown, the whole travelling is something that stresses me, the waits, the gate changing, the delays, etc. That’s why I need to read this book. It transports me to a different world and it makes me relax while enjoying it.

I’m currently reading a self-growing book, that a guest speaker from a convention that I went recommend us to read and it’s called “Rich Dad Poor Dad”, from the authors Robert Kiyosaki and Sharon Lechter. I’m reading this book because it teaches you to change your mindset about the whole you need to study to get a job to buy a house, type of traditional mentality. The guest speaker told me something that got stuck into my mind. “When I read I am updating my mental software. I’m learning things directly from successful people”. Many successful people have their own book where they not only tell you about their success, but they tell you about all their mistakes and failures that led them to where they are right now. That’s why if you are really into some specific subject or if you really look up to some successful person and you want to know how they got where they are, read their book!. Be sure to read something from someone that is a professional in the area, everyone can write a book but that doesn’t mean it would be a good book or a relevant book. For example, if I wrote a book about “how to be a successful blogger” it will be like a scheme. I have been blogging just for less than 3 months and I am not someone that can tell you how to be successful at the moment.

The beauty of reading

When you read a recreational book, you use your imagination with the help of the author’s description to create a world in your mind, the character, how they speak, how they look and that’s amazing. In the written works you also get way more details than when those books get their own TV series or movie. A specific example is with the movie “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” we can see that Harry has a piece of a mirror that for the people that didn’t read the books (like me), didn’t seem like an important thing but for those who did read the books knew that Sirius Black (Harry’s godfather) gave him the two-way mirror to communicate with him. Thing like this happened in most books. In my case, I refuse to watch the series of “American Gods” at least not now, firstly because I have a couple of chapters left and secondly because I don’t think that the way I have pictured the whole story will be as good in the Amazon series as they are in my mind now. I might watch it , to compare my mind version to the version of the series.

On the other hand, when talking about the self-growing reading, you may find some of the authors talking in some conventions or some TED talks and they might talk about their books, but they are not going to go through the whole book and when you read the book(s) you can take notes, re-read some chapters and read them on your own time.

My experience with reading

I’m not the kind of person that reads every kind of book. I now read way more than before, it’s a bit hard for me to find an appealing book, but when I do find one I can’t stop reading it. I need to know what happened next. I’m lucky enough to have people that are avid readers that love to talk, so they tell me about all the different kinds of books that they read, that made me look for some of those books that sounded interesting and also give me knowledge about things that may be useful but doesn’t interest me that much. I usually feel very good reading, there is nothing better than the journey of taking a book and found a great story, I even read a book that told a scary or a thriller kind of story and I’m not into scary things. I didn’t know what I was getting into when I started it. It gave me nightmares because the story and the monster of the story were in my head and I imagine something that scared me but I couldn’t stop reading it because I needed to know how it ended. That’s the beauty of reading even though we are asked to imagine the same thing we will picture different things in our mind, for example, if I ask you to picture something that scares you, you might picture a monster, an animal, a ghost or something else but I’m sure it will be different from what I would picture when asked the same thing.

*Fun fact: Since I’m a multilingual person I had the luck to read the “The Little Prince” (Book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry) both in French and Spanish 6 years apart. I didn’t realize that I was reading the same book until 3-4 chapters. One of the reasons is that I read chapter by chapter in class with photocopies and not the actual book in French and when I read it in Spanish I read it in one go with the physical book. I know that the “The Little Prince” is a book that you can read in different stages of your life you’ll understand it differently but it is quite interesting that language could also influence the content of what you are reading and in some cases, information is lost or added in translation. (now back to the post)

If it’s so wonderful to read why don’t more people do it?

To try to answer this I’ll compare the information that I found from Chile and from Canada and later on I’ll give you my final comments.

According to the Frequency of reading books a survey done by Global GfK(Growth From knowledge) who did a survey to 1000 Chileans from different regions and households, and 1002 Canadians with the same differentiation. Chileans from high-income households are the ones that read the most, 30% every day, 25% once a week, 21% once a month, 20% less than once a month and 4% don’t read at all. In second place is the lower middle class(quite close to the middle class) which 20% read every day,13% once a week, 29% once a month, 35% less than once a month and 3% don’t read at all (GFK 2017).

Chile is below average regarding the frequency of reading (30% every day and 59% at least once a week are the global averages).

To my surprise, Canada is also below average but with higher numbers than Chile. The ones that read the most every day are the ones from a lower-middle-class household with a 32% followed very close by high and middle class both with a 30%, then the high and middle class tie again with a 25% once a week reading while the low middle class go second with 18 % (GFK 2017).

The reason why I wanted to compare household income and not age or gender. It is because while I was doing the research I found statements from people saying “I don’t read because I don’t have the money or because I don’t have the time.” Probably 10 or 20 years ago that statement was true, but in 2019 there are thousands of books online that we can read in our little devices that we carried with us everywhere and there are a lot of those E-books that are free. In these past weeks I even saw a couple of campaigns from the TTC (Toronto Transit Commission), to be more specific in the subways where when you connect to Wi-Fi they show you where to download E-books for free so you can read when commuting in the subway.

They have a wide variety of books to pick from.

My opinion

The real reason why I think people don’t read, isn’t because of the money nor time, is because of two factors. One is their lack of incentive from the schools and second but most important their family education and who we interact with. If you never see your parents nor friends reading a book, it will be hard that you’ll do it. I remember that my mum always read a book in summer or during the weekends but I only read the books that were assigned from the school until they assign a book that caught my attention. I also met some authors that were invited to the school who talked a bit about there books, one, in particular, gave us a brief summary of one of his books from a trilogy that he made and I liked the plot that much that I bought the book the next day.

My friend that loves reading has a family full of readers, he is always with a book. We now know the benefits of reading, we just need to start doing it and lead by example. If in the future my children or my nephews and nieces see me reading, they’ll think that reading is a normal thing to do, and they’ll do it. In the same way, your friends and family will do it if they see you enjoying the reading. That’s how I got into reading, watching how friends laugh, cried, got scared, excited and showed me other strong emotions just from reading.

Today’s post it’s a bit more extended than usual. If you have other thoughts about this issue please comment below or send me an email. I would love to hear your opinions and the name of some books that you guys recommend me to read. I hope you enjoyed this post and if you are not an avid reader, you can start now, it is never too late to do it.

Have a wonderful weekend and write you next time 🙂

References

GFK. (2017 April). Frecuencia de lectura de libros-Estudio global GFK[Frequency of reading books- Global GFK survey. Retrieved from https://www.gfk.com/fileadmin/user_upload/country_one_pager/CL/Estudio_GfK_Global_Lectoria_de_Libros.pdf

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