How We Started Reading… and Why We Are Giving It Up Today

Inspiration from VIP libraries

Tell me what you read

Reading is not an old-school pastime. Even today there are plenty of passionate readers among famous and successful people. Will you let their example inspire you?

• Warren Buffett

  The well-known investor and financier reads every day – by his own account for five to six hours. His domain is newspapers and company annual reports. He once advised students at Columbia University to read 500 pages a day: knowledge, he said, builds up like compound interest. That answers the question of where he gets all the information for running his empire.

• Bill Gates

  The founder of Microsoft is known to read about 50 books a year. They include popular science and specialist titles, but also fiction. He regularly shares his recommendations on his blog, Gates Notes.

• Elon Musk

  Another familiar face from the world rankings of successful entrepreneurs is said to have read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica at the age of nine, and as a boy he could read for ten hours a day, mostly science fiction. So writes his biographer Ashlee Vance.

• Mark Zuckerberg

  The list of avid readers would not be complete without the head of Facebook. In 2015 he set himself the challenge of reading a book every two weeks and ran a public book club, A Year of Books. And although you would expect mainly books on technology or business, Mark’s scope is considerably wider. He likes to read about history, different countries, cultures and the like.

• Oprah Winfrey

  On her show, from 1996 onwards, Oprah regularly recommended books that had passed through her hands and caught her interest. Her book club outlived the show, which ended in 2011, and to date she has recommended more than a hundred titles.

• Jeff Bezos

  The founder of Amazon is an avid reader too. In his book about Amazon, the journalist Brad Stone compiled a list of titles that shaped Bezos – books that moved him forward in business, but also fiction. He has named Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day as his favourite novel.

• Stephen King

  One of the most famous horror authors in the world is also an avid reader. In On Writing he says that anyone who wants to be a writer must above all read a lot and write a lot. He himself reportedly gets through seventy or eighty books a year, and you will hardly ever see him without one.

That we need in order to read

8 basic skills

There is no single canonical list. This one combines the five pillars of reading named by the US National Reading Panel (2000) with the comprehension skills described by Understood.org.

• Decoding

  The ability to sound out a written word – turning letters into sounds and reading even a word we have heard but never seen written down.

• Cohesion

  The ability to understand how sentences are built and to connect individual ideas into a coherent whole.

• Comprehension

  The ability to understand what we read – connecting the text with what we already know.

• Phonics

  The ability to recognise the connection between a sound and a letter.

• Vocabulary

  The ability to understand the meaning of words, their definition and context.

• Reasoning

  The ability to draw conclusions from the text and connect new information with existing knowledge.

• Fluency

  The ability to read accurately, smoothly, at a reasonable speed and with understanding of the text.

• Attention

  The ability to concentrate on the text and hold in working memory what we have just read.

Learn the reading techniques

Different texts, different ways of reading

• SQ3R

  A sophisticated method of five consecutive steps – Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review – designed to maximise comprehension of a text. It was described in 1946 by the psychologist Francis P. Robinson. When to use it: with more complicated, structured texts and when studying.

• Skimming

  Quickly running your eyes over a text to pick up the main points and the gist. A widespread way of consuming everyday information of lesser importance. When to use it: a quick survey, a list of articles on the web, a first look at a text.

• Scanning

  A method for finding a specific piece of information in a text – a name, a number, a keyword. Ideal if you already know the general context and can happily skip the rest. When to use it: product descriptions, instructions, a shopping list, a restaurant menu.

• Active reading

  It allows a deeper understanding of the text. It is suitable for texts we need to think about critically and understand well. When to use it: new materials and materials we need to understand.

• Detailed reading

  Thorough analysis and word-by-word reading, also known as intensive reading. Each word is read slowly, with the aim of understanding both meaning and context. When to use it: detailed research, medical records, poetry.

• Structure–proposition–evaluation

  A method in which we first work out the structure of a text and its chapters, then its main propositions, and finally evaluate them – either in our head or in notes on paper. It is associated with Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book. When to use it: when studying and when synthesising information from several sources.