Review: The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life: How to Get More Books in Your Life and More Life from Your Books

The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life: How to Get More Books in Your Life and More Life from Your Books by Steve Leveen
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

I remember Leveen's visit to the prior Readerville. I've been thinking about him and this book since discovering Note:Books, which should appeal to his thinking about how we read.

It's good for all of us probably to spend a little time thinking about what we read, and why, and how. There are a million books telling you what to read, but few really explore the mechanical process of reading, and of learning from what we read.

What have I learned? Well, if I spent more time reflecting on what I had read, and fitting it into a context in my head, and making notes on it, I would certainly remember more than I do. But, most of my reading is for the pleasure of being sucked into a text and transported. When I'm really enjoying a book I'm not thinking of anything else, I'm just there in it. For me, then, I'm much more likely to have something to say in a review about the nonfiction, while the fiction boils down to "sucked me in", "really sucked me in", or "just barely helped the time pass and I wouldn't have bothered to finish if there had been anything else available to read".

The shelves/tags idea is one I hadn't thought much about before. These days I frequently find someone asking me for books on a given subject, or for a specific reader, or other, somewhat narrow criteria. I'm using tags more and more, just to enable me to answer those questions. When the Possum needs to read something science fiction, and I like being able to make title suggestions in the YA/MG area that I loved.

It'll be interesting to see what sort of information I want to keep about books in another ten or forty years. Not a book I expected would go in the category of "it changed my life", although I suppose that is one of the delights of reading. That's all I expected it to be, cute maybe but nothing important. Leveen starts by offering up good advice on keeping lists and dealing with recommendations, suggestions helpful to readers who haven���t discovered the Ville, but old hat here.

But it���s the second chapter that really grabbed me, Seizing More From Your Reading. Here Leveen starts by offering a variety of useful study tips, and I started taking notes, thinking ahead to the days when the Paragons would need same. Before too long though, I was reflecting on how little I retain from the reading I do. Zooming through a couple of hundred books a year, I find myself unable to remember anything about most of them. Consulting my ���bookograpy��� (Leveen���s word) I can easily make a list of my best reads, because I am wise enough to mark them as I enter them. Although this past year I had so many great books to list, I ended up having to look at Amazon descriptions just to group them meaningfully. To say why they were so good was utterly beyond me. Even the occasional blurbs in my journal were unhelpful to restore memory. Thankfully, Leveen was able to tell me why I wasn���t remembering them, and how to remedy that problem.

Already I���m reading in a different way. As an English Lit major I retained enough of the text to write papers and answer exam questions, and out of college and into book reviewing I used post-it flags to highlight important text and took notes. For some reason, once I stopped reading professionally, I also stopped reading attentively. The loss has been felt. How many times since joining the ���Ville have I refrained from posting or even reading discussion on a specific book because I had no comments to make other than ���loved it��� or ���hated it���. Like most folks hereabouts, I���ve been grateful to other posters who not only recommended titles, but were also able to give me a reason for reading it. And still my posts remained content-less.

So, this is my new leaf. Henceforth, when asked ���So, are you reading anything great these days?��� I hope to be able to respond with a meaningful answer. Leveen���s book was great to me, for pointing me to an Emerson quote: ���There is creative reading as well as creative writing.��� Now I���m making notes, flagging quotes, and perhaps most importantly, I���m taking breaks during my reading to reflect on what I���ve learned and what it means to me. There will be books I���ll have less to say about. Fiction, for the most part, I read for escapism, not to learn. But at then end of the year I���d like to be able to make a rational statement on why I enjoyed, for example, all the Mallory series. Now all I can remember is that I did.


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