From Hating to Read to an Avid Reader

I tried beating my obsession
with reading for ten minutes and trust me, they were the worst ten minutes of
my life. Books can be more addictive than alcohol. If this is true,
why do I see people struggling with smart reading? Everyday I deal with people
who give me lame excuses like “I don’t like the quality of the book”, “My
back hurts when I sit for too long“, “I don’t understand a single word”, “I
don’t like the font of the content” and so on and so forth. This hare-brained
scheme just doesn’t work in the real life. There are well-devised levels to
develop your reading habit. You can never advance to the stage of a bibliophile
if you begin your reading expedition with top-notch authors like Paulo Coelho,
Jhumpa Lahiri, Amitav Ghosh etc.

Three stages of reading and the
best works offered at each stage are mentioned below. Continue reading if you
want to be the next Howard Berg. For those who don’t know him, he is the
fastest reader in the world (80000 words in 1 minute).

1) STAGE 1 (BEGINNER) – I
have heard people saying that they usually pick up a novel on the basis of its
thickness thinking that the lesser the number of pages, better will be their
interest in the content. This is level 1 of reading. You not only need
a book with fewer pages but also the content that grabs your attention. Remember,
as a child you  enjoyed listening to interesting stories like Hansel and
Gretel, Cindrella, Rapunzel etc. just because they grabbed and held your
attention. Whereas stories like The Poky Little Puppy, Love You Forever etc.
were dreaded as they are mindless and boring. Same is the case with
reading. Also, your mind is yet not equipped to deal with difficult
words. Hence you need to read works of authors who use simple and colloquial
English. Some of the best authors in this category are Agatha
Christie, Stephanie Meyer, Sidney Sheldon, Ravinder Singh, Chetan Bhagat, Lesley
Pearse, Nikita Singh and Durjoy Dutta.

I have also noticed that most of
the beginners usually like to begin with romantic novels. This is
understandable as half the the population these days is dealing with
heartbreaks and heartaches. Trust me, reading will cure your moroseness
with time. Just don’t give up on books! You will slowly
advance from romantic genre to interesting fiction and suspense.

2) STAGE 2 (INTERMEDIATE)
– At this stage, you are supposed to read medium-thick novels, say
200-350 pages long. The best novels to begin with are – The Immortals
of Meluha by Amish (personal favorite), The White Tiger by Arvind Adiga, The
Third Twin by Ken Follet (personal favorite) and The Godfather by Mario Puzo. These
four books will take your reading interest to an entirely new level. This
is the transitioning stage of your reading habit and you cannot skip it. You
can also read books by Ken Follet, John Grisham, Ruskin Bond, R K
Narayan and Khushwant Singh.

3) STAGE 3 (ADVANCED) – Now
that you have managed to scrape through the first two levels, the third level
should be a cake-walk for you. If you have religiously followed my advice till
now, this level won’t pose much difficulty.  In this category, authors
likeJhumpa Lahiri, Amitav Ghosh, Khaled Hosseini, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati
Roy, Paulo Coelho, Alvin Toffler, Dan Brown, Lawrence Sanders and Orhan Pamuk
are predominant. This stage offers you six major reads namely, Interpreter
of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (personal favorite), The Hungry Tide by Amitav
Ghosh, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott, The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, How to Kill
a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.

The titles here sound interesting
but some  novels are emotionally very draining. You need to do
some mindless reading and some smart reading to deal with such works.
Pick any of these novels only if you are mentally prepared to read some
depressing and philosophical stuff. If you are not, you can pick some
works of Shakespeare and Tolkien to be on the safer side.

Good reading helps you build
three things – smartness, intellect and perspective. If you ardently
follow this order over a span of three months (one month for each level), you
will definitely advance to the stage of a bibliophile. Don’t believe it? Try
and share your experience with Exampundit! Remember one thing, there is no
friend as loyal as a book. So if you can befriend a book, you always have that
one friend who stands beside you through thick and thin!