Do you read broadly and deeply enough?

Do you read broadly enough?

Most people who read my blog know that I love to read. And I constantly write about reading broadly, but what does that mean? If someone wanted to start reading broadly, where would he start? There is no shortage of advice on the web on why it is important to read, and there are countless articles on which books to read. But if you were reading to get an education, where would you start? Would you only read books in your niche? Or would you read other books as well? If you wanted to learn how to generate creative ideas, where would you start? Is there a perfect book list that includes the books necessary to read broadly? These are all very important questions.

While on the Buzzsumo.com website, when you search for “reading broadly” or “reading deeply” or even “reading deeply” you will notice that not many people search for those terms. But when I searched for “reading books,” the top article that came up for the keywords is “BBC Believes You Only Read 6 of These Books… – How many have you read” This particular post has been shared close to two million times. Wouldn’t you love to have a post go viral like that? When you click through to the List Challenge website, you are greeted with these words:

“The BBC believes that most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books below. How many have you read? [I have read 37]

(Tip: The average Goodreads member has read 23 out of 100 books on this list).

Interestingly, the BBC never actually made this declaration. The list was created by an unknown individual and spread around the internet as a meme called The BBC Book List Challenge. It was probably loosely based on another list of books that was the result of a survey carried out in 2003 by the BBC in which three quarters of a million people voted to find the nation's best-loved novels of all time. Here's a link to that list: BBC's The Big Read – Best Loved Novels of All Time”

If you pay special attention to the novels on the list, they are from different genres, but most of them are written by authors from Western countries. To me, if you read the 100 books on the list, you couldn’t say that you read broadly because there isn’t enough diversity, since they are all novels. On the other hand, the books on the list, are not only diverse in subject, but in level of difficulty to read, so reading them would be a very good thing because they would give your mind an intellectual workout.

For some time now, I have tried to unpack what it means to read broadly, and one of the ways that I have done it, is to look at the personal library of successful people. In fact, I did a series here on the blog. I was able to do this because Library Thing has a legacy library project that it is working on.

Related Post

F Scott Fitzgerald Personal Library
Jack Layton Personal Library
Marilyn Monroe Personal Library
CS Lewis Personal Library – The Shaping of a Mind
Oscar Wilde Personal Library – The Shaping of a Mind
Emily Dickinson Personal Library
Katharine Hepburn Personal Library
Frederick Douglass Personal Library
The Personal Library of George Washington
The Personal Library of Carl Sandburg
Why read, what to read, and Teddy Roosevelt
Books That Changed the World by Andrew Taylor, a Review
The Great Books: A Journey Through 2500 Years of the West’s Classic Literature

What I did isn’t scientific, but I looked at the names of the books in the personal libraries, and I immediately noticed that these successful people had a hobby, which was clearly evident in the titles of some of the books, and they had books on their craft. So writers had many books on writing, grammar, poetry and so on. Politicians had books on the constitution, pressing issues such as climate change and Medicare, actresses had books about the films or plays they starred in, as well as biographies about them. These successful people also loved to read biographies, autobiographies, collections of letters/correspondences, diaries, travelogues, and there were a lot of fiction in their personal library as well. This gives us an inkling into what it means to read broadly. They had books from authors born in various countries, but there was a limitation to reading globally because back in the day, not many foreign titles were translated into English, which is still a problem today. These people had many of the popular classics such as Homer’s Odyssey, as well as the poetry of Walt Whitman and Edgar Allen Poe.

So my definition of reading broadly is reading books from different genres, of varying levels of difficulty to digest, by authors from different cultures, and both fiction and non-fiction. This is a lot to digest. What I think is that, even though there are specific titles in the personal libraries, some focus should be placed on the types of books being read, and from what discipline. This would enable a reader to incorporate some new titles into their repertoire of books to read.

Before starting my Virtual Literary World Tour, I discovered a list of the Best Books of All Time (the name of the list has since changed). It’s a great list, but it doesn’t include any books by Canadian authors or those from the Caribbean. For me personally, to read broadly, I am pulling books from many lists and you can take a look at the list of books I am reading this year.

Book Lists for the Serious Reader

Lists

1. Best Books of All Time
2. The Harvard Classics (Bookshelf)
3. 100-Best-Books-for-an-Education
4. Using Rare Books to Inspire Learning Part 1: Anthropology – Diaries
5. Using Rare Books to Inspire Learning Part 2: Drama to Travel

Books

1. Books That Changed The World: The 50 Most Influential Books in Human History, Andrew Taylor
2. The Great Books: A Journey through 2,500 Years of the West's Classic Literature, Anthony O'Hear
3. 501 Must-Read Books, editor Emma Beare
4. The “Big Read”: The Book of Books
5. Who the Hell Is Pansy O'Hara?: The Fascinating Stories Behind 50 of the World's Best-Loved Books, Jenny Bond & Chris Sheedy
6. The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Times, Daniel S. Burt

If you want to start reading broadly because you want to get an education, or generate more creative ideas, browse the book lists and the books mentioned in the infographics. You can’t go wrong with those choices.

Get Started Here – I want to help you get started on your learning journey. Join the Facebook Group for the Reading Challenge and The Invisible Mentor 2015 Reading Challenge today, connecting the ideas from the books you read!

In the meantime, THANK YOU for your time… Thank you for sharing this post, and thank you for connecting with me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest! What was your biggest takeaway from today?

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