Reading 51 Books This Summer

Bill Gates reads 50 books a year. Warren Buffett spends five hours a day reading, and Oprah runs a book club where she shares her favorite book of the month with members. Most people have a vague idea that knowledge is the key to success; yet most people don’t take advantage of one of the oldest ways of acquiring vast amounts of knowledge about nearly anything in a very easy way: reading.

Warren Buffett says that the fastest path to success is to read 500 useful pages a day, and in a study of the reading habits of wealthy people, more than 1,200 have reading as a daily habit (from the Huffington Post). Aside from imitating society’s role models, daily reading has a score of other benefits including vocabulary expansion, memory improvement, and relaxation. For students, reading seems like a cornucopia of rewards. High exposure to reading different types of texts will improve your score on the SAT Verbal section far quicker than simply drilling questions, because the types of questions the Verbal section of the SAT tends to focus on are not drill-based exercises one can practice excessively and then quickly master, but rather ones that test understanding while reading like vocabulary in context questions or author intent questions.

Reading will also improve your writing dramatically because you’ll be seeing new sentence structures, usage of language, and vocabulary every time you read. You’ll unconsciously make use of these things as you write and speak, making you sound more erudite on paper and in person.

Lastly, this is repeated a lot, but reading does open a lot of doors for you as a person. You might get exposed to new fields that you didn’t know you would find interesting, or learn more about a field you thought you were stuck on to find it isn’t as promising as you thought it was. Expanding your knowledge base is always beneficial for you in society, because it will help you understand the world better and express your thoughts in a more communicative and educated way.

With all that being said, it was time to reevaluate my own reading habits. I was an avid reader as a child. Many a night would pass with me working through a stack of books from the library as tall as my hip on the couch, and my favorite birthday present I ever received was a full set of the Harry Potter series in paperback form. I read a lot of things, but my favorite subjects were general science and biology. As middle school and then eventually high school progressed, I got lazier, and then all of a sudden too busy to read anymore. I feel like I’ve definitely been missing the way reading sparks my intellectual curiosity and capability to learn things on my own, and I felt that this summer I should make an effort to pick up the habit again. I’m setting a goal to finish 51 books this summer, because I think I should finish more than Bill Gates does this year as he is a much busier human being than I am. This seems like a daunting task, but I’m not afraid because I can finish anything I am determined to.

Here are a few of the books on my list:

1. Knights of the Sea by David Hanna (write email to him afterwards!)
2. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
3. Factfulness by Hans Kosling
4. Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner
5. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
6. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
7. Collapse by Jared Diamond
8. Born A Crime by Trevor Noah
9. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
10. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
11. Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow (never finished this so it’s time!!)
12. The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham

If you guys have any suggestions, comments, or questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below. I hope you all join me on this journey- I plan to post book reviews every time I finish a book and a weekly recap to track my progress and overall impressions.

Happy reading!

stay achieving <\/3