Reading. Its Advantages, and How to Gain Them
One of the world’s greatest treasures and a blessing to humans is the ability to read. Reading is essential to everyone in order to gain knowledge, create a better vocabulary, and be more aware of what’s around you. However, some might debate that in order to gain the three items listed you must read certain books and avoid others. In today’s column, I will be giving my take on reading, its advantages, and how to gain them.
What kind of books to read
In my opinion, reading is one of the greatest gifts that we humans have. Throughout our lives, we read many different types of written scripts. Writing can be found in the form of comic books, graphic novels, novels, articles/columns such as the one you are reading, and more. In today’s article, I will be focusing mainly on novels and regular paper-back books.
Before I get into the type of books to read, I want to say that I prefer reading actual paper books such as the ones that you can buy at your local chapters or take out at the library compared to ebooks. Whilst ebooks are very versatile and complete the same tasks that books were created for (to enlighten the reader with a story or a lesson), the experience that one gains from reading a paper-back book is completely different from that of reading an ebook.
There is a certain classical feeling that you get when you pick up a book from the shelf and are able to feel the delicate pages in your hands whilst the aroma of ink fills your nose. As well to this nostalgic feeling, using paper-back books translates to less screen time when compared to reading from an ebook; something that we can all benefit from.
Now that that’s out of the way, I would like to stress that reading all types of books is useful. Whether the genre is action and adventure, mystery, or informational, all books provide some type of moral. This being said, I believe that the best books to read are self-help, biographies, and allegories.
Let me explain…
What we learn from these types of books
These three books are essential to gaining knowledge and from these novels, we gain three main things.
Firstly, we learn important and valuable lessons. Take the novel The Unfair Advantage written by Ash Ali & Hasan Kubba. In this novel, the reader learns about the MILES framework, and how to take advantage of their own unfair advantages. Self-help books give us practical information and lessons that we can take and apply to our own lives, in order to become more successful, organized, or whatever it is that the book looks to help you with.
Secondly, when reading biographies, we learn about people’s journeys and how they got to where they are now. Reading these types of books is good for two reasons. First and foremost, we learn that the journey is important, and we become aware of the truth that anyone can become successful no matter how they start off. Secondly, we become inspired to work harder and to reach our goals when we learn of other success stories. Let me give you an example. A few years ago, I used to watch the popular show Shark Tank, and every single time I heard the intro to the show, which briefly explains how the sharks got to where they are now, I was inspired to work harder to become just like them. Reading biographies is incredibly useful, and on top of the lessons that we gain from the stories of the main character, we also become incredibly motivated to work harder to become a success ourselves.
Finally, from allegories, we become aware of different lessons or meanings. For those that do not know, allegories are stories, pictures, or poems that someone can interpret to have a hidden meaning. Though the reader gains an understanding of different lessons, reading allegories also makes us more creative. Let me explain.
When we read, it is important to not take everything literally. Characters usually represent a greater fact or truth, and items can hold symbolic meanings. Through reading allegories, the reader is challenged to find out the hidden truth, and this can be done by analyzing the characters. We think a lot more in order to find out the lesson, and this makes us more creative.
In short, reading self-help books, biographies, and allegories allows the reader to gain new knowledge, a motivation to work harder, and they also teach us different lessons and make us more creative; something that is useful to us all.
Note to the reader: Please let me know your favorite types of books to read and whether you agree or disagree with my opinion. I love getting other people’s perspectives and I look forward to seeing them in the comments below. Until the next article!
