The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life

There was an article in the Washington Post a few years back about people who were aliterate-that is, they knew how to read but didn't. With television, radio, I-Pods, etc. bombarding us with information and entertainment, there seems to be a lot of non-reading going around. Steve Leveen's 'The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life' is aimed at least partly at people who want to get back into reading but feel in need of some guidance. Leveen is the co-founder and CEO of Levenger, a catalog company that sells 'tool for serious readers.'

Leveen gives a lively pep talk about (re)discovering the joys of reading, and he provides reading techniques many people should find useful. He starts by saying that in order to get more out of it, reading should have direction. This means spending some time thinking about which subjects are of interest to us and investigating which are the best books on those topics. Part of the fun of reading, he says, is developing a reading plan. The author emphasizes the word YOUR in the book's title. Whether you should read a particular book depends on how the volume fits into your personal list of candidate books. All this does not mean that one must stay rigidly to a reading plan. Slipping in a book one has come across serendipitously may lead to new interests.

The author suggests further that, since there are so many books available on most subjects, if you do not like a particular book after giving it a try, you should feel free go on to another one. Leveen also discusses other techniques to add additional value to the limited time we have to spend reading. These include methods to help us remember more of what we have read, joining reading groups, and listening to recorded books (for which he has coined the term 'ristening.')

Although he realizes that will get some people upset at the suggestion, Leveen encourages people to write in the books they read-comments, questions, notes about words to check in a dictionary. He is not suggesting that readers write in library books, but that people buy hardcover editions with wide margins in which to write. He says that such marginalia will likely be treasured by loved ones who pick up the book years from now and see how you responded to the book. My wife loves to find comments by previous readers. For my own part, give me a clean book. Notes are for notebooks.

Leveen also writes about speed reading and says that though the techniques may make one a faster reader, they likely won't make a person a better reader. 'Speed reading,' he says,' is no more likely to make you a good reader than the ability to run fast will make you a good tennis player.'

Throughout the text, the author mentions other useful books about reading, such as the classic 'How to Read a Book' by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, and the more recent 'Great Books' by David Denby. But Leveen's 'Little Guide' should be all most people need to get started on what can be the truly mind altering experience of reading. A final plus, the author directs readers to the website www.levenger.com/wellreadlife for further information about having a well-read life of one's own.