40oz

As a quiet misanthropic person I always found it kinda peculiar that I never really took into reading books as some people with similar traits do. It seems like the type of things most people like me get into, but many of my experiences with books often ended pretty quickly with the author writing too heavily into detail about seemingly innocuous things without really developing the plot. Or if the plot was developing, it must have been going over my head. For that reason, I find it kinda weird that novelists are celebrated so much as I get much more entertainment value from short stories and poetry. Maybe it's just a great accomplishment, but for what its worth, I feel a similar and more effective way of telling stories can be accomplished in less paper.

Still yet, I've never really picked up many books. While I really like the idea of having shelves loaded with books and an endless supply of reading material, Books always seem like commitments. Like TV series, sometimes a show can grab you with a colorful plot and interesting characters, then towards the later seasons, the plots don't seem to be going anywhere and there are filler episodes to take up time before the next set of events occurs. I don't want to feel like my time is wasted.

However, my time spent in my college classes helped me to discover a newfound love for writing -- more specifically, taking notes. I managed to find some effective tips at taking notes and outlining your notes in a neat legible format. I've used this as an opportunity to learn and have recently become engrossed in watching documentaries with a composition book and pencil in hand, and jotting down things I found interesting as if I were studying it for a quiz. In the end, the writing helps me retain the information better, even without any intention of reading and studying the notes later. It just helps me feel more worldly and understanding of different viewpoints about controversial issues and history and science that I didn't understand before. Youtube has been a surprisingly thorough and bountiful resource for this. Tomorrow I'll be buying a fat stack of composition books and a pack of freshly sharpened Ticonderoga pencils from the dollar store to fill with notes from all the documentaries I recently added to my list.

I believe this somehow fueled my interest in reading lately. A recent epiphany reminded me that with the internet, you can pretty much learn anything in the world as long as you know what questions to ask (and can identify a biased source when you see it!). Now I've been dedicating a couple hours each day to actively fill my brain with things I didn't know the day before, and spending other time throughout the day listening around for things I don't understand, and embracing the fact that I really don't have a thorough understanding of it and that I should educate myself about it. Recently I've thoroughly studied how the economy is powered, the biography of Donald Trump so I can have a better understanding of whether or not he would be a good president other than looking like a moron, how a car engine works so I can understand what the fuck is going on under the hood of my car that makes it go, statistics related to climate change over the last century and natural disasters that might await us in the future, etc.

The thing about the internet is that it can sometimes be hard to find reputable sources of information. But if you're a writer and you can get your book published, then you're probably more credible than the average blogger. Websites like gutenberg.org is loaded with digital texts from political figures, scientists, and other reputable writers. And for fictional stories with strong ethical and moral messages involved, sparknotes.com has many thorough chapter summaries to breeze through and understand the underlying message being communicated. And if I really like a book, I might purchase it, or better yet, listen to the audiobook on Youtube or Audible while playing Doom.

Listening to audiobooks is hardly reading, but I've found that turning off the sound and music in Doom along with the focused actions of dodging fireballs and killing monsters has a really strong symbiotic relationship with listening and retaining information from an audiobook than I would if I were to sit in a chair and listen to the audiobook alone. So now I'm subconsciously learning things while doing what I love to do. I've also embraced some pretty noble writers such as Dickens, Frost, Vonnegut and Orwell, as the stories they tell through their writing provides a lot to learn about the types of people you might meet in real life.

Anyway, for anyone who has always been a reader, good on you. You probably know a lot more than I do. And for those who don't, I'd recommend it :)