How to Become an Insighted Reader (with Pictures)

2024 Author: Jason Gerald | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 10:50

If you want to be a broad-minded person in reading, then to quote the phrase from William Faulkner, you must "Read, read, read. Read it all…". You can start from scratch, or go straight to the eclectic list of books you want to read. What's important is that you choose books that are lively, challenging, and broaden your knowledge. If you want to be an insightful reader, here are some tips and recommendations to get you started.

Step

Part 1 of 3: Reading Classics

Step 1. Read classics written before 1600

Reading classics is the most important thing you need to do to become an insightful reader. If you want to have a solid foundation in understanding the books you read, don't miss out on some of the oldest plays, poems and oral stories ever written. Keep in mind that novels weren't very popular until the 18th century, so you won't see any novels on this list. Without reading Homer's poetry or Sophocles' plays, you cannot call yourself a broad-minded reader. Here's a list to help you get started:

• Epic of Gilgamesh (Author unknown) (circa 18th and 17th centuries BC)
• Homer's Iliad and Odisseia (850–750 BC, 8th century BC)
• "Oresteia" by Aeschylus (458 BC)
• Oedipus the King by Sophocles (430 BC)
• Euripides' Medeia (431 BC)
• Virgil's Aeneid (29–19 BC)
• One Thousand and One Nights (Author unknown) (c. 700–1500)
• Beowulf (Author unknown) (975-1025)
• The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (11th century)
• Dante's Comedy Divinity (1265–1321)
• Boccaccio's Decameron (1349–53)
• Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (14th century)

Step 2. Read classic books written from 1600 to 1913

While there is a lot of material to read in such a short period of 300 years, reading books from the period when the novel first appeared to the beginning of World War I will give you an idea of the development of the novel and other works created throughout the Romanticism and Victorian periods, as well as an understanding of the realism style, which is the traditional style of the novel, which was later replaced by the emergence of the Modernism period and the disappointment of World War I. Here is a list of books that you can start reading:

• Cervantes' Don Quixote 1605 (part 1), 1615 (part 2)
• Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and William Shakespeare's Macbeth (1593, 1594, 1595, 1596, 1598, 1599, 1599, 1600, 1604, 1605, and 1605)
• Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)
• Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1832)
• Le Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac (1835)
• The Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol (1842)
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
• Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851)
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1856)
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1861)
• War and Peace and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1869 and 1877)
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)
• Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866 and 1880)
• Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871)

Step 3. Read classics from 1914 to 1995

This period saw the emergence of the Modernism period, an experimental form of fiction, as well as a rebellion against traditional narrative styles. Reading classics from this time period will help you gain an understanding of the dramatic transformation of literature in the 20th century. Here's a list of books you can read:

• Searching for Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1913–27)
• James Joyce's Ulysses (1922)
• The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (1924)
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
• The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925)
• Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1925 and 1927)
• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929)
• The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)
• The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943)
• Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)
• The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (1951)
• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952)
• The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1926 and 1952)
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
• Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo (1955)
• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958)
• Rabbit, Run by John Updike (1960)
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
• The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962)
• Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963)
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967)
• Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
• Read contemporary classics written from the 1980s to the present. While it's not certain whether the following books will last long or not, there are some contemporary novels that are so popular that it feels as though everyone has read them. In fact, reading the books below will probably make you feel like the most insightful of readers because people will talk about them a lot. Here are some books to read:

Step 4. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)

• The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (1984)
• Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (1997)
• American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1997)
• The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy (1997)
• Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee (1999)
• Zadie Smith's White Teeth (year 2000)
• Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001)
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay by Michael Chabon (2001)
• Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (2002)
• Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (2003)
• The Known World by Edward P. Jones (2003)
• Marilynne Robinson's Gilead (in 2004)
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (2007)
• 2666 by Roberto Bolaño (year 2008)
• Swampland! by Karen Russell (in 2011)

Part 2 of 3: Becoming an Insighted Reader in Other Genres

Step 1. Read a short story

Short stories are a fascinating genre in and of themselves, and if you really want to be an insightful reader, you need to read short stories by classic as well as contemporary poets. When it comes to short stories, it's better to read the work of a particular author than to read a collection of short stories, so here is a list of classic short story writers as well as contemporary writers that you can try reading:

• Poets of classic short stories (1600 - 1950): Edgar Allan Poe, Anton Chekhov, Ernest Hemingway, Jorge Luis Borges, Kafka, Isaac Babel, John Updike, Katherine Mansfield, Eudora Welty, and Ray Bradbury.
• Contemporary short story poets: (1950 - Present): Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, Donald Barthelme, Tim 'O Brien, George Saunders, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Diaz, Z. Z. Packer, Joyce Carol Oates, and Denis Johnson.

• Classic Short Story Collection:

  • In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (1925)
  • A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor (1953)
  • What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver (1981)
  • Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson (1992)
  • Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (1999)

Step 2. Read the play

If you want to be broad-minded in reading, you need to read the works of classical playwrights. While Shakespeare is the ultimate playwright you should know, his name has been on the list before. But there are contemporary plays and other less contemporary plays that you should read if you want to be called a broad-minded reader. Take a look at the following list:

• All of Shakespeare's works, including Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Much Ado About Nothing (1606, 1597, and 1599)
• Hedda Gabler and A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen (1890 and 1879)
• The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde (1895)
• Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmund Rostand (1897)
• Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and Uncle Vanya (1904 and 1897)
• Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw (1912)
• Thornton Wilder's Our Town (1938)
• Death of a Salesman and The Crucible by Arthur Miller (1949 and 1953)
• Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1949)
• Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose (1954)
• A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (in 1947, 1944 and 1955)
• John-Paul Sartre's No Exit (1944)
• Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence (1955)
• Long Day's Journey into Night and The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill (1956 and 1946)
• A Raisin in the Son by Lorraine Hansberry (1959)
• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee (1963)
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard (1966)
• Harold Pinter's Betrayal (1978)

Step 3. Read the poem

While there may not be many people around you who talk about poetry unless you meet a broad audience of readers, it's important that you get to know both classical and contemporary poets so you can engage in conversation. Here are some books you can start reading:

• Shakespeare's Sonnets by William Shakespeare (1609)
• John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667)
• The Complete Poems by John Keats (1815)
• Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (1855)
• The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes
• The Poetry of Robert Frost by Robert Frost
• The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson
• The Waste Land and Other Poems by T. S. Eliot (1922)
• Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda (1924)
• E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems, 1904 -1962 by E. E. Cummings
• Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg (1956)
• Ariel by Sylvia Plath (1965)
• The Complete Poems, 1927 - 1979 by Elizabeth Bishop
• Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966 - 1996 by Seamus Heaney

Step 4. Read non-fiction articles

If you want to be a broad-minded reader, don't just read works that people wrote. You should also read some non-fiction articles to keep you informed of what's going on in politics, history, popular science, and whatever else is going on in this world. Here are some non-fiction readings you need to know:

• History
• Political
• Various magazines
• Memoirs
• Biography
• News

Step 5. Read popular works of fiction and non-fiction

If you really want to know what books people are talking about, don't just sit back and read Virgil's works. You also need to know what's going on in the modern world and read the literature for the beach or the plane or the book that Oprah's book club is talking about. How do you know what to read? Find out what people read on planes, on the beach, etc., and check the New York Times bestseller lists to see what books are on the list. Here are some of the popular books that have appeared in the last twenty years and that almost everyone has read these days:

• "The Lord of The Rings" by J. R. R. Tolkien
• "The Wheel of Time" series by Robert Jordan
• The Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling
• Any novel by Nicholas Sparks
• Any novel by John Grisham
• The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins
• The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
• Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
• Fear of Flying by Erica Jong
• Books by Bernard Cornwell
• George R. R.'s "A Song of Ice and Fire" series. Martin
• The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
• Freakomics by Steven Levitt
• Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
• Outliers and The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell
• Stephanie Meyer's Twilight Series
• The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho
• The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series by Stieg Larsson

Part 3 of 3: Making Reading More Fun

Step 1. Set a target

You may ask, how can setting goals make reading more enjoyable. The reason is because you will definitely feel proud if you get something done. Start small: say you want to finish one book a month. Then shorten the time to one book in two weeks. Once you're really addicted to reading, you can finish one book a week-or even two. Make a list of the books you want to read and follow the list. That way you'll be reading more and more in an instant.

Setting goals will also prevent you from wasting time doing less productive things. Let's say you want to finish Ulysses' book on the weekend but the Bad Girls Club show is playing on TV. Say goodbye to bad girls, and welcome the culture

Step 2. Go through a list of the 100 best books

Modern Library, Amazon, Time magazine and the New York Times put out great lists of the 100 best books that will make you feel even more proficient at reading. You will feel very broad-minded and proud of yourself when you look at a book list and cross out the books you have read one by one. Take a look at the following lists for more references:

• Modern Library's 100 Best Novels List.
• Time Magazine's List of the Best Novels of All Time.
• The Guardian's list of the 100 Best Novels of All Time.
• Read books by Nobel laureate authors. Check out the list of authors here:
• Village Voice's list of the best books from the past decade, by genre.

Step 3. Listen to the audiobook

Create an account at Audible.com or start listening to books you borrow from your local library. Listening to audiobooks is a great way to gain insight when you're feeling too tired to pick a book and read. You can also listen to audiobooks in the car, which is the perfect way if you're traveling long distances to work, or with your iPod while walking. In no time you'll be looking forward to the long commute to work instead of hating it!

Before buying or renting a book, see if you can listen to a sample to make sure you like the sound of the person reading the book. If you find the sound distracting, the book will feel slow to read

Step 4. Purchase a Kindle

While the Kindle can cost upwards of $1,300,000, you'll save money more quickly by buying the books it offers at a discount. You can buy classic novels, such as works by Henry James, for under Rp. 13,000, and depending on the book, you can buy contemporary novels at a discount of 10 to 25% off the store price. Buying a Kindle also allows you to be able to immediately download a book when the urge to read comes, rather than waiting for the right time to go to the bookstore.

If you have a Kindle, you can also preview a sample chapter of a book before you buy it, so you can still browse through the books a bit

Step 5. Reward yourself with a fun book

While it's important to be an insightful reader, it's also important to have fun while reading. What's your weak point-a cheesy detective novel, a Harlequin romance, or a suspense story? Whatever type of book you really enjoy reading, don't leave it just to read the works of Charles Dickens. Instead, give yourself a reward: for example, every time you finish a novel or classic literature, you can read a thriller, a romance at the beach, or whatever book in the genre you enjoy the most.

Step 6. Create or join a book club

Being part of a book club will not only help you make friends with other readers, it will show you a wider variety of books and give you a tight deadline to finish reading, as well as time to think about what the book means to you. Book clubs will keep you from switching from one book to the next without taking the time to think about what it means.

In most book clubs, you'll have the opportunity to choose books for club members to read, so you can share your favorite authors with other members

Step 7. Create an account on the Goodreads website

If you create an account on the Goodreads website, you can create a list of books you have or want to read, as well as interact with other book lovers. Creating an account there costs nothing and will connect you with more books and book readers. Most importantly, you will feel excited to read, so create an account today!

Step 8. Be the best reviewer on Amazon

Create an account on Amazon, if you don't already have one, then start reviewing all the great books you've read. After reviewing a wide variety of books and writing interesting and thoughtful reviews, you'll have the opportunity to become a top reader status. If you do manage to become the best reader, you will receive perks such as discounted prices and the opportunity to read a book before its official launch date.

Even if you don't get top reader status, taking the time to review the books you've read will help you think about what your reading means

Step 9. Spend time with other knowledgeable readers

Spending time with people who love to read, whether they're coworkers or members of your book club, will give you more ideas about the next book to read, as well as give you more ideas about what's currently popular. There's no point in being broad-minded in reading if you can't use your insights to have interesting discussions with other people.

Step 10. Listen to podcasts

You can download free podcasts, such as the New Yorker Fiction podcast, or the podcast from KCRW's weekly show Bookworm, to hear authors read a section of their favorite book or hear authors discuss a new release they've had. You can also find news from podcasts and listen to works from Chekhov's stories to classic speeches from American history, such as the Gettysburg Speech. Try listening to this podcast for more insight without reading a single word:

• Podcasts from New Yorker Fiction
• Bookworm from KCRW
• Selected Shorts from PRI
• This American Life from WBEZ Chicago
• American Abroad from PRI
• Great Speeches in History podcast from LearnOutLoud
• New York Times Book Review Podcast

Tips

• If you want to have fun reading, read books that are at your reading level (books that you do understand), but at the same time, if you want to improve your skills, you can always try to read and understand more difficult books.
• Don't be afraid to read children's books.
• Reading will also improve your vocabulary.
• Don't be afraid to show your reading to those around you. Books are great conversation starters, and you can show off your newly acquired knowledge.
• Reading something to look smart is not a good idea, you have to feel good about reading.
• Read everything.
• If you hate and will continue to hate reading, but you still want to appear insightful, the best sources for you are Wikipedia, Google, and Sparknotes. That way you can read the summary of the book without actually reading the book.