How technology can help you reading more books

Who doesn't like the feeling of turning the last page in a book, the accomplishment of having read the whole book by yourself can be very satisfying. The problem is getting to the last page. Today we live intense lives and it's so easy to find daily events that prevent us from finding enough time to actually sit down and read that damned book. 

We are great at finding excuses and postpone reading it, "our future selves will find time to read it, I am too busy right now". That's how it can take weeks or months to read even a tiny book. I struggled with this issue for a while but slowly I am finding my own balance and over time I am increasing the amount of books I read while spending less time doing it. 

First of all, if you are like me, you are never going to find the perfect moment to sit down and read a book, there will always be something more urgent to do (which includes watching the last episode of "Game of Thrones" or "The last Kingdom"). Even if by miracle you manage to sit down, by the time you open the book you have exhausted all your willpower just to decide to start doing it, after only a few pages you fill tired and decide to stop. How many times did you do this? 

A way to circumvent this issue is to read in moments when you have no other options, for example while you are on a bus or in an airport waiting for your flight. Myself I spend 1 hour everyday on a bus, imagine how much I can get done if I consistently read each time I am on the bus..problem solved right? Not quite, I can't read just one book at the time, someday I have the mood for science, another day I want to read fiction and when I don't like reading neither I try to read something funny to cheer me up. If I were to satisfy my mood swings I would need to bring with me an entire library, not going to happen. That's when I decided to turn to technology to solve this other problem. Initially I bought an amazon kindle, that made things much easier for me. Also even when I did not have a kindle with me I could access the ebooks I was reading from my phone because I have a kindle app always in sync with my kindle, so I could effortlessly start from where I finished off. 

After turning from classic books to kindle I found myself reading books 2 or 3 times as fast, impressive right? Well, I am a bit embarrassed to admit that if before I was completing a book every 6 months, now it was "only" taking me 2 months. It was an improvement but I felt I could do better even if I was reading books in English which is not my first language (I'm italian). So I started  trying audiobooks.

In theory it sounds great to get someone to read a book for you, but I have to admit at first it was hard to follow a book, especially if you listen while doing other tasks. It takes some time to get used to but pretty soon I was able to reduce the effort required to listen to an entire book. I generally find very easy to listen to non-fiction audiobooks, especially self-help books. Do be fair you don't need much attention to do that as listening to most self-help books feels almost like having a conversation with someone. 

However I still find it difficult to listen to fiction audiobooks, especially the very long ones. Here you have to imagine the story, the environment and the characters in your mind and keep up with the voice of the audiobook, it's annoying to press the pause button all the time and at the end I don't enjoy listening to fiction that much. I still prefer to actually read it on paper or on my kindle.

At the end the best thing for me is to read books in all format available, each genre with its own preferred media. Now I can listen to one audiobook per week (non-fiction), I can complete a book a month on my kindle and complete a paper-book every 2 months, if you sum it up it makes 11 books every 2 months (1 audiobook per week + 1 kindle book per month + 1 paper book every 2 monhts)!! 

I know this sounds weird but it works for me, I hope you will find the way to read that works best for you, but technology can definitely give you plenty of options!!