#How to absorb books

[csuitebitches]

Reading tip for when you’re reading something educational (self growth, skill based etc)

When you start your self development journey / want to take it even higher, most of us turn to reading books or articles. We take notes and highlight the areas that we found impactful, we remember those points for a couple of days and then boom - we forget.

books are such a wealth of information but it’s not possible to read every single book you’ve read once multiple times.

you might find it frustrating that you can’t seem to remember all that information when you need to, or you keep racking your brains trying to remember exactly where you had read that particular insight.

here’s a method to help you out.

If you have a kindle / read online, make a Word doc/ pages doc of all the things you’ve highlighted. Copy the highlighted areas, which would be areas that you found hopefully/ intriguing/ interesting, and paste them on the word doc. Use only one document for all your notes of different books and every month or so, take about 30 minutes to rapidly go through them. if you read physical books, take a photo of the sentence/ paragraph that you liked, crop it out so that the other stuff isn’t there, and put that photo in the document.

this allows for a couple of things - information isn’t lost when you finish reading the book. Sometimes we find the solution to a problem too early and when the problem crops up, we don’t remember that we had already found the answer. Two, it allows for revision and three, you may see that with time, the way you understood that particular point changes.

this is not for fictional or fantasy books - this is for books that talk about self development, marketing, sales, technical know how, etc. Stuff that you should remember and would impact your progress positively.

[balkanradfem]

Do you ever think about how sad and messed up it is to grow up in this world as a little girl who likes to read. Because you are a child, and you don't get that there's a difference in who writes the books, you read everything you like, you read the adventures and the fantasy and the mysteries and the traumatic stuff and if you're also very isolated and lonely, these books build your worldview. Because why wouldn't they? They're written by humans, so they have the attitudes, opinions, perceptions, morals and spirits of human beings in them, they're telling you what humans think and feel about things, how they go about situations, what they imagine, what they desire. What your role in all this is, or what it could potentially be.

But, since you are not capable of differentiating the material, and you just read what is available to you, you end up reading a lot of books written by m*n. You also have to go thru the required reading at school - 90% written by m*n. And so slowly, since young age, without even socializing or learning it thru interaction, you find yourself in a world shaped by minds who do not have empathy for women, especially not for little girls. You find yourself relating to the male protagonists, but you also find out that girls only play a passive role in their stories. You find that m*n problems are centered, made important, their suffering and violence critical points in the story, while women are cast aside as helpers, servants, givers, caretakers, and generally just exist in the background, not a thought given to what they are going thru.

You learn thru books written by m*n, that your experience is secondary. Even if you cast yourself as the adventuring, immensely important and struggling protagonist, even then the other women in your mind end up being just background characters, caregivers who do not need a thought spared for their suffering.

Books written by m*n, even for children, will trivialize female suffering to the point where they shape the child's mind into one that looks at the world from a male perspective. Where women either don't matter, or are capable only of giving and aiding, to be cast aside for more important matters, such as male aspirations for their own lives.

Thinking back, I understand why I felt myself unimportant and trivial in any social setting - I understood my role from the written word, and I knew adults found me trivial, secondary, only a background figure to someone else's adventure or mission. As much as I could fight it in my fantasies, and make myself the main character, it felt like a pipe dream, like something that was incredible self-indulged and selfish and would never translate to reality.

I wish it had been different. I wish I had been introduced specifically and only to books written by women, for women. I wish I had found empathy for myself in those books. I wish I had found myself standing on high ground, equal ground, with other women, our desires centered, our lives translated into tales of epic importance - because that's what they are. I wish I had been born into a world where female perspective is available from the start, not after years of growing up and finding feminist literature and having to re-write my own role in my brain, from all of those years of reading male perspective as the default.

I don't think any little girl should be exposed to literature that shape her world as a place where she doesn't matter. I don't think books written by males and shaped by their worldview should be allowed into children's literature, or teenage or for young adults. Girls should not be learning from fiction that their most important value is empathy and understanding for male problems, and their second, to be desired and/or helpful to them, all while being treated as nothing but service and background noise until you're desired for something. We need to open books and find out that we matter too. That our lives can be the center of our existence, rather than being in the service of someone else's life.

[bonebabbles]

Ill get into this later but the Star Flower x Clear Sky romance shit is legitimately some of the most rancid canon ship stuff in WC without full out having an on-screen Bramblesquirrel argument. I can't believe people legitimately take away that Star Flower has any canonical agency here and try to spin this like girlboss shit

You understand that what Clear Sky likes about this very young adult is that she "obeys" him, subjects herself to bad conditions, and tells him that she's soso loyal that she promises to never leave, yes? While holding up her 1 absolutely insignificant ""betrayal"" as morally equivalent to Clear Sky's murders, beatings, and starvations?

Played as a manipulation this would be interesting. But it's not. She is basically an 18 year old who thinks she's so awful she deserves a serial killer, while his mouth starts watering that his reward has finally come. In their second interaction.

[stuckinapril]

i love anthologies. anthologies are so sexy

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

helloooo my dearest darling listeners, i am back on my soapbox to regale you all with the marvelous things i witnessed/experienced on my Whimsical As Fuck™️ three hour drive today. not necessarily in order <3

some cute does with bigass floppy ears / very sweet waitress who called me "hon" and put the most tasty looking crepes on my table / a pair of hawks divebombing a golden eagle / a kite (the bird) / a flock of magpies / some GORGEOUS scenery / a rainbow / lovely rain sprinklings / MORE gorgeous scenery, i mean what the fuck / fields of purple/orange/red tipped bushes / a meadow of buttercup-yellow very tall grass, in which many picturesque trees stood / lots of fluffy, adorable, tasty cows / a large herd of likely-feral horses with a wonderful variety of patterns & colors / the fluffiest husky ever / the juxtaposition of cold wind through an open window + warm sunlight / the most stunning snow-coated mountain of whites and blues in the sun, wreathed in clouds / no seriously some really fucking Gorgeous scenery, i was near tears with some of it

[weisbrot]

dear @wheresurboytonighthelookslikeenj i have decided to add gavroche and azelma to the marius eponine friendship and have them all enjoy (some more than others) a lil studying/bookclub session 😌✨📚📖📔 Hope you enjoy too!! thank you for chosing such fun prompts for me to work on ☺️

Thank you also to the @drinkwithme-exchange mods who did a wonderful job moderating 💛

#drinkwithme2023

[enough-spider-noir-stuff]

I think Hobie is scarily smart but also not at all books-smart. He can understand really complicated stuff (see: him literally building a dimension watch from scratch) but also his education sucked majorly and he has no idea how everything works/is called "properly".

He knows pretty well what he can do, but he also consistently underestimates just how much that is, compared to most people.

[aphsillyos]

silly lil designs for pf ez and aphelios blending into piltover :]

[writeouswriter]

Setting my goodreads reading challenge next year to 3

[sleeplessdreamer14]

I’m just gonna say it; Moira would make a much better Dr. Frankenstein than Junkrat. If you’ve read Mary Shelley’s book, you know what I mean.

[magic-magpie]

Thinking abt the Mishima household when Kazuya and Lee were growing up like imagine your father kills your mother then throws you off a cliff and you haul yourself back up and vow to kill him but you're too weak rn and you still live under his roof and are still his son and he trains you ruthlessly and you're thirteen and burning with hatred too big for your barely-teen body and then he adopts a boy close to your age and it's clear what he's doing this boy is only here to threaten your status as heir to the Zaibatsu this boy isn't even given the Mishima family name and your father (and you) call him by his surname because although he learns the fighting style and learns the business he'll never be Heihachi's blood son, and by all accounts you shouldn't hate him it's not his fault he was adopted but you do hate him and he quickly realises what kind of household he lives in now and he grows to hate you too but neither of you hate the other as much as you hate your father and so maybe sometimes you'll smoke together after having bloodied your knuckles from beating each other bruised in training because beneath the rivalry and resentment is someone who gets it, who knows what it's like living on these grounds, who you don't need to keep up false pretences for because the shadow looming over the two of you is the same

[dragoncarrion]

Ugh umgh

Look at what Soda found... On google

[1eos]

120 books a year? yeah u not retaining SHIT

[ghoul-haunted]

this is everything to me actually

[braidwoods]

i hope mc makes mal wear a wig or im not buying a single scene with him in bolas2