How I Read 63 Books in 2021
Is there a feeling more beautiful than being in your bookish bubble, blocking all the sounds of the second world while digging your nose inside your latest sweet and musky baby?
-Beta Scribbles
Hello and welcome to one of the writings where I get to share my reading experience with you. My name is Firdaus, a writer, reader, software engineer, others say nerd. I go by the penname Beta Scribbles.
The writer in me can ink so many things but she chose to be biased to only poetry, technical articles and code. A cool obsession, what can I say?
Being a long-time reader, I have had my hands in so many types of genres and was more interested in a few: werewolf fiction, thriller, adventure, self-development, psychology, poetry and of course school content themed books. I find it much easier to read a genre I love than to drug my way through Steven King’s horror novels.
I use Goodreads to source books and keep track of my progress. It is an amazing platform.
How do I get books?
Goodreads is my all-time go-to place whenever I am surfing for a new read. I use their genre classifications and ratings to find a book of my choice and shelf it in my Goodreads account. The platform is used and loved by many, although others hate it because 90% of the books there are sold on Amazon (and not given for free), I understand because I was once there…until I found out a cool way to go about this.
So once I have settled for a book, I copy the book’s title and author name then search for its free downloadable .pdf/epub file in Google. One thing that being a dev taught me is to move around google and pick what I want with ease the way I move around my bedroom. If you search for the book, you will be amazed by the number of websites you will find that will give you the book for free…
This is not a very safe way though, there are some dangers of the free downloads, sometimes the file carries a virus or the website you found is not genuine. I got one website that I trust, and so far it has been my favourite free store, b-ok.africa Zlibrary (also has a replica mobile app)
The website allows a few book downloads per day, if you create an account with them they add you more. I created an account with them and unsubscribed to their emailing service to stop the frequent email pings. b-ok.africa is one hell of an e-library for me.
Authors publish books for money. Being a published author myself, it doesn’t feel fair to forgo the premium book and go for the free version, but…
I normally download the books from my PC then share the files to my phone, where I will read from. If you have noticed, reading pdf files from a phone is very tricky depending on your choice of app. You have to zoom in and zoom out every time, and that makes the reading less fun. Reading epub files with is a bit better.
In January 2021, I met an android app called eReader Prestigio. It has been my partner ever since. This app allows users to read all types of files without the zooming in/out bother. On top of that, it has several text-to-speech engines which I find very useful when I feel like listening to the books instead of actually reading them. This app has greatly increased my reading speed and hunger. I love it so much that I have written an article about my reading experience with the eReader Prestigio.
Basically, that is how I source for books and read them. You may be wondering about my reading time since my schedule (as a software engineer, a student, and now an employee) seems pretty tight. I spend an hour or two reading every evening, plus any time during the day when I find myself in a car/queue/idle. Sometimes I read also during the short breaks in between my work/study time.
How many hours do I invest in reading every day?
This may seem a little bit extra for a normal person, I know, and I am not advising you to get yourself obsessed with books. Books are drugs, and their rehab hasn’t been invented yet.
Being an introvert is an advantage in this case too. I get to spend more time reading than chitchatting whatever is trending.
I also think that paying less attention to social media bought me more reading time. I mostly use Twitter every day for 30 minutes to check on #techtwitter and post my #100DaysOfCode progress (don’t worry if you do not know what that is, you are safe)
The more books I read, the faster my reading speed gets. As of now, I can read 100 epub pages in 2 hours. If an average book equals 300 pages, I can finish it in 2 or 3 days. If I read every day I guess I could read more than 63 books.
I do general cleaning on weekends. That gives me some more time to listen to books (using the text-to-speech engine in eReader Prestigio) as I do my chores. This time, or any other time when I am using the audio feature, I like to increase the recitation speed to 2X if the book is fiction and not brain-consumable content. This makes the reading fun and faster.
That’s how I read 63 books in 2021. See my Goodreads 2021 log.
As of now, I am on my 7th book of 2022. Let’s see how many books we will read this time :)
I will be happy to connect with you on Goodreads. Here’s the link to my profile.
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