How To Read Less More

Here’s a helpful article by apologist, Greg Koukl, www.str.org. Speaking from personal experience, the idea of a book club he references at the end of the article is tremendous! Here’s a format a friend and I use:

1. Select a book that expands your worldview
So far, we have chosen books on varied topics, with both Christian and non-Christian authors, fiction and non-fiction, etc.

2. Construct a reading schedule
Depending on the length of the book and subsequent chapters, this may consist of reading a chapter a week, a section a week, or a book a week.

3. Write a report for the section you cover each week
The length of this may vary. For us, each report may be anywhere from one page to seven pages long. We have occasionally chosen smaller works for variety, such as Tolkien’s The Hobbit, and have opted to employ verbal vs. written discussion for the sake of time.

4. Go into further discussion based off of what your partner wrote
This often stretches your own thinking, especially when you come to sections of the book you don’t agree with or don’t understand.

Since having launched this tool for growth, I have greatly enjoyed the safety of being able to express mental hang-ups, spiritual problems, or personal challenges I have encountered in the reading without having the fear of being misunderstood. I have also received significant benefit through hearing someone else’s perspective on a subject in which we are both engaged. Added to this, you gain incredible insights into how your partner thinks, making for a meaningful and vibrant friendship!


How to Read Less More

Greg Koukl

Overview
Get a sense of the book in 10-20 minutes.
Read jacket copy, contents, skim preface & introduction, read conclusion (last 3 pages) and skim the index. Note publisher and date of publication.
Quickly page through the entire book at the rate of 2-3 seconds per page.
Determine if you want to read the book more thoroughly, give it away, or file it for future reference.

Preview
Skim entire book at a slower rate (4-10 seconds per page), breaking the book in as you go.
Look for structure, outline, key facts and concepts.
Write a quick summary for the book in pencil on title page.

Read
Preview each chapter again before you read it to get the structure (4-10 seconds per page).
Read every word at the fastest comfortable speed using a pointer so you don’t wander, hesitate, regress, or lose your place. Mark the margin, but don’t underline the text.
Write a 1-4 sentence summary in pencil at the beginning of the chapter. This serves as a quick overview of the content of the chapter.
Sketch a quick outline or recall pattern.

Post-View Immediately
Re-read the chapter quickly, focusing on marked sections, interacting with the text.
Refine your 1-4 sentence summary at the beginning of the chapter, if necessary.
Review at regular intervals, looking over recall patterns and summary material.
Read my entire article in the January 2008 Solid Ground.

Just Do It
Now it’s time for action. You have the plan. Here are six books I recommend you read this year and master using this simple plan to read less more.

And here's a suggestion an emailer passed on to us. Challenge yourself and have a salutory effect on others by finding like-minded people and start a book club. Choose a book the group agrees on or take turns picking a book. You might being with one of my recommendations. Use the guidelines for effective reading, and discuss the book with a group. This is a great way to exercise your mind. And you'll master each book you read this way.

Here are my suggestions for the six books you master this year. I've chosen them because they cover a variety of topics to build your knowledge, wisdom, and character. And I consider each a quintessential source of its kind.

Thinking about God--Greg Ganssle
Mere Christianity--C.S. Lewis
Serious Times--James Emory White
In But Not Of--Hugh Hewitt
The Lost Virtue of Happiness--J.P Moreland & Klaus Issler
He Is There and He Is Not Silent--Francis Schaeffer (available as an individual work, or as part of the trilogy)

The Faith

Chuck Colson teams up with Harold Fickett to deliver a provocative and much-needed message at the start of 2008 through his newly released book, The Faith. The book will answer three essential questions every Christian must understand and live, namely: what do we believe, why do we believe it, and why does it matter. I’m looking forward to reading all of it soon. Here’s a link to give you a taste: http://www.pfm.org/media/The_Faith_BookSample.pdf

Two Quotes:
“We don't need a new vision of things; rather, we need an eternal vision---to raise our eyes once again to the light that has always guided Christians during times of distress. One of the greatest truths of the Christian faith is that is life affirming and culture building.

“The challenges of anti-theism and Islam could not come at a worse time for the Church, because most Christians do not understand what they believe, why they believe it, and why it matters. How can a Christianity that is not understood be practiced? And how can it be presented in its true character as peace, freedom, and joy? How are skeptics to understand Christianity’s positive aspects?”

A view of and for the world

New Eyes

Author: John Piper

Taken from the daily Desiring God blog; www.desiringgod.org

On October 22, 1976, Clyde Kilby, who is now with Christ in Heaven, gave an unforgettable lecture. I went to hear him that night because I loved him. He had been one of my professors in English Literature at Wheaton College. He opened my eyes to more of life than I knew could be seen. O, what eyes he had! He was like his hero, C. S. Lewis, in this regard. When he spoke of the tree he saw on the way to class this morning, you wondered why you had been so blind all your life. Since those days in classes with Clyde Kilby, Psalm 19:1 has been central to my life: “The sky is telling the glory of God.”

That night Dr. Kilby had a pastoral heart and a poet's eye. He pled with us to stop seeking mental health in the mirror of self-analysis, but instead to drink in the remedies of God in nature. He was not naïve. He knew of sin. He knew of the necessity of redemption in Christ. But he would have said that Christ purchased new eyes for us as well as new hearts. His plea was that we stop being unamazed by the strange glory of ordinary things. He ended that lecture in 1976 with a list of resolutions. As a tribute to my teacher and a blessing to your soul, I offer them for your joy.

1. At least once every day I shall look steadily up at the sky and remember that I, a consciousness with a conscience, am on a planet traveling in space with wonderfully mysterious things above and about me.

2. Instead of the accustomed idea of a mindless and endless evolutionary change to which we can neither add nor subtract, I shall suppose the universe guided by an Intelligence which, as Aristotle said of Greek drama, requires a beginning, a middle, and an end. I think this will save me from the cynicism expressed by Bertrand Russell before his death when he said: "There is darkness without, and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, no vastness anywhere, only triviality for a moment, and then nothing."

3. I shall not fall into the falsehood that this day, or any day, is merely another ambiguous and plodding twenty-four hours, but rather a unique event, filled, if I so wish, with worthy potentialities. I shall not be fool enough to suppose that trouble and pain are wholly evil parentheses in my existence, but just as likely ladders to be climbed toward moral and spiritual manhood.

4. I shall not turn my life into a thin, straight line which prefers abstractions to reality. I shall know what I am doing when I abstract, which of course I shall often have to do.

5. I shall not demean my own uniqueness by envy of others. I shall stop boring into myself to discover what psychological or social categories I might belong to. Mostly I shall simply forget about myself and do my work.

6. I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but simply be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of what Lewis calls their "divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic" existence.

7. I shall sometimes look back at the freshness of vision I had in childhood and try, at least for a little while, to be, in the words of Lewis Carroll, the "child of the pure unclouded brow, and dreaming eyes of wonder."

8. I shall follow Darwin's advice and turn frequently to imaginative things such as good literature and good music, preferably, as Lewis suggests, an old book and timeless music.

9. I shall not allow the devilish onrush of this century to usurp all my energies but will instead, as Charles Williams suggested, "fulfill the moment as the moment." I shall try to live well just now because the only time that exists is now.

10. Even if I turn out to be wrong, I shall bet my life on the assumption that this world is not idiotic, neither run by an absentee landlord, but that today, this very day, some stroke is being added to the cosmic canvas that in due course I shall understand with joy as a stroke made by the architect who calls himself Alpha and Omega.