I love to learn, and one of the best ways of doing so is to read non-fiction. Call me a nerd – I do, too.
What I Have Read
Over the last years, I’ve read close to fifty non-fiction books. Some of my areas of interest include:
- Personal Development & Productivity – including the titles Four Thousand Weeks, Designing Your Life, The Power of Full Engagement
- Diversity and Inclusivity – including Invisible Women and ‘De Zeven Vinkjes’
- Psychology & Communication – I’ve read books like Process-Based CBT, A Liberated Mind, Feeling Great, Nonviolent Communication, Supercommunicators
- Health & Wellbeing – books like Outlive, How Not to Die, and Full Catastrophe Living
- Society, Culture & Politics – such as Homo Deus, Has China Won, and How to Avoid a Climate Disaster
- Fiction & Fantasy – don’t worry, I like these too. I recently read the Harry Potter series in German to get some fun extra German practice.
How To Choose What To Read
Before you start reading something, I think it is important to take time to choose what to read and, perhaps more importantly, what not to read. This is especially important when reading non-fiction.
I spend an average of one hour of active research to decide on a new book to read. If there is a topic I’d like to read about, I’ll often look through people’s recommendations for that topic on platforms like Reddit. This gives me an idea of the different books in a field, but also about the different views and subdisciplines within that field. That way, this research already provides the basis of learning. It gives me context of the book I’ll end up reading and provides a lens through which to interpret it.
Once I have identified some books I may potentially want to read, be it from my own research or from a podcast, for example, I’ll usually read through several reviews of the book(s) on Goodreads. I find that those reviews
usually give me a good idea of the aspects of a book that I might like or dislike. I also sometimes scroll through the EPUB file of the book so I can have a look at the table of contents and some chapters, before committing on a purchase.
After all of that, I usually end up with an informative non-fiction book that gets me excited enough to actually want to start reading it.