Sharing Your Reading: Passing On To Others the Best of What You Read

Well, here it is. My last article for a while. I want to give you some more tips on how to get the most out of your reading experience but even more importantly, what to do with the “good stuff” you’ve squeezed out.

After reading certain books, I have gained a lot of benefit by writing a brief summary of the book. I try to do this in less than a page so that I condense the big ideas or themes I discovered. This helps me in a couple of ways. I can go back to my summary and quickly re-familiarize myself with what the book was about. It also helps me to explain or describe the book coherently to others who might be interested in reading it.

A variation of writing a book summary is outlining the book. This could be as simple as highlighting the chapter titles with a one or two sentence summary of that section. Sometimes a particular book lends itself to this sort of summary.

Probably the easiest way to get the most out of your reading is to write out the significant statements you check-marked or starred while you read (see previous post Getting the Most From Your Christian Books-How to Mark Your Text). Put them all into a Word document. This will re-enforce what you’ve read and will put it into a convenient format which you can search later on if needed.

Once you’ve got your summary, outline, or significant statements, what can you do next?
1. Share them with a friend. Tell them about the book you’re reading and that you want to tell them some of the highlights. Talking about these things will help you heaps as you try to communicate in your own words what the book is about and why you found it helpful.

2. Form some kind of study group. Get a group together who can read the same book (hopefully not the same copy of the same book) and meet on a weekly or fortnightly basis to talk about what was interesting.

3. If you’ve read a good book, buy a copy for someone else.

4. Blog about it. Tell the whole world. Pass on your recommendations and insights to others.

5. If you make a list of really good quotations, you can easily insert them at the end of your e-mails or letters. I use these lists of quotations to insert into the church’s bulletin every Sunday.

6. Maybe your church would let you start a book stall to sell quality books you have read or establish a library of good books that church people can take home and return when finished. This is a great way to make these resources available to others.

Whatever you do, don’t keep them to yourselves. Pass them on so others can benefit too.

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