Nowadays, with the growing voice of the whole people reading, many people who have bid farewell to reading for a long time have turned their eyes to dusty bookshelves and secretly vowed: "From today on, I will read more!" However, this passion is often short-lived. Sweeping away the dust and holding books in both hands, many people suddenly find that they still can't calm down and concentrate on reading, especially when facing deep reading.
How to face deep reading is a problem worth pondering. Although reading is much better than not reading at all on the whole, it can't achieve the profound effect of dripping water wears away the stone, and it is even more difficult to go deep into the soul. I spent a lot of time and energy, but when I closed the pages, I knew nothing. This kind of reading is a pastime.
In-depth reading, perhaps you should choose the appropriate subject area first. If the content of the selected book is too abstruse, which is seriously decoupled from your own understanding ability, you can't read it deeply. If you only read China's books on social history, but bring a copy of Nietzsche's Theory of Moral Genealogy, and throw yourself into modern western philosophy at once, it will be meaningless to read without the necessary knowledge reserve. If you just read some shallow people's online novels at ordinary times and suddenly start with a big book "Purple Tongzhi Sword", you will naturally feel that you can't get in.
To push reading deeper, we must respect the law of reading, carefully choose the field, and complete the spiritual climbing in different reading stages step by step and from easy to difficult according to our own situation. You don't have to plunge into Nietzsche's paradoxical speculation and nihilism to get involved in western philosophy. You might as well read Russell's A Brief History of Western Philosophy to understand the schools and evolution of western philosophy, and then choose the fields of interest to deepen gradually. If you don't understand the writing style of the Three Kingdoms, you might as well start with some simple and popular books about the Three Kingdoms, and then come back to study, which may be easier to understand.
Furthermore, in order to fundamentally improve the quality of reading, we might as well try to change the superficial sporadic reading into thematic reading. In fact, reading is also divided into different levels: the first level is chapter reading, that is, reading each chapter of a book; The second layer is book reading, that is, understanding the meaning of the whole book; The third layer is thematic reading, that is, choosing a specific field of knowledge, extensively dabbling in all valuable books, materials at home and abroad, and even research papers of relevant scholars, and striving to exhaust everything. Compared with subject reading, reading at chapter and book level can only be regarded as sporadic reading.
Take theme reading as an example. If we lock the field in pre-Qin philosophy, browsing the original works of various schools is only the beginning. Annotate hundred schools of thought's authors, such as Zheng Xuan, Wang Bi, Guo Xiang, Zhu, etc. They should be critically inherited after ingestion. Liang Qichao's History of Pre-Qin Political Thought, Feng Youlan's History of China Philosophy, etc. We should also select outstanding people and learn from them, such as Liang Shuming and others.
If you can really finish such effective reading, you will naturally become an expert in the corresponding field, and the process of subject reading is more like research than reading. Most people usually read sporadically, which is not necessarily bad, but it is precisely because of its fragmentation that it is easy to generalize reading. The final harvest is not much. When we sublimate the superficial experience of scattered reading into the concentrated study of theme reading, reading will no longer be just the comfort of chicken soup at the bedside before going to bed, but a gradually filling soul home.