Hey, guys! What's going on? Welcome to this episode of Aussie English. Today, I want to talk to you about reading, reading, reading, reading, reading. So, to give you a bit of background, for me at least, my personal story I hated reading as a kid. I really, really hated reading. I don't think it was because of reading in and of itself, I think it's mainly because I didn't like sitting still.
So, while I was outside skateboarding or running a mark or surfing or whatever it was that I was doing with mates, people like my sister were inside studying hard, reading a lot of books and absorbing a lot of knowledge and it has taken me, well, it took me, it took me probably all of high school and then, you know, parts of university to really start enjoying books and getting the most out of books and even till today it's been an on again off again relationship.
I think partly, for me at least personally, it's because I just have other things to do. I don't like sitting down for long periods of time and just absorbing myself in say a book. However, this has changed. This year I'm trying to challenge myself to read one book per week, ok? One book per week. This is a huge undertaking it feels at least for someone like me, but I was I was finally motivated to do it because I just realized how much information is in books that you can't necessarily get through things like podcasts and audio books.
So, there were a lot of topics that I started looking into and then I started to want to know more about that I just couldn't find audio books about, because the audio books that you normally get on companies like audible tend to be the most popular ones and if you find anything that isn't the mainstream, that isn't the most popular, it tends to be pretty difficult to get your hands on.
And the first book that I read I don't have because I've given it to my dad to read was 'A Story of Australian English. So, the sort of how the slang, how the expressions and everything have evolved since Australia was colonized in 1788, when the first fleet came out and the language evolved and I couldn't find that on audio books, so I bought the book and then throughout that book he referenced a lot of other books about Australian English that were worth reading and learning from and I thought would give me a lot of material for Aussie English.
And, so I ended up buying that entire top row there is effectively just books that he recommended in his book 'A Story of Australian English'. Aside from that, it put me sort of down the rabbit hole and I started finding other books about things like language learning, which again, I couldn't find audio books for and I'm obviously passionate about because I teach you, guys, all about language learning, so again, I ended up buying a whole bunch of books, also included up there and that top row about language learning.
And, so I know that it's very easy to spend a lot of money on these things, especially as humans we love to kind of collect things and we feel like the work done, right? Like I've gone out, I bought a whole bunch of books I feel good even though I haven't read them, but now after having done the easy part and getting these in the mail, I now now have to put a lot of effort in and actually work my way through them, but ok, so what have I done? First I started with something small because it's all about habit building, right?
It's difficult to choose something really, really difficult if you're starting to try and build a habit to help develop that habit, to get that habit sort of ingrained, so I started going through smaller books, right? And reading these and I just said to myself 'I'm going to do a chapter a day', ok? That's all I'm going to do, a chapter a day, however long that takes, I'll try and smash that out.
I was watching a documentary last night, I'm just going to get it up on the screen here so that I can remember it correctly, called 'Bookstores - How to read more books in the Golden Age of Content' and it was an amazing documentary, I'll link below so you guys can go and check it out, but he effectively went around and showed all these beautiful bookstores, but also talked to some experts about reading more books and what he needs to do in order to read more books and to go from someone, I think, he said at the start I read one book for pleasure a year on average, which was probably what I was sort of on the same page as, one book a year for pleasure.
We'd still read them for work or for study or for, you know, things that are related to making money, because you have to do that, but for leisure he was reading one. So, he had a guy set him aside, do the maths and that was something like a few minutes a day of reading, and he said if you move that only to 30 minutes a day, that will equal about 17 to 18 books a year, right? Which is pretty good.
And, so yeah, he made the argument of just start with a small chunk of time, put that aside and you'll be able to read a lot more, you'll be able to consume a lot more content like this before you know it, right? Those those shelves will start filling up with books that you've read and, so I want to apply this. He also talked to another guy who spoke about habit building and the importance of starting small with something that is impossible not to do, right? So, maybe you buy this new book by David Hunt, I'm about to interview this guy on the podcast by the way, this is an amazing book and you read a page a day, you just start with the bare minimum, something that is so easy you can't not do it, it takes, you know, 3, 5 minutes to read a whole page in a book.
So, he said start with that and before you know it it starts building. On top of that, though, he also says get away from social media, get away from checking your emails and try and shave off as much of that useless time that you spend on other things and redirect it towards productive things like reading, going to the gym, exercising, spend time with your family, whatever it is, and so that had me kind of think deeply about what it is that I can do and I realized if I kind of thought about my day I wake up in the morning and I spend a lot of my day watching the news, you know, I kind of I don't know why, it's just one of those things I get fascinated by what's going on and I feel like I need to know what's happening in Australia, in particular, although it doesn't really serve me.
It doesn't really help me. So, I've decided to try and stop doing that as much and substitute in reading books for that amount of time in the morning. So, that's about it. That's sort of my plan and I thought I would share that with you guys to see what you think, comment below let me know what you're reading currently. This is going to be the next one, I've just started a reading club for all the Aussie English members, so if any of you guys are watching, I hope your books have arrived and we can get cracking pretty soon, we can get we can get started.
This is a really, really good book that I recommend for any of you guys, whether you're a part of Aussie English or not. If you're interested in Australian history, David Hunt has an amazing sense of humour, I'll probably review this in the future, but I really recommend that you go and check that out, 'Girt - the Unauthorized History of Australia', really good, i's not too big, it is, the font is pretty big on the pages, so I think you'd get through it pretty quickly.
But yeah, that's about all I want to say. So, my plan is to try to read one book per week and to be honest it doesn't seem that hard, right? Like, before we finish up I'll tell you, I've just finished this one 'This is Holy Shit - A Brief History of Swearing' and it was really enthralling. It sort of sucked me in, it was really interesting and I got to learn about the history of swearing in English, but also other languages and how that's changed.
I'm going to review that in a video shortly, but yeah something this big I finished in six days, so you know, average size book, average sized text, not the biggest thing in the world, but it was feasible. To me in the past, this is the kind of thing that would have taken me a month to finish if not more, right? Even if I'd put my mind to it, but instead I decided one chapter a day I'm going to smash out of chapter no matter how long it takes, that's just what I want to do.
Fortunately, the chapters in this book are pretty big and they all took me about one to two hours. You don't have to do that, but it went to show, it goes to show, how much you can get done when you start getting into and building habits, right? Habits for reading. The next thing for me is going to be hopefully getting back into fitness and doing the same thing.
Anyway, I wanted to make this video because I've been inspired to read more. I wanted to share it with you guys and see what you think. Tell me what you're reading, tell me what your thoughts are about reading, especially if you're learning a foreign language like Australian English. Leave me a comment below, guys like and share. I appreciate your time, thanks and I'll see you soon. Peace!