yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Reading (and comparing) multiple books | Reading | Khan Academy


3m read
·Nov 10, 2024

Hello readers! You know what's better than reading a book? Reading two books! Reading a bunch of books! Reading a mountain of books! This may sound self-evident, but great readers read a lot of books. Good readers read widely. They read lots of different types of books. Sometimes these books will be similar, and sometimes they'll be very different.

But one thing that good readers do is think about how what they are reading might connect with other books they've read in the past. They think about how books connect with other books. I have been reading a lot this year, mostly cookbooks, mysteries, and science fiction novels. So, they're alike in some ways and different in others. Right now, I'm reading these mystery novels that take place in Australia.

They're all written by the same person, and they all feature the same main characters. A collection of books that are about the same character in different situations is called a series. Reading a series is a great way to see how the same characters grow and change over a longer period of time. There's the hero of the series with a fabulous feather in her hair and a magnifying glass, ready to solve some mysteries.

Now, not all books by the same author are automatically part of the same series. Authors can write standalone books or start completely different series. Here's the author hard at work on a typewriter, an ancient writing device. If you don't know what that is, politely ask an older person. Often, writers have a similar writing style even when what they're writing is not connected.

For example, if you like funny books and you find an author that makes you laugh, chances are that the other books they write could also be funny. Books can have similar plots. So, the series I've been reading is a mystery. The main character is a detective, and she figures out how and why someone committed a crime.

After many years of reading, I've learned that I really like books that share this quality of a hero that solves mysteries. But just because two books are both mysteries doesn't mean they're going to work the same way. Two mysteries by two different writers, with different characters and situations, are going to be pretty different from each other.

As a reader, I have to be careful not to assume that I know where a book is going to go just because I'm familiar with what kind of story it's telling. It's like fairy tales, right? Every culture around the world has traditional stories, and the stories all pretty much have the same purpose, which is to teach people how to behave like a good person.

There are stories all around the world that have a similar structure to the story of Cinderella: young poor girl with an evil stepmother, unfairly punished, and then through magic and the goodness of her own heart, she marries into royalty. There are thousands of versions of this story from every culture on Earth. I love reading stories from all over the world because it helps me understand the values that different cultures share or how they differ.

This is why it's fun to read lots of stories from different times and different people. It can help us understand what's important to people, what was important to people in the past, or what's important to us now. And it's fun! Reading lots of books is fun. You might find an author or a character that you love. You might be transported to a whole new land or time.

Reading widely and thinking about how books connect is the best way to become a better reader. And you might just solve a mystery or two while you're at it! You can learn anything.

-Dave

More Articles

View All
Graphing exponential growth & decay | Mathematics I | High School Math | Khan Academy
This is from the graph basic exponential functions on KH Academy, and they ask us to graph the following exponential function. They give us the function ( H(x) = 27 \cdot \left(\frac{1}{3}\right)^x ). So our initial value is 27, and ( \frac{1}{3} ) is our…
Congressional oversight of the bureaucracy | US government and civics | Khan Academy
In multiple videos already, we have talked about the three branches of government. At the federal level, you have the legislative branch, which is Congress, made up of two houses: the House of Representatives and the Senate. You have the executive branch,…
Definite integral of trig function | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
So let’s see if we can evaluate the definite integral from ( \frac{11\pi}{2} ) to ( 6\pi ) of ( 9 \sin(x) \, dx ). The first thing, let’s see if we can take the anti-derivative of ( 9 \sin(x) ). We could use some of our integration properties to simplify…
3 Stoic Ways Of Letting Go
Life can be extremely stressful at times. And this is basically because we’re holding on to illusions of control and because our minds are overthinking and ruminating all the time. In most cases, holding on to things is a waste of energy, and overdoing it…
Half the universe was missing... until now
This episode was sponsored by KiwiCo. More about them at the end of the show. Until recently, half the universe was missing or hidden or just… undetected. And no, I’m not talking about dark matter or dark energy, which make up 27 and 68 percent of our un…
Warren Buffett Buys GOLD?
Well, it’s that time again. The 13Fs are out. Uh, so we as the little investors get to have a look at what the big money managers of the world are buying and selling. And definitely the most watched 13F filing is definitely that of Mr. Warren Buffett. Uh…