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
Slope from equation | Mathematics I | High School Math | Khan Academy
We’ve got the equation ( y + 2 = -2 \cdot x - 3 ), and what I want to do is figure out what is the slope of the line that this equation describes. There’s a couple of ways that you can approach it. What my brain wants to do is, well, I know a few forms w…
Polynomial special products: perfect square | Algebra 2 | Khan Academy
What we’re going to do in this video is practice squaring binomials. This is something that we’ve done in the past, but we’re going to do it with slightly more involved expressions. But let’s just start with a little bit of review. If I were to ask you, w…
Packing the Shrimp Pots | Port Protection
Ahoy there mate! It’s absolutely flat calm and glassy out, so we have to seize the moment. Mother nature can squash you like a bug. The only thing you can really do is just put your boots on and see what’s gonna happen once you get out there. And there’s…
The Shock Downgrade of the U.S. Economy
Last week, U.S. debt holders got a big shock as they read the news headlines: Fitch, one of America’s three big credit ratings agencies, stripped the U.S. government’s AAA rating, downgrading them to double A plus. They cited some pretty scathing reasons …
Passing Along My Investment and Economic Principles
I think you might know that at my stage in life, uh, my main objective is to pass along what I have that’s valuable to others. That includes, most importantly, I think, the skills and the principles that, uh, helped me be successful in the areas that I ha…
How Government Solved the Health Care Crisis - Animation
Today, the United States faces a health care crisis. Medical costs are too high, and health insurance is out of reach for the poor. The cure is obvious to nearly everybody: government must step in to solve the problem. Eighty years ago, Americans were al…