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
Saving and investing | Investments and retirement | Financial literacy | Khan Academy
Let’s talk a little bit about saving and investing. I would define saving as just any extra money you bring in in a given amount of time that you haven’t spent yet. So, let’s say in a given month you bring in four thousand dollars and you spend thirty-fi…
Uncovering the Tooth Fairy | StarTalk
So, Tooth Fairy is an interesting dilemma when you’re a parent. Because right when they’re losing teeth, they’re supremely gullible. They’ll believe basically anything you tell them, because they don’t have their own sense of the world yet. Their understa…
Estimating adding large numbers by rounding
Let’s say that we run an egg farm. Yesterday, we went out and we collected 398 eggs from the chickens, and then today we went out and we collected 251 eggs from the chickens. What we’re curious about is roughly how many eggs do we now have that we’ve coll…
Warren Buffett Just Made a NEW $10B Investment
This video is sponsored by Steak. Download the Steak app today and use the referral code AWC to receive a free stock when you fund your account. Details in the description. Hey guys, welcome back to the channel! In this video, we are going to be talking …
Why Mosquitoes Bite Some People More Than Others
Are you the person in the group who’s always getting bitten by mosquitoes? Because I certainly am, and science has shown that this is a thing—that mosquitoes are more attracted to some people than others. And the reason for that is at least partially gene…
Michael Burry's 'Big Short' Against the Stock Market
Well, Michael Barry has been back in the news lately with a bombshell tweet. It turns out Christian Bale was actually wearing Michael Murray’s clothes in The Big Short, which does beg the question, whose clothes was Michael Barry wearing? Yes, the award-w…