Book In A Bowl – Exposing Modern Myths of Reading

The easiest way to gain new experience and new knowledge is by absorbing stories. Today, most of these stories reach us through reels and videos. But there are still old-styled people, like me, who’d rather read.

The art of reading predates all of this by thousands of years. I enjoy it more than most things, which is exactly why a certain claim doing the rounds recently caught my attention. It’s being sold to people as a shortcut to intelligence, and I think it deserves a closer look.

Here’s what’s being promoted:

• Read more books – 5 a month.
• Read faster – 1000 words a minute.
• Read like a CEO – one book a week, every week.

People buy into this. I understand why … it sounds efficient, even impressive. But I want to walk you through why it doesn’t actually work, and I’m not saying this from theory. I’ve tried it myself.

The food comparison, and where it actually leads

Reading a book is a lot like eating food. You take something in. But the food itself doesn’t give you strength … it has to be digested first, broken down over hours, and turned into something your body can actually use. That’s why you don’t eat again immediately after a big meal, and you definitely don’t go for a swim right after.

Reading works the same way. When you finish a book, you’ve only consumed a story. The lesson inside it hasn’t become yours yet … it still has to be sat with, turned over, and connected to something in your own life. That part isn’t automatic. Food digests on its own. A book’s lesson does not. If you skip that step, you haven’t really read the book, you’ve just passed your eyes over it.

Now here’s where it stops being a metaphor and becomes something I can actually show you.

I tried reading fast. I pushed my pace (the top speed was 210 words per minute). I could get through the pages quickly enough. But a week later, when I tried to recall what the book had actually taught me, I couldn’t. I could tell you the plot. I couldn’t tell you what I was supposed to do differently because of it. The words had passed through me, but nothing had stayed.

That’s the actual failure: speed gets you through the pages, but it skips the part where an idea becomes usable. And a book you can’t use was, for all practical purposes, never read.

Why five books a month empties out the same way

Try this yourself: think of the last time you read two books back-to-back with no gap. A month later, can you separate which idea came from which book? Most people can’t. The lessons blur into each other, and eventually blur out entirely, because the mind never got a quiet stretch to actually settle on any one of them.

That’s the real cost of “5 books a month.” It’s not that it’s excessive in some abstract sense; it’s that it leaves you with five stories and zero lessons you can actually repeat back to another person. And a book’s only real value is the one thing you can carry out of it and use.

The same logic covers “reading like a CEO.” One book a week sounds disciplined, but discipline applied to the wrong target – speed instead of understanding – just produces the same emptiness on a weekly schedule.

What to do instead

If you want to read a lot of books, that’s fine … but increase how fast you absorb a book, not how fast you move your eyes across it. And give yourself a real gap between books, long enough that the last one has actually settled before the next one starts.

It’s better to walk away from one book with a single lesson you actually use, than to finish a hundred books and be unable to name one thing you changed because of them.

Don’t just read. Make sure something from the book is still with you next month.

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Thanks for seeking clarity,
from Khavi Darpan.