How to refine & mature your reading taste

A quick heads-up: we've just wrapped up A Mug of Insights' rebrand (go check out the home page!) and launched our SESSIONS workshop series. Every session will distil my last 8 years of reading advice into actionable frameworks and worksheets, helping you transform confusion into clarity! From December, we'll run one monthly workshop and demonstration, and the first session is now live, so go and show it some love!

(1) The Idea: Your Reading Taste Will Mature And Change

A problem many aspiring readers run into is that their idea of what they want to read doesn’t match up with what they are genuinely interested in. You know that experience. This is when you stare at a TBR full of high-minded books while your heart secretly craves something else. And the standard advice for fixing this mind/heart split is enraging: if a book doesn’t speak to you, close it and if it’s meant for you, it’ll come back.

Here's where we pull out the pitchforks and shout out the objections. If we quit reading the books that aren’t speaking to us for the moment, how in the world do we:

·      Expand our reading abilities

·      Work through some impressive books

·      Develop our taste for quality readings?  

I’ve also hated that advice, because frankly, if I ever leave a book half-finished, there’s a good chance that I’ll never finish it. So, for the past decade or so, I’ve always forced my way through those periods when a supposedly good book starts to bore me.

But recently, I caught myself doing something strange. I was on my way to the airport last Friday to pick someone up, and on the way, I listened to a history podcast. When I got the news that the flight was delayed, I pulled into a McDonald’s and started reading a book I brought with me: Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond.

So, as I was sipping my Sprite and working through the prologue, I paused and thought: wait a minute, since when did you start taking up history? History, in my mind, always felt difficult, pedantic and dry. I enjoyed it in high school in a masochistic way to prove that I’m smart, but this time it felt different. I genuinely wanted to understand the world around me, and I couldn’t get enough of it.

Uh-oh, I thought, your old-soul transformation is nearly complete. It won’t be long until I start practising Tai Chi after playing Chinese chess in the park. But it also raised an interesting question: does our reading taste change over time? And could it be that different books do belong to different phases of our lives? The answer is yes, and for us to understand this, we have to turn our attention to a model called Spiral Dynamics.