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Becoming well read...

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At the risk of making this a "New Years Resolution" (that I would therefore have to break by January 9th...), I am going to work on "optimizing" my reading this year.

The subtle difference between determining to be "well read" and vowing to "read more" is that I want to be able to have read more of what is important to the big picture...

• Personal and Professional Development.  I'm not just talking about "Self-Help Books", but rather publications that can help me achieve other personal and professional goals.  This can be anything from Religious and Philosophical to Inspirational and Motivational.  I prefer things that have practical applications and are succinct.
• The Classics... if I'm going to read fiction, then it may as well be notable.  My parents got me a Dickens' book for Christmas this year, and I also have some other older books that are on my shelf waiting to be read (Tom Sawyer
• Current events... I currently read 3-5 newspapers (The Sun, The Post, The Journal and The Times) daily, about a dozen magazines (including The Economist, BusinessWeek) and currently about 400 RSS feeds.  I'm becoming a media junkie, and I wonder if that is actually all just counter productive.  How much of that information is truly useful or can even be retained effectively?

I'm going to try a few approaches to becoming well read this year:

• Audiobooks.  Sounds silly, but I think this could work.  This approach to optimizing reading time will be to take "windshield time" spent commuting to the office/meetings, etc. and even time working out (another "non-resolution" ... another post I'm sure) and "read" some Audiobooks that I've been picking up from iTunes.  Stephanie is also exploring this as a means to make the most of her 3hr per day commute from "Squampton".
• eBooks.  I'm a fan of eBooks as well, primarily because I can have an entire library in my laptop/tablet.  On the same note I'm a big fan of Zinio and PressReader for magazines and newspapers respectively.  Easy way to not only have a large library, but it can be indexed as well for quick searches on a topic of choice.
• RSS "Best Practices".  A few ideas related to RSS reading...
  • Shared Feeds.  I love Google's feature here, and I'm finding that I'm starting to unsubscribe from some feeds in favour of reviewing shared feeds by people that I (and/or others) respect in various fields.  For instance, I know that Scoble has (absolutely) nothing better to do than to scour every feed on the web to pull out the pearls (subscribe here), that I will gladly capitalize on...  :) 
  • Subscribe to Categories.  A lot of the feeds I read allow for more focused subscriptions by subscribing to specific categories.  That way you can largely avoid un-interesting content.  The problem is that a lot of feeds (mine included) don't make proper use of these publishing features.  (My excuse is that I have a bug in my categories module.)
• Television.  One thing I'm going to do is NOT use TV as a source of current events.  The other tactic is to NEVER WATCH LIVE TV.  I've got Windows Media Center and a Digital PVR (from Shaw), so can record just about anything I want.  The thing is that live TV is designed to keep you watching... with recorded TV I watch my show, and even if the next one looks interesting I can't watch it because I (probably) didn't record it.

At the end of the day, I guess nothing really beats just curling up with a good hardcover (a term which will no doubt be lost on future generations) and bottle of Merlot.

Any other ideas out there?

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