Reading a good book is one of the most enjoyable things you can do. Reading a good book in your recliner, in bed, in the living room, in the summer house, on a camping trip, sunbathing, by the pool, in the garden or really anywhere you like, letting your mind relax and visit foreign lands, cities and to get to enjoy another's life experience is a magnificent experience. The problem for many of us though – is the time it takes to finish a reasonable book.

For most of us, the problem lies in a few factors and mostly in old habits that are holding us back, usually old misconceptions or fallacies that are kept alive and also our lack of concentration that increases with our fast modern lives. These old habits – or misconceptions – I discuss in my courses and books, but in this article I am going to talk about the lack of concentration. And that's a problem that is much easier to tackle than you might think.

Lack of concentration while reading

Since I am going to be...

Here are 11 simple tips on how to tackle the textbooks for College or University. These rules should give everyone a good overview on how to best use the time spent reading textbooks.

These 11 tips are based on the advice of many masters that I have read throughout the years and are all things that I have both taught and asked students to dedicate themselves to at speed reading courses and if you use them you will find that your mind will stop wandering when you're reading – and the textbook won't put you to sleep.

Your focus and understanding of what you are reading will change – the reason is simple –  you are now reading with a clear goal in mind. You are looking for answers. You are no longer reading your textbook in the same way you read a novel – from the first page to the last.

You go through it – keeping in mind to look for the points that the teacher wants you to emphasize – to find the points that the author wants you to emphasize....

In this short blog post I want to take on a belief that far too many of my students have when they come to my course - and that is the notion of reading being a skill that you learn once and will then be fixed and unchangeable. This, however, could not be further from the truth.

Reading, like any skill, is learned, trained and mastered.

Reading, like any skill, gets better with the amount of time we apply to reading in our daily life. If you hardly ever read - don't expect that you enjoy reading or that you possess great reading skills.

A man who reads one book a year does not have the same reading skills as a person who reads one book a day.

In sports, the key to success is training and applying the trained methods - again and again - until we master them. This same principle applies to your reading skill.

To the same effect if you only read fiction - you've mastered reading fiction in no time. But if you change genre and begin reading non-fiction - you'll leave your comfort...

This is without a doubt one of the major reasons people sign up for my speed reading courses. Their constant lack of focus while they are reading. They begin reading some text and half-way through the page – and not even half-way through – their mind begins to wander. They get caught up with their everyday worries, trying to remember some task, a quote from a movie, a conversation with a friend, what they want for dinner, what they want to do over the weekend and so on.

Has this happened to you?

Well, it most likely has since over 97% of the people joining my course have experienced this.

One of the main reasons for this is that we are bored while reading – our old reading habits hamper the flow of information that is processed in our mind – and our mind tunes out – begins to wander.

The main problem is our habit to read silently aloud – to vocalize the words - in our mind. A habit that starts at an early age – when we are asked to read...

I have become a huge fan of electronic reading, and today I always choose reading on my Kindle eReader or with my Kindle app on my tablet rather than reading the old-fashioned way with a paper book in hand.

There are a few reasons why this is so, and the main one is that with the eReader I am in total control of my reading experience. The reader has never had as much control over their own reading experience as they have today. I have even spouted and proclaimed that the eReader and tablets are the greatest innovation in our reading since Gutenberg carried out his first printed Bibles from his print shop.

There are 7 tips I always give my students when they are reading on their own eReaders. I created this list because I found that almost 95% of my students were not using their eReaders in the right way. They were not taking advantage of the massive benefits that the eReader can give you while reading your books and texts. Something that I go into much more detail with them in my...