I Wish I Were A Genius but I’m not: Why I’m Writing Book Reflections

Image via Tim Wildsmith on Unsplash

I’m not one of those people who can devour a whole book in a day or two.

I read slowly. I have a hard time keeping track of names and characters. I’m definitely not one of those people who can just absorb and can regurgitate all the facts, stories, themes, dates etc.

When I read a book or watch a movie that I love - that truly moves me and changes me - I often have a hard time explaining, verbally and meaningfully, what it’s about and/or what I liked about it.

I find this frustrating and, at times, embarrassing. I want to be one of those people, like my younger brother or a professional podcast host, who can read something and then immediately speak eloquently about it.

So effortlessly articulate. So impressive. So cool. Fuck.

Until I was about 7 years old, I genuinely thought I was destined to be the smartest person in the entire world. Then Zach Henry transferred to our school and beat me in the ‘train game’, the one with the flashcards where you go head-to-head around the class and see who can answer the multiplication problem first. It was then, upon defeat, that I realized I’d only ever, at best, be the second smartest person on the planet.

Apparently I’ve never gotten over this because I’m still hard on myself for not being a super genius.

Recently, I wanted to tell someone about Joseph Campbell’s “The Power of Myth”, and my description was limited to something like this:

“Um, it’s like about this guy from the 50’s who was like into mythology and like… how we used to have it and now we don’t but like… we need it and we’re all screwed up and men used to have rituals and rites of passage where they transitioned from boys to men, but we don’t have that anymore and its like… Oh, I’m butchering the description, I’m not very good at this, but I promise it’s good!”

My frustration is that I know my appreciation for the material is so much more profound than this, and I want to be able to share that. I want to inspire others to read the books that change me, to interpret them in their own way, and to then share their interpretations with me and with others.

The best workaround I’ve found, so far, for my case of ‘regular person brain’, is to read slowly, highlight my favourite parts, and then manually type up (or dictate when I’m feeling lazy, but typing works better because I have to pay closer attention to the words and ideas) all the quotes/notes in a document.

Then I can pull up the doc any time, whether I’m trying to share an idea with a friend, pull a quote for a blog post, or maybe I’m just trying to remember some stuff I’d once deemed worth writing down.

The next step to strengthening my understanding and/or interpretation of a book (or film), I think, would be to actually write about it in my own words. What I thought of it. Why I read it. What it meant to me. Where I’m applying (or trying to apply) its best ideas in my life.

This is how I ended up writing this post. I was on an early flight, looking at about 50 different blog topic ideas I’d written down, feeling utterly uninspired to dig into any of them, so I decided to open up my notes folder and just see what came to me. I opened up “The Power of Myth” by Joseph Campbell and I was instantly reminded what an incredible impact this book had on me.

So, I’m going to write a reflection piece on “The Power of Myth”, by Joseph Campbell.

I’ll try to write a number of these this year, on some of my all-time favourite books.

I think it’ll help me better understand, internalize, and contextualize the ideas in these books and, hopefully, feel a bit more confident speaking about them out in the world.