How I Read Books
I think many people misunderstand how to use books generally. They're such simple things. Many people think you have to read every page of a book starting at the first page and go to the last page, before moving on to the next. Maybe because that's what they were taught in school? How I read: - as many books as I want concurrently (from 0 to infinity) - sometimes I skip entire chapters to get to the bits I find important - sometimes I read parts of a book and decide it's a bad book, or not useful to me, so I put it aside - sometimes I read the same paragraphs/pages/chapters/books multiple times, rarely, but occasionally, many, many times (e.g. some essays I read approximately every 3 months, since they're so important to keep front of mind). - very often, I take notes, often many pages of notes. These are an amazing resource for years to come
Discussion Highlights (5 comments)
Preston67
Thank you, this has been very helpful information
Onplana
I like to listen instead of reading books.
jimekus
I also listen, as I've done for 40 years since my first SpeechThing. Now I have end-to-end harmonic mixing thrown in. I automate Firefox scraping of daily articles, but for longer books, I read as much as I want and when the session closes the remainder is queued up at the rear, so I get back into those queued books in the quiet weekends when then articles are exhausted. I listen from very early morning until midday.
ytoawwhra92
What you're describing requires a level of literacy possessed by less than 10% of the adult population.
fyredge
It depends on the book. This style of reading is suitable for textbooks and journal articles, but does not work for fiction, where reading order can be quite important.