How I read books (2012)

I just found a 2012 article on how I read books that I have never published before!

As part of setting up my GitHub account for AI integrations, I removed all the repos that could have personal info in them. In the cleanup, I found an old-blog repo, with 3 articles from 2012.

One of the articles was “How I read books” which, despite its raw writing, holds up quite well to how I still think about reading books 14 years later.

So travel in time with me. Here’s the exclusive “How I read books” from Dui back in 2012.

How I read books

---
layout: post
title: "How I read books"
category: Books
tags: [discipline]
---

First all those anti-flaming disclaimers - This is how I read books, not the right way to read books, or how you should read books. Although throughout the narrative I'll say things as advice or implying that you should change the way you do things, maybe you don't have the same limitations or the same resources that I do, so take that into consideration. I don't mean in any way that my advice is universally better than whatever you're doing.

I don't care about reading speed

The way I read books has as much to do with what I don't do as it has to do with what I do. And one thing I don't do is read fast.

Of course I can't read fast even if I wanted to, I don't know how to speed read. But it’s not something I miss particularly on reading books. I think my reading speed is fine. It's my thinking speed that needs work.

I'll explain - I understand some of the claims about speed reading is that it improves comprehension, and I don't really doubt that. My point is that reading speed is not really the bottleneck of my reading activity, and neither is comprehending what I'm reading. To me, it’s like improving my machine's IO when I'm trying to crunch data at 100% CPU - I don't need more IO, what I need is more CPU.

Another analogy would be thinking about writing. I've been recently helping out a friend with his MBA thesis. The interesting part is, if you sum all the time spent working on the thesis, our overall writing speed would be maybe 5 wpm (words per minute). Maybe 10. Most of the time, we spent thinking about what to write, researching topics, structuring ideas, re-writing what we had previously written (and as you know, I read slowly). Typing faster wouldn't have helped, it was a cognitive bottleneck that we had, not a writing speed one. That's the same bottleneck I have when reading.

I don't mean this for reading fiction or entertainment

That to me would be like comparing writing your thesis to writing an email. I know some fiction is involving and hard to grasp, but overall the type of reading I'm talking about is the hard stuff, and the stuff that changes you.

I'm specifically talking about making sure you absorb what you read in order to use it in the future. I see reading some entertainment books kind of like I see watching a movie or TV show - its usefulness is to entertain me, and for that moment. Of course I need to comprehend it, but I don't need to remember it, or master it in a particular way.

The reading I'm talking about is the type where you master things. The type where, after you read the book, you feel like you really know what the book is about. After you're done, you should be able to pull ideas from that book into your daily conversations when they are permanent (one thing I'm particularly good at), or write a summary of each of the chapters and main ideas of the book. One could even say that, with the knowledge you got from the book, you could probably write the same book. That's the kind of knowledge I aim for when I read, even if I sometimes can't attain it.

Actually I dislike even calling it "reading"

Reading shouldn't be called reading - it’s like calling writing, or even programming, 'typing'. The reading part is easy and really unimportant.

I'm not sure if there's a good name for what goes on under the covers, but that's what you should focus on. I'm almost tempted to call it "learning", but that's actually too broad. But to me it sure isn't just "reading". It is more like "studying".

I guess we all at a point or another studied something. Be it a topic in school which we had to learn because it need to be memorized (I know its lame but we all had to do it, right?) or ideally something you really wanted to learn the most from, take the most off, and it implied not reading from the beginning to the end of the paragraph, but saying multiple 'aha's as you read, reading the same line again and again until you really grasp its meaning, going back a few pages to really understand the reference on the current page.

It should actually involve a lot more than just reading

Pretending you'll learn by reading books is like pretending you can learn music by reading sheet music.

The way you learn music is by exploring it, exploring the holes in our understanding of it. And that usually can't be done through reading alone. If you're reading a book about nutrition, what are the things you'll change about your nutrition to complement your learning? Reading about productivity, what are the metrics you have so you can tell if your tweaks are working or not? Without worrying about these things, reading is as good as useless.

The process I have is keeping my to-do list nearby, and adding items that I think are relevant for my learning to my inbox. Some books even break it down into exercises for you, which makes things way easier. I add those, schedule them just like I do for my regular to-dos, and get to them as I read. Like I said, it’s really not about the reading. It’s about the whole learning experience, and that goes way further than reading.

I don't care how many books I read per week/month/year

I actually cared about this before, and maybe I'll care about it at some point in the future, but right now this doesn't make any sense to me, it’s like asking 'how many different exercises did you do at the gym this month?'. I mean, there's an answer to that, but is there a point? You should be worried about what have you learned, or in the gym how much stronger you actually got.

All the books I read are in a constant flow. I'm never really done with them. They are always there, waiting to be revisited. I guess I'm only done with them when I spend so much time without revisiting them because I think either my time is better spent on other books, or because I know so much about that book that I'm really confident revisiting it won't add to my knowledge. To be honest, that's hardly true and I always learn something new by revisiting something old.

I could probably be more methodical about it. I haven't researched the topic too much, but there's plenty of research about the impact of spaced repetition in memory, and about how things you learn that you haven't repeated are usually only retained at about 10% of the original material. Like I said, I don't have much research to back this up but I know plenty of research has been done in this field. I suggest you check it out and maybe leave me a comment. For now, I just revisit things in an ad hoc way. But I find revisiting the same material multiple times really critical in my reading.

I don't necessarily finish books, and don't read cover to cover

If you don't skip when you read, you probably should. Actually, there's no such a thing as skip. Reading a book from beginning to end is kind of like reading a computer program by opening the file that starts with an 'a' in the first directory, then going all the way to the last file in the last directory. It doesn't make sense. A book should be read like a dictionary - it’s a treasure map and treasure island all in one, and searching for the treasure by walking every step of the island linearly is at least naive.

There are even some books that are written with the 'cover to cover' narrative in mind. Even those should be skipped. You know how you feel when you're talking to someone who keeps repeating that same thing he just said? You say "ok, I get it" and then they repeat it? Well, most of those books are read with the reader that needs reinforcement in mind, and you might not be one of them, at least for the current topic. So always keep in mind if you would be learning more if you were actually reading a different part of the book. If you think you would, skip it. You'll always come back to it later anyway.

I highlight rather than take notes or write summaries

Some people prefer to take notes, some people write summaries, some prefer to highlight, some do a combination of the three. I sometimes change my approach, but recently I almost always only highlight and don't do any of the others.

There are two problems I see with writing summaries: Most of the time you write a summary only once with limited information, and writing is slower than reading for topics that you already have a good understanding of.

Sometimes, I noticed when writing summaries, that I already knew everything I wanted to write about. I just kind of had to go through the effort of actually writing it. Although that is great in order for you to realize if you really know about it and to find holes in your knowledge, sometimes it’s quite time consuming. I actually don't dispute this part too much and think it’s a good exercise, and I might go back to doing it again.

It’s the reading of summaries that bothers me. Once you write that summary, it’s too tempting to just stick to what you wrote when revisiting topics. I think that tends to keep my knowledge of the book inside that initial box. The first time you read you almost always don't have a full understanding of the topic. For this, revisiting the whole material is crucial. The great part about highlighting is that you can go through your highlights, but you immediately find the contexts around them in case you need to dig further into something.

Conclusion

Reading is hard. Some people don't even have the habit of reading, and reading the easy way, just plowing through books, is kind of a nice way to feel like you're making progress. I think that unless you have eidetic memory, and maybe even then, this is like using a cheat code to see the ending of the game without playing it through. Not only you won't really know what the game is all about, but you'll also never become a good player.

Don't rush, take your time, and forget reading books as something that's only about reading. It is not.