How do you extract the most possible value from a book?

Obligatory ref.:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book

By enjoying it

Entertainment and/or fulfillment is most of the value in most books. Whether or not a book contains directly actionable information is mostly dependent on what you are trying to do. For example, a book about Kubernetes is only directly actionable when working with Kubernetes. At random, a human being is unlikely to use Kubernetes. So a book on Kubernetes usually doesn't contain any actionable information.

Suppose you read a book on Kubernetes today. You don't use Kubernetes. So you read it just because you are curious. That's the value of most books. If three years from now you start using Kubernetes then the book suddenly becomes directly actionable.

The common strategies that you'll find people do are:

- take notes in margins

- phrase what you read in your own words

- think critically about what you read

But for me, I extract the most value when I discuss what I read with others. Not only does it provide more motivation for reading but I also find myself with a lot more insight after a conversation with a friend about what we just read.

I like to kind of live with books rather than read them linearly. So I might go and read a chapter from a book. I consider them resources. That’s why I deeply appreciate a good table of contents; they were better in the past.

Check out “How to Read a Book”, too. It presents book reading in quite a different way than you might be used to. The book as an object that you investigate almost like a strange beetle or a transistor radio—to learn how it works.

Most nonfiction books “do something” in the way that a program does something. There’s a main purpose and a lot of subroutines and maybe some boilerplate and repetition. It’s not as linear as you might think either. And they’re embedded in a web of references. It’s very interesting to think about how you actually use a book in your life...

I find that re-reading the books help. For instance, it wasn’t until my 3rd read of The Goal that I felt as if I completely understood the underlying themes.

As others mentioned, being able to relate to the content of the book helps immensely. For instance when reading The Innovator’s Dilemma I kept finding parallels to my previous industry and company. This struck me so much that I can list most of the content of the book simply by thinking back to those insights.

As a last note, non-fiction books are seldom gripping. Reading a few pages before going to sleep doesn’t cut it for me, words zip past my eyeballs without hitting the brain. I need to actively focus on the content, much more so than when reading fiction. I try to force myself to pause and actively think about the content every few paragraphs: does it make sense? Can I follow the logic of the argument? Does it resonate with my experience? It’s the only way for me to actually get anything lasting out of the book.

Read books with ideas you can apply, and use the ideas in practice. Don't read books that you cannot directly apply to something, that's consuming input without producing output. (I quite enjoy reading, and happily read books that I cannot apply, but this is not "efficient"...)

Value extracted, and even the best way to extract value from a book, will be heavily context dependent. E.g, here's a wildly contrived example: If you are trapped in a hut in a snowstorm you may be able to extract considerable value from a trashy novel or physics textbook in your backpack by tearing it apart to use as kindling.

Try longer. Don't read a book with the assumption that you will derive value from it in the amount of time it takes to simply read all of the words start to finish. You will need to try examples, re-read sections, skip around, ask questions of others, find other sources, etc.

Sometimes it would be nice if life was more like an RPG - reading a book means a few hours ticks by and then you get +1 to your skill of choice - but unfortunately it's not that easy :)

Everyone's different, but something that helps me is deliberately testing myself after reading a passage or chapter that taught me something I didn't already know. Literally take your eye gaze away from the page and try to recall, summarize, and answer a question about what you just read.

It's one of those things that sounds too simple to be effective, but it works for me.

Try to take a single element from that book and implement it in real life.