Ask HN: How Do You Read?
Hi HN. Recently I have been wondering how other people read. I recently realized that once I finish a book I immediately replace it for the next one on my to-read list. As soon as I swap titles it kinda feels like the value of the previous book slowly starts to fade and gets lost. Obviously not all of it, and especially on novels I'm in for the ride and getting into the story. But in more informative/instructive stuff I feel like there must be a "better" way to read and get the most out of each book.
For example, recently, I started taking notes into the margins and I find I feel more "engaged" to the reading experience and the content. So I wonder what is other people's take on reading?
257 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 286 ms ] threadThis is a great question though. What features could one add to a hypothetical PDF viewer that could help us? Sometimes I feel like having a separate text file is not sufficient, or not convenient enough. Most of the books I read do have a summary per section, perhaps I could take a screenshot of them. Additionally I could use the PDF viewer to highlight sentences, and add a feature to this PDF viewer that would allow me to cycle through them. Thoughts and/or ideas?
https://vimeo.com/331908835
Needless to say, I don’t read a lot. Once in a while I find a book that interests me, and usually it takes me around a week or two to complete (when reading around 30 - 60 minutes a day).
"I don’t read a lot" this might be the "problem". Likely because of bad digital reading habits I completely lost the ability to focus while reading for pleasure.
Last year, I needed a few weeks (if not months) of a daily grind until I recovered the ability to read for prolonged periods of time without getting distracted.
At the same time I'll bounce around on the web and voraciously read a wide spectrum of things on a daily basis. Anything from programming topics to spending an afternoon reading a neurology systemic review.
I think it's the format. With books I really have to have a singular focus, and I can't periodically task switch or indulge in nervous tics like repeatedly clicking the page background as I read.
Definitely used to read a lot more physical books. Guessing prolonged computer/internet/smartphone/game use tends to fracture one's attention span in weird ways.
The same thing works for many repetitive activities. Wear headphones while doing dishes. Listen while driving, walking, anything of the sort. The important thing is to have something that takes up a bit of brain, but not too much.
This is a problem. For few weeks I am trying to conquer it by focusing eyes onto infinity while looking at the computer. It helps me wade off thoughts other than whats printed (and I just read) on the screen. So read a line, focus to infinity (and picturise what was said in the line), read next line.
Experiment is on only for a few weeks now, but it surely helps in attention and wading off extraneous thoughts.
That said I know I can speed read and retain information even if I'm rather rusty for things outside of information lookup/skimming. But I find if I speed read and can recall information about it that doesn't mean I've developed any insights or enjoyed what I read as an experience.
After finishing the book I do another review simplifying the most important parts and then I add them to Anki.
After that using SRS helps me to refresh the knowledge about the book.
If it's a book I'm reading in order to acquire a certain skill, then I have to stop periodically and do the thing it says (e.g. in programming, or a foreign language). Not even notes would be enough to make it stick.
Then find one good book in this field and read it carefully while doing practices.
Find other books in this field to broaden your thinking.
I read, mostly on my Kindle, mostly at night before falling asleep. I gladly re-read books I've enjoyed and usually get a lot more out of it the second go-around compared to the first.
Read How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer Adler. (https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Classic-Intelligent/dp/...) I’ve given this book to a bunch of people on my teams as it also helps with communicating ideas which is vital as a programmer.
The wikipedia page for it is a good place to get an overview of what it’s about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book
Since reading it I’ve been keeping a notebook, some people might call it a Commonplace Book, with interesting stuff from the book. I find that I get a lot more from books from the act of writing it down and then reading those notes later when I glance at them while looking something else up in the notebook.
One big big big thing I learned from the book is to not read a non-fiction book like it was a novel. There’s nothing wrong with skipping ahead and finding out what happens later, in fact you should absolutely skim the book first. I end up finishing a lot more books by doing this since so many books aren’t actually worth careful reading. I am able to systematically skim a book including the TOC and index and determine if it’s worth reading carefully. A lot of books are so sparse with ideas that you can get most of them through this method. Only the good books are worth going on to the second and third stages and only the great ones the fourth stage.
I tend to have two books going at a time. One I read seriously, usually in the morning and take notes etc. The other is purely entertainment band is usually an evening or weekend mornings book.
Do you mean to say: "is to read a non-fiction book like it was a novel"?
- First pass: Understand the structure, important words (from index), some interesting passages.
- Second pass: Read it all the way through, don't worry if you don't understand stuff
- Third pass: Look up stuff that you didn't understand from the previous pass and read it again in order to understand them.
- Four pass: Read it concurrently with other related books to try to truly understand the topic
There's far more written than you'll ever be able to read. The cost of discovery is a large impediment to that.
Skimming / scanning (contents, index, bibliography, intro/conclusion chapters) is part of the informational assessment. If the book holds up to that, keep digging into it. If not, set it down, and feel no guilt.
I'm reading a lot of material, though I'm not satisfied with my methods or progress. I've found Adler's book highly useful. The principle problem is that my interests have both breadth and depth sufficient that the volume of relevant material is enormous, and quality assessment is complicated. I'm doing the best I can.
My point was aimed along the lines that if a book is worth reading once, you will benefit from rereading it at a future date.
What's impressed me is how much a book can change ... or was it me ... over time, as I've learned and been exposed to more things and experiences.
Some improve, some are less impressive.
When reading a novel, you wouldn't skim it and skip ahead to find out all the plot twists and surprise ending and spoil all the suspense and fun.
With a nonfiction book, you're not worried about plot spoilers. You want to learn from the book. So skimming through it to pick up some of the gist before reading it in detail is a fine idea.
Lansing spent years doing research for this book, including interviewing all the living crew members, and it is 100% true. But it has a proper plotline, fantastic character development, and a very climactic and happy ending. Reading ahead won't exactly ruin the story (the basic points of the mission are commonly known anyway), but there's no advantage to doing so.
In other words, some non-fiction books are novels too, and they should be read like novels.
If a reader wanted to extract and retain as much information as possible from Endurance (say, if they were studying it in school, or read it but found they didn't retain a lot of the key points), they would still benefit from skimming, skipping around, taking notes, and other advice provided in this post. This advice applies to anyone who wishes to extract and retain information and understanding from any given piece of text, fiction or non. Just don't spoil compelling stories for yourself unless you really want to.
For instructional books I make a bullet point list of key learnings.
I'm sure that problem won't exist forever (and it doesn't exist for titles that are never updated). But it certainly reduces my trust in the platform. Which reduces how much I take advantage of it.
Under Manage Your Content and Devices, Preferences, there is an Automatic Book Updates item which you can turn off. Then if you want you can update books individually, or not.
https://www.reddit.com/r/kobo/comments/7swz6v/exporting_high...
I never would have thought to look this up without reading your comment. Absolute game changer. Cheers!
But as of yet I tend to read books cover to cover and either finish them or give up on them along the way. But I do take notes about interesting things, and sometimes I do little experiments with them also. My notes are a bit lazy in that often my notes consist of taking a picture with my phone, but I categorize the photos into certain albums.
That's a perfectly good question. I used to think that skimming was worthless, only something that people who didn't actually care about information did.
But if you think about how you are constantly judging the value of information everywhere throughout the entire day then you can see how we have to make some filtering decisions.
Systematic skimming is just another filter. If I'm going to dedicate 10 hours to reading the book carefully it makes sense to get an overview of the ground first. If the books I'm reading are from Alan Kay's list of greatest books you should read then I'm going to not worry so much about the filtering aspect of the skimming. If it's a shitty book with a catchy title in the business books section of the library I'm going to be much more skeptical and the filtering part of skimming is essential to not wasting time on crap.
Judge a book by its cover. Then judge it by its table of contents. Then judge it by some passages you read that looked interesting. Don't commit to a book until you've gotten a better feel for what's inside.
Also, while sometimes this could backfire, it's often useful to come to a book with some idea of what you want to get out of it and go digging for it specifically.
Also, it allows me to export all of my highlights.
Finally it adds a gamification dimension, showing me random five hightlights from my books.
PS: Through this site I learned that my Kindle highlights reside in a in file called `My Clippings.txt` (in /Volumes/Kindle/documents/My Clippings.txt) This is something I always wanted to know, because I have many books I uploaded to my Kindle device via USB (so no clound sync available).
Unfortunately 'My Clippings.txt' is a narrowly (and honestly, pretty awfully) defined format that Kindle devices generate. So that won't work for Google Play Books.
That being said, we want to build a separate Google Play Books importing tool -- it's on our roadmap!
[0] https://www.audible.com/pd/How-to-Read-a-Book-Audiobook/B003...
Country doesn't affect card payments in my case (Monzo) but worse case scenario you can use points.
Short passages or a couple chapters can be really rewarding. “What is the author actually connecting this to?” “Are these questions being addressed one at a time, or too many at once” etc.
We used Adler as a starting point for a bunch of school books and did these as assignments - while it was painful it upped my game and brought so much more out of the book.
:)
Adler's book is indeed highly recommended.
An upshot is that you cannot in any meaningful sense read 10,000 books in a short period of time, though it's a tractable option over, say, a lifetime: 10,000 books in 60 years is 160 books a year, or about 14 a month. That's considering a new book every couple of days.
To which you could apply the techniques described in Adler's book. To add to that, you need some sort of information capture system that scales, such that you're aware of the books you've attempted to read, and what your quick-perusal impression was.
I'm also convinced that more information is useful only in a general sense. Information as with all else follows a Zipf or Power function fo significance and utility, both in area and time of impact. Much of what we are exposed to either doesn't concern much by subject, area, or time, with news being very high up on that list. News matters when current events have a high probability of impact on your life. The fact that newspaper readership in the US peaked during WWII, and has declined at a virtually constant rate ever since, has much to do with this. During the war, small events in faraway places could have a significant impact (and did). Since then ... not quite so much, and focus on individual events has proved largely less productive.
(Hrm: maybe the news is grossly misdesigned? That thought's occurred to me for quite some time.)
What you describe in terms of maintaining state and sense of place within a book is something I struggle with. The idea of learning and forgetting curves, and of paced repetition, should probably play into that. A key issue being "does this material warrant paced repetition?" Because if you've got to repeatedly process the information you hear, that's going to put a cap on what you can learn.
So, the idea of progressive reading not only of a given topic, but over the entire corpus is something you've got to consider. What's a reasonable progression through a set of works? Which is pretty close to saying "what is an effective pedagogy?"
The benefits of reading a wide range of works is that patterns, similarities, and patterns emerge. The disadvantage is that there's a great deal of repetition, and of course, a large amount of bullshit, some accidental, some intentional.
Not all bullshit is useless. Bullshit that's become culturally relevant and/or integrated is useful not because it's true, but because it explains and describes that culture. Reading with this in mind is useful, though also difficult.
And there's the problem of exposing yourself to repeated bullshit and/or toxicity. At a certain point that becomes damaging even when you're aware of it. The biggest problem with propaganda isn't that it's false, it's that it's effective even on those who create it. "Drinking your own Cool Aid" is a phrase because reasons, and some of the most harmful doctrines are harmful because their originators are fully convinced or swayed by them.
There's probably a rough structural outline of the work in these paragraphs, FWIW. Anything you'd add/remove/change?
I did a double-take until I read 'non-fiction'. Yes, absolutely, I agree. Large non fiction books need to be approached strategically for time saving's sake.
Fiction on the other hand, I adore taking my time :)
The slow books take me a while to read. Each section I read I like to think about it and write a short blurb for myself to remind myself or apply it to a bigger body of knowledge or put it into use.
The books I skim usually don’t need to be read completely and it is important to just gather the broad overview and take the notes at the end. But for these I try to just summarize the 2-3 major points that the book is making at the end so I can go back and remember them if I need to.
I thought I was an outlier, then I met people that do 4 books per week.
80% of the books I read are technical about programming, math, science, etc. 20% are a hodgepodge.
Fiction books I read very slowly, for enjoyment.
My pace has slowed down. Nowadays I read only one chapter per month of "What to Expect: The First Year" and pray that we make it to the next month ;)...Okay I kid, but my pace is now down to about 1 per month.
I found it really useful, but it took willpower to do this, and I soon fell out of the habit. Il have to try it again.
It was also recently discussed here on HN[2].
As a serious reader, I took "offense" at first the sweeping title. But when I completely read the article, the author's contention was largely with poorly written books and lectures work ... which wouldn't make for a sensational title.
As to the original question, for non-fiction (and even for some fiction, like by Iain. M Banks) I take a lot of hand-written notes while reading. Of course, it's "slower", but so be it -- if I'm reading a valuable book, I want to take my sweet time.[1] https://andymatuschak.org/books/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19887424
Also, if anyone knows good open source alternative which would work on mobile and web in a way Play Books works - would be great to try. I've seen few libraries e.g epub.js and also NextCloud has its way to display uploaded books, but couldn't find a fully working alternative.
I skimmed through the comments and folks have said they read slowly, but also say they average about a book a week. Is that really true? How many books would you say you finish on average per year?
I read quite quickly but I average about a book every 2 weeks because of other commitments (consistently ~25 per year)
For non-technical books, I've very rarely seen any value in taking comprehensive notes (except highlights). I read those on a Kindle, so it's easy to highlight and reference highlights later.
Absolutely agree. I often liken reading (at least reading fiction) to the leaking basket fable [0]. I'm not sure of it's origin but the linked description is in the context of reading Buddhist spritual texts. This mindset has also made reading much more enjoyable for me, because I've stopped caring whether or not I can instantly recall details of books that I've read.
[0] https://www.itstimetomeditate.org/leaking-basket-indian-fabl...
Reading is an experience, not a chore. The value of reading comes from the reading, not from the "have read". The fraction of information you retain from your hobby reading is essentially irrelevant.
As for remembering, you won't remember everything. I think the commentor that said it's about shaping your mind over time is correct.
It's just like how you want to surround yourself with smart/successful people. You might not remember everything they say or do but it shapes you.
"iron sharpens iron"
Most books I just read once fairly rapidly: skipping over parts I don’t get or find uninteresting. Just a few books ever get an ‘analytical’ reread.
I don’t keep a notebook generally to keep reads portable, I instead talk about what I’m reading pretty aggressively as a strategy to memorize and absorb knowledge.
For math and computer science books, I definitely like to write code to do things. Particularly in math I have the hardest time remembering which greek letter means what thing in which context, and well formed programming language variable names make things much clearer.
For other stuff, I try to build an outline of the theory of the book and come up with some actions I can take to see how the ideas would work in the contexts I have available to me. It's a little difficult to take notes depending on the context, particularly with audiobooks. Sometimes I will read other people's summaries to see if I missed something.
For fiction and poetry I don't really do anything special except copy down particular quotes I enjoy.
https://link.medium.com/30JQJa3KBZ
Synopsis: 1. Use a reading list 2. Pay attention to reading environment (what app/device, lighting, noise-level) 3. Use a dictionary 4. Talk about it 5. Follow journalists 6. Increase quality, read less
So I decided to take notes. But then I thought of all the notebooks I filled in school (and still have some), and never looked at after the semester was over. Notes in a notebook are not much better.
So I made a blog, and for every book I read, I make blog posts with the highlights. The idea is that it will be on the Internet, and I can review them whenever and wherever I want to. I did this for a while, but noticed I never went back to review my notes. Still, I considered this an improvement.
Taking serious notes, BTW, slowed down my reading probably 3-5x.
Along the way I realized I can't always be near a computer while reading. So I started taking notes in a notebook and transcribing later. Fountain pens for the win!
Anyway, since I still wasn't reviewing my notes often, I decided to take it one step further. I used org-drill[1] to make flashcards of things I would like to retain. I started using flashcard software for other reasons in November, and I can say it's been wildly successful when it comes to retention. I've not done it for much of my nonfiction reading, as life has been busy and I've not read much. But I do plan to make flashcards. I still make more refined notes and put them in my blog, though.
Making flashcards is not a significant effort. Mostly it's copy pasting material from my usual notes blog.
Now this all may seem overkill, and perhaps literally killing the joy of reading books. But as I said, if I'm not remembering 80-90% of a book I enjoyed, then the only reason I'm reading it is entertainment. And fiction provides for better entertainment.
[0] Here's an extreme example: In 2014, I was reading Willpower. It was amazing. I recall several times saying to myself "Wow!". After reading it, I decided to reread Thinking, Fast and Slow and take notes. I had read it less than a year prior, but had not taken notes. Still, I did feel I hadn't forgotten much. What did I find out? Over half of my "Wow!" moments for Willpower were in Thinking, Fast and Slow. So not only had I forgotten so much within a year, I did not even recognize it when reading it again!
(Let's ignore the question of whether most of Willpower is junk science).
[1] Most people use Anki if you don't want to use Emacs. Org drill has the benefit that I type up my notes in Org Mode anyway.