Nabokov's solution to this dilemma, reread. The only good reader is, as he said, a re-reader. If we're honest nobody can actually remember more than a dozen books, and if you pick the right ones there's more to learn in any of them than you can learn in years.
It's similar to the sentiment that the only way to understand a poem is to be able to recite it from memory, or the fact that some pianists play nothing else but Bach and yet reach mastery. Everything's already in there, or most of it anyway.
Requires a different mentality, one that treats reading or perception and deep study as the thing to care about, not 'absorbing information' or 'knowledge'.
Umberto Eco once pointed out that the size of the unknown, the books one has not read are magnitudes larger than the books one has read, so to treat knowledge as some sort of priced possession to climb in the pecking order is meaningless, what matters is being adequate in understanding the few things one actually has the time to study.
Recognition and retrieval are different mental processes. When one re-reads a material, they recognize it. Recognition gives a false impression of “knowing” the material, whereas retrieval is a better measure of knowing. In order to get better at retrieval, one should practice retrieval, for example, by answering questions about the topic.
I found this related saying from Eco even more insightful (at least for me and for my particular case):
> The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
I've just turned 40 recently and I've started to realise that no, I won't get to read all the books that I already have in my library, but in the last few years (and especially during the pandemic) I think I've started to "accelerate" the purchasing of books related to fields of knowledge I'm interested in and of which I don't know that many things.
For example just yesterday I bought "The European Right: A Historical Profile" co-authored by Eugen Weber [1] because I've already read Weber's "Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914" which I found highly interesting and because I found it interesting that in the 1960s (i.e. relatively shortly after WW2) the people were still seeing the proto-European fascists as being right-wing, nowadays they would just be called populists, in other words I was interested in reading in the 2020s a book written in the 1960s about an European political movement that took place in the early 1900s. There's a big chance I will not get to read that book in the next 2-3 years, but by just purchasing it and having in my head all the internal conversation I tried to summarise above has give me an extra "intellectual" (for lack of a better word) something.
> Because when you’re finally in a situation where you could use its insights, you’ve completely forgotten them.
I once read a short essay by Patrick Süskind (author of "Perfume - The Story of a Murderer"). I am paraphrasing, but in it, he discusses his embarrassment that he cannot remember even major plot details or character names of great works of world literature, although he has read them multiple times and they deeply inspired his own work. He then makes an interesting speculation: if a book really and deeply influences you, then maybe actively remembering facts and insights of the book becomes harder and harder, because the book's ideas have been so deeply ingrained into your brain and thinking that you cannot remember them as facts independent of your thinking. But this doesn't mean that you have "forgotten" them.
Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but you don't know why.
The fact that I dug up this quote proves I remember some things I've read :)
FWIW I take 1-3 sentences of notes on articles I read, and few paragraphs of notes on books I read, and put them in my personal wiki. I find this not only helps retention but it helps understanding, by forcing hyperlinks to related work. Hyperlinks model the way your mind works.
I think it might work the other way. Remembering more details prevents the reader from likening their own life to what they read because they can more easily recall the incompatible differences between the two.
This reminds me a plot in "The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber", where the Taichi master asks the student how much he remembered what was shown to him, and keeps doing it until he "remembers nothing", that's when he has fully learned Taichi.
The way to remember what you read is to make sure you understand all the words in the text, the way they apply in context.
It's the micro-misunderstandings that lead up to the macro-misunderstanding which manifests as "forgetting".
Other commenters also mention applying what's in the book. That is 100% true, when you're reading about how to do something. If you're reading a fact-based book (non-fiction) but not about doing something I usually take a break from the text and think about how it would apply to the subject I'm studying. But it's just obvious that you can't get a concept if you don't understand the words that describe it.
The target is conceptual understanding. It's got nothing to do with memorization. TO get the meaning of a song, for instance, it's not necessary to memorize the lyrics.
One real-world example, I was taking care of my father in the hospital and I noticed one of the techs telling him that he needs to order his dinner from the "dysphagia" menu. I asked her if he could have some other soft foods from home and she said, "all I know is that he needs to order from the menu." I asked her what dysphagia means, honestly I didn't know. She didn't know. I looked it up and told her it means "difficulty in swallowing". She realized that she never actually understood the concept of WHY one needs to order from the menu. As if the food is somehow magic. So that helped her understand the concept of the rule, and why it applies and I am sure she hasn't forgotten it.
I don't take notes, mark up pages or speed read or use any crutch, trick or technique to study. I just get the definitions of words that I don't understand and I do just fine.
>I just get the definitions of words that I don't understand and I do just fine.
This is what turned the tide for me but it took much more discipline than I was willing to admit at first. When I stopped lying to myself about how much context clues were helping me understand the words I didn’t know, it started to take me 10 minutes to get through a page of a difficult book. However, it started to pay off when I achieved a deeper understanding of the books I was reading.
Exactly! Somewhere along the line we started being taught things like context clues and other study traps. No amount of technique can possibly replace proper vocabulary building. I spent a lot of time in the dictionary in my younger years but it’s paid off massively in my ability to study and assimilate new things.
Honestly, I am amazed that there are people that don't do this.
I am often wondering how different the world looks through the eyes of someone else, and it's very hard for me to imagine how people can "go through the motions" without understanding in situations like you described.
Personally, I could never remember a fact or a word without understanding the concept behind it or its significance.
It's easier to remember something if you understand it, which is why rote memorization is inferior, because it takes so many more repetition to get something to stick in your mind.
People need to realize that human memory != computer memory. It’s not even similar. Human intelligence is all about identification and differentiation. Intelligence comes from being able to work with raw data and seeing how it can apply to given circumstances, predicting outcomes and selecting correct actions.
Memorization is the lowest form of intelligence, although it does have uses. I think it would be very beneficial for standardized testing to move away from testing ones ability to remember dates and lists of things and more toward problem solving and ability for the student to come up with solutions to problems of the field being studied.
Good for a book's first reader. What I really hate is browsing a used bookstore and finding something interesting or ordering a used book online, only to find it covered in markings (especially as some readers seem to highlight the most banal things). Very distracting.
I usually can't bring myself to mark up my own books for fear that I will distract my future self (or some other future reader if I sell or donate it), but will take notes separately. Although I've found that most books usually have hardly anything at all worth noting, and I'm not sure taking notes for its own sake, without any idea of its future usefulness, is necessarily worth it. Perhaps the hope is that a bunch of random knowledge just sitting in your memory will somehow automatically make itself useful when the time comes, which to be fair happens now and then, but usually if its not useful for very long, into the land of the forgotten it goes.
I used to feel this way too! But I've rethought it completely. The way I reframed is: If you spend money on a class, you can't then donate/sell that class to a used bookstore; I'm just turning the book into a class by writing in the margins. So, if I can increase my retention by 10% by writing in a book, I'm gonna write in the book. In reality I'm probably increasing my retention by something like 100% to 300%.
Thinking in these terms, I went from being just horrified at the idea of writing in books (I'm the kid of two college professors lol) to a huge advocate of it. There are some books I won't write in; the less related it is to my job & the more I'm just reading it for fun, or the more surface-level the content is, the less likely I am to write in it. (Also some UX books have really glossy pages and I literally can't.) (The one line I draw is, I will only write in pencil, never pen.) But most books I write tons and tons and tons of comments in the margins, and it really, really, really helps boost retention.
Also, writing in the margins is like actively participating in dialogue with the author and makes the experience a lot more engaging! Which makes me able to stay focused for a lot longer. Like if I'm not writing anything I'll start to get distracted / zone out after maybe 10 minutes, but if I'm interacting, I can stay focused for an hour or more. (Depends on the book and what's on my mind at the time and other environmental factors of course.)
I like to see others’ notes and highlighting, as long as it’s not too much. If the notes are banal or stupid it just makes me feel better about myself. If they are too smart for me or make connections I cannot, all the better.
My preference, rather than write in the book, is to write notes on little notepads and leave the note in the book as bookmarks. Probably not good for the books themselves if I add too many but it is convenient and I don’t have to worry about someone downstream finding my marginalia banal.
The best way to remember what you read is to apply it. If you read a book about programming in python and you want to retain that knowledge, write a program in python.
Unfortunately writer's writing advice for other writers but pretending like it's for everyone is too common.
>> 1. Quality matters more than quantity. If you read one book a month but fully appreciate and absorb it, you’ll be better off than someone who skims half the library without paying attention.
Maybe, or if you read the wrong thing, get a bunch of dumb ideas in your head that you would have been better off not having and nothing to counter act that can mess you up.
Furthermore, quality is hard to gauge ahead of time.
>> Speed-reading is bullshit. Getting the rough gist and absorbing the lessons are two different things. Confuse them at your peril.
That's hyperbole. When I read about speed reading it suggests that you vary your reading speed according to the subject matter. e.g. if you are reading Atlas Shrugged(if that's your cup of tea), I highly recommend speed reading through certain parts(you'll know when you get to them).
>> Book summary services miss the point. A lot of companies charge ridiculous prices for access to vague summaries bearing only the faintest resemblance to anything in the book. Summaries can be a useful jumping-off point to explore your curiosity, but you cannot learn from them the way you can from the original text.*
Depends on why you are reading the book. (e.g. Unfortunately much of school was nonsense, this can help with that).
>> Fancy apps and tools are not needed. A notebook, index cards, and a pen will do just fine.
Fancy apps and tools can be a purpose of their own. If a fancy note taking tool helps motivate you to take notes, and note taking is useful for you, you should get a fancy note taking tool. This is a personal decision.
>> We shouldn’t read stuff we find boring. Life is far too short.
Sometimes that nugget you need is in a boring book. I thought this wasn't reading for entertainment.
>> Finishing the book is optional. You should start a lot of books and only finish a few of them.
If the book is on surgical techniques... do I need to apply every technique to remember it?
Obviously, "applying" book knowledge is one of the least efficient or practicable way of improving retention. Also, it would be more around understanding the topics more thoroughly, especially if the author didn't do a good enough job of explaining the concepts already (it's easier to blame the reader, though).
Yeah I could expand on this some more. If a book is on surgical techniques then yeah you need some practice. Surgeons don’t get trained from books. I certainly wouldn’t want to be operated on by someone that only reads about operations.
I think some of this is around what it means to understand a topic. Is it just about an ability to regurgitate facts or maybe you want a book to really sink in because you don’t know when you will apply it.
Taking notes or doing kindle highlights and then reviewing them can really help. Review after you read and then again after a week. This works better for remembering specific things.
One of the best ways to have a book really stick with you is to read it again. This seems to be super linear and some books really benefit from it. That is re-reading a book will more than double your understanding. Sometimes when doing this you will wonder if it’s even the same book. Though this really is more true for better books.
I find this amusing because I remember (I don't know why I remember), reading an article posted on HN essentially suggesting the opposite. Something along the lines of: not trying to absorb the whole book if it's stopping you from making progress, better to finish something than read nothing, it was argued better and felt convincing at the time... It sort-of clicked because I do have a bunch of unfinished books that I find quite interesting, probably like most people. I usually get to a point where I stop because I feel like I'm just mechanically reading and not absorbing, and then get distracted...
I still haven't managed to force myself to just carry on, it just doesn't feel right. However when I do make some progress, I feel enriched and think about it in the following days - and isn't that the point? so I guess I am in agreement with this article. I'd rather make incremental progress on these books that matter to me, and actually assimilate the ideas, than get all the way to the end and only have a vague sense of what it was about. Maybe one day I will have the luxury of re-reading them front to back.
Or, perhaps they are both good strategies, but for different things. Slow for depth, fast for breadth - if you want to expose yourself to a wider variety for discovery, go fast. If you found a good quality book and know you like it, go slow.
All these types of heuristics, secretly push you, in a good way, both of them make you read more. It’s like hitting the gym and looking for the perfect routine, doesn’t matter which one is the optimal, working out is enough. That’s the hack
>Quality matters more than quantity. If you read one book a month but fully appreciate and absorb it, you’ll be better off than someone who skims half the library without paying attention.
Let's measure outcomes instead. Choose between these two scenarios:
1) I spend one month reading a book closely and I follow some memory enhancing technique to retain the material - book club style. I can verbally retell the main points of the book afterwards and discuss it intelligently with others who have done the same.
Or
2) I had a quick look at the book and it's outline, I placed it conceptually in it's genre and in relation to other books covering the same kind of material. I had a normal reading of the chapters that seemed most valuable. I found one actionable insight and immediately worked it into my own set of habits/techniques/schedule. All in all I do this in 1-2h. I do this for 5 books a month.
After a year, I suspect strategy 2 has a better yield.
Are you talking fiction or non-fiction? Strategy 2 will work pretty well for most non-fiction books, especially trendy ones. It'd be a bit odd for fiction IMO.
I was going to suggest a zettelkasten but while reading this noticed the author namedropped "How to Take Smart Notes" by Sönke Ahrens*.
Basically, when you take notes, summarize them in your own words. Look at a tool like Obsidian which uses markdown to save notes in plaintext. Look at people using this on YouTube if you want to dive deeper into the ecosystem.
Readit News
It's similar to the sentiment that the only way to understand a poem is to be able to recite it from memory, or the fact that some pianists play nothing else but Bach and yet reach mastery. Everything's already in there, or most of it anyway.
Requires a different mentality, one that treats reading or perception and deep study as the thing to care about, not 'absorbing information' or 'knowledge'.
Umberto Eco once pointed out that the size of the unknown, the books one has not read are magnitudes larger than the books one has read, so to treat knowledge as some sort of priced possession to climb in the pecking order is meaningless, what matters is being adequate in understanding the few things one actually has the time to study.
If anyone else is wondering, it's in his book encyclopedia of imaginary lands
> The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
I've just turned 40 recently and I've started to realise that no, I won't get to read all the books that I already have in my library, but in the last few years (and especially during the pandemic) I think I've started to "accelerate" the purchasing of books related to fields of knowledge I'm interested in and of which I don't know that many things.
For example just yesterday I bought "The European Right: A Historical Profile" co-authored by Eugen Weber [1] because I've already read Weber's "Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914" which I found highly interesting and because I found it interesting that in the 1960s (i.e. relatively shortly after WW2) the people were still seeing the proto-European fascists as being right-wing, nowadays they would just be called populists, in other words I was interested in reading in the 2020s a book written in the 1960s about an European political movement that took place in the early 1900s. There's a big chance I will not get to read that book in the next 2-3 years, but by just purchasing it and having in my head all the internal conversation I tried to summarise above has give me an extra "intellectual" (for lack of a better word) something.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Weber
I once read a short essay by Patrick Süskind (author of "Perfume - The Story of a Murderer"). I am paraphrasing, but in it, he discusses his embarrassment that he cannot remember even major plot details or character names of great works of world literature, although he has read them multiple times and they deeply inspired his own work. He then makes an interesting speculation: if a book really and deeply influences you, then maybe actively remembering facts and insights of the book becomes harder and harder, because the book's ideas have been so deeply ingrained into your brain and thinking that you cannot remember them as facts independent of your thinking. But this doesn't mean that you have "forgotten" them.
When I read I recall little but compile the experience as if holographically, enlarging my store of metaphors that surface unbidden as needed.
http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html
Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but you don't know why.
The fact that I dug up this quote proves I remember some things I've read :)
FWIW I take 1-3 sentences of notes on articles I read, and few paragraphs of notes on books I read, and put them in my personal wiki. I find this not only helps retention but it helps understanding, by forcing hyperlinks to related work. Hyperlinks model the way your mind works.
I elaborate on that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24536687
Funnily enough it cites the same PG essay. It also echoes the article here, which I strongly agree with:
Finishing the book is optional. You should start a lot of books and only finish a few of them
It's the micro-misunderstandings that lead up to the macro-misunderstanding which manifests as "forgetting".
Other commenters also mention applying what's in the book. That is 100% true, when you're reading about how to do something. If you're reading a fact-based book (non-fiction) but not about doing something I usually take a break from the text and think about how it would apply to the subject I'm studying. But it's just obvious that you can't get a concept if you don't understand the words that describe it.
The target is conceptual understanding. It's got nothing to do with memorization. TO get the meaning of a song, for instance, it's not necessary to memorize the lyrics.
One real-world example, I was taking care of my father in the hospital and I noticed one of the techs telling him that he needs to order his dinner from the "dysphagia" menu. I asked her if he could have some other soft foods from home and she said, "all I know is that he needs to order from the menu." I asked her what dysphagia means, honestly I didn't know. She didn't know. I looked it up and told her it means "difficulty in swallowing". She realized that she never actually understood the concept of WHY one needs to order from the menu. As if the food is somehow magic. So that helped her understand the concept of the rule, and why it applies and I am sure she hasn't forgotten it.
I don't take notes, mark up pages or speed read or use any crutch, trick or technique to study. I just get the definitions of words that I don't understand and I do just fine.
This is what turned the tide for me but it took much more discipline than I was willing to admit at first. When I stopped lying to myself about how much context clues were helping me understand the words I didn’t know, it started to take me 10 minutes to get through a page of a difficult book. However, it started to pay off when I achieved a deeper understanding of the books I was reading.
I am often wondering how different the world looks through the eyes of someone else, and it's very hard for me to imagine how people can "go through the motions" without understanding in situations like you described.
Personally, I could never remember a fact or a word without understanding the concept behind it or its significance.
Memorization is the lowest form of intelligence, although it does have uses. I think it would be very beneficial for standardized testing to move away from testing ones ability to remember dates and lists of things and more toward problem solving and ability for the student to come up with solutions to problems of the field being studied.
Good for a book's first reader. What I really hate is browsing a used bookstore and finding something interesting or ordering a used book online, only to find it covered in markings (especially as some readers seem to highlight the most banal things). Very distracting.
I usually can't bring myself to mark up my own books for fear that I will distract my future self (or some other future reader if I sell or donate it), but will take notes separately. Although I've found that most books usually have hardly anything at all worth noting, and I'm not sure taking notes for its own sake, without any idea of its future usefulness, is necessarily worth it. Perhaps the hope is that a bunch of random knowledge just sitting in your memory will somehow automatically make itself useful when the time comes, which to be fair happens now and then, but usually if its not useful for very long, into the land of the forgotten it goes.
Thinking in these terms, I went from being just horrified at the idea of writing in books (I'm the kid of two college professors lol) to a huge advocate of it. There are some books I won't write in; the less related it is to my job & the more I'm just reading it for fun, or the more surface-level the content is, the less likely I am to write in it. (Also some UX books have really glossy pages and I literally can't.) (The one line I draw is, I will only write in pencil, never pen.) But most books I write tons and tons and tons of comments in the margins, and it really, really, really helps boost retention.
Also, writing in the margins is like actively participating in dialogue with the author and makes the experience a lot more engaging! Which makes me able to stay focused for a lot longer. Like if I'm not writing anything I'll start to get distracted / zone out after maybe 10 minutes, but if I'm interacting, I can stay focused for an hour or more. (Depends on the book and what's on my mind at the time and other environmental factors of course.)
My preference, rather than write in the book, is to write notes on little notepads and leave the note in the book as bookmarks. Probably not good for the books themselves if I add too many but it is convenient and I don’t have to worry about someone downstream finding my marginalia banal.
Unfortunately writer's writing advice for other writers but pretending like it's for everyone is too common.
>> 1. Quality matters more than quantity. If you read one book a month but fully appreciate and absorb it, you’ll be better off than someone who skims half the library without paying attention.
Maybe, or if you read the wrong thing, get a bunch of dumb ideas in your head that you would have been better off not having and nothing to counter act that can mess you up.
Furthermore, quality is hard to gauge ahead of time.
>> Speed-reading is bullshit. Getting the rough gist and absorbing the lessons are two different things. Confuse them at your peril.
That's hyperbole. When I read about speed reading it suggests that you vary your reading speed according to the subject matter. e.g. if you are reading Atlas Shrugged(if that's your cup of tea), I highly recommend speed reading through certain parts(you'll know when you get to them).
>> Book summary services miss the point. A lot of companies charge ridiculous prices for access to vague summaries bearing only the faintest resemblance to anything in the book. Summaries can be a useful jumping-off point to explore your curiosity, but you cannot learn from them the way you can from the original text.*
Depends on why you are reading the book. (e.g. Unfortunately much of school was nonsense, this can help with that).
>> Fancy apps and tools are not needed. A notebook, index cards, and a pen will do just fine.
Fancy apps and tools can be a purpose of their own. If a fancy note taking tool helps motivate you to take notes, and note taking is useful for you, you should get a fancy note taking tool. This is a personal decision.
>> We shouldn’t read stuff we find boring. Life is far too short.
Sometimes that nugget you need is in a boring book. I thought this wasn't reading for entertainment.
>> Finishing the book is optional. You should start a lot of books and only finish a few of them.
Yes finishing the book is optional.
I have one, but every time I turn it on, it wants to run Windows update…
Obviously, "applying" book knowledge is one of the least efficient or practicable way of improving retention. Also, it would be more around understanding the topics more thoroughly, especially if the author didn't do a good enough job of explaining the concepts already (it's easier to blame the reader, though).
I think some of this is around what it means to understand a topic. Is it just about an ability to regurgitate facts or maybe you want a book to really sink in because you don’t know when you will apply it.
Taking notes or doing kindle highlights and then reviewing them can really help. Review after you read and then again after a week. This works better for remembering specific things.
One of the best ways to have a book really stick with you is to read it again. This seems to be super linear and some books really benefit from it. That is re-reading a book will more than double your understanding. Sometimes when doing this you will wonder if it’s even the same book. Though this really is more true for better books.
Dead Comment
> Finishing the book is optional.
I find this amusing because I remember (I don't know why I remember), reading an article posted on HN essentially suggesting the opposite. Something along the lines of: not trying to absorb the whole book if it's stopping you from making progress, better to finish something than read nothing, it was argued better and felt convincing at the time... It sort-of clicked because I do have a bunch of unfinished books that I find quite interesting, probably like most people. I usually get to a point where I stop because I feel like I'm just mechanically reading and not absorbing, and then get distracted...
I still haven't managed to force myself to just carry on, it just doesn't feel right. However when I do make some progress, I feel enriched and think about it in the following days - and isn't that the point? so I guess I am in agreement with this article. I'd rather make incremental progress on these books that matter to me, and actually assimilate the ideas, than get all the way to the end and only have a vague sense of what it was about. Maybe one day I will have the luxury of re-reading them front to back.
Or, perhaps they are both good strategies, but for different things. Slow for depth, fast for breadth - if you want to expose yourself to a wider variety for discovery, go fast. If you found a good quality book and know you like it, go slow.
>Quality matters more than quantity. If you read one book a month but fully appreciate and absorb it, you’ll be better off than someone who skims half the library without paying attention.
Let's measure outcomes instead. Choose between these two scenarios:
1) I spend one month reading a book closely and I follow some memory enhancing technique to retain the material - book club style. I can verbally retell the main points of the book afterwards and discuss it intelligently with others who have done the same.
Or
2) I had a quick look at the book and it's outline, I placed it conceptually in it's genre and in relation to other books covering the same kind of material. I had a normal reading of the chapters that seemed most valuable. I found one actionable insight and immediately worked it into my own set of habits/techniques/schedule. All in all I do this in 1-2h. I do this for 5 books a month.
After a year, I suspect strategy 2 has a better yield.
If you're unsure about the book, then strategy number 2 is better. Skim and find the interesting bits, if any.
If you know it's a dense book and you value the subject and think highly of the author. Then strategy number 1 is better.
Personally I tend to go with a just-read-whatever-is-interesting-at-whatever-speed-or-level-of-attention-feels-right-and-what-sticks-sticks strategy.
Basically, when you take notes, summarize them in your own words. Look at a tool like Obsidian which uses markdown to save notes in plaintext. Look at people using this on YouTube if you want to dive deeper into the ecosystem.
* https://www.google.com/search?q=smart+notes+ahrens+site:news...