I can't speak for others, but for me this headline and idea is exactly and perfectly wrong, so I suppose I just want to reach those for whom this generates unnecessary "guilt" or something like that.
As a voracious reader, I've personally found that I got the most out of books when I stopped trying to summarize and highlight. I very rarely do either anymore.
I realize that what happens is sort of a Darwinian "survival of the fittest ideas" in my head, often subconsciously. Once I relaxed and decided, "If the stuff in this book is good enough, my brain will keep it FOR me" both my satisfaction AND utility of books increased dramatically.
(which is to say, it's not that I never write anything down. It's that if I do, it's not tied to the book, but to the "thing" or "topic" that I'm interested in, with a reference TO the book)
> I've personally found that I got the most out of books when I stopped trying to summarize and highlight.
The good thing is that it’s not an either/or proposition. I often read a book straight-through then decide it will be useful enough to me in the future that there are elements I want to retain, in which case I’ll engage in a second cursory extraction process. Often I just don’t know in advance whether I will feel that way at the outset.
I now find myself googling for other peoples notes on a book if I want to extract more. I read through those notes and rewrite with a pen in a journal and start to pull apart the dense notes further and connect to my own experience and life
I generally disagree with any assertion on what’s more important on such a wide array of variation, for who and when. Sure, it could be important for some things and irrelevant for others things at the same time.
Yup. Thats another thing I've noticed. When I think of the phrase "a man never steps into the same river twice," I feel that way A LOT when it comes to reading good books. That was maybe the biggest reason I stopped highlighting in them, I want to come to it fresh.
Update: yes, it is not just a matter of texts. The annoying snipers that infest these boards should summarize as a general practice: this will help them with an exercise in thinking, expression, so that maybe one day they will also be able to formulate and present an argument. And stop abusing the freedom they should not be granted.
If it's informative, you can't really summarize. Summarizing is the act of throwing most of the information away.
If it's informative, you have to read and take your conclusions. And if you later decide to use the information for different conclusions, you'll have to read it again.
It's little wonder that informative texts don't usually come in the form of books.
In my opinion it's just another symptom of the trend in tech circles for ever-increasing self-documentation. Thing is, it doesn't matter how hard you try to shove your life up its own ass, you're going to be just as dead as me at the end of it. And I'll have read more cool stuff.
This made me chuckle. Too true. I would only argue that thinking/journalling deeply about fewer ideas is an equally good use of your time as tasting a greater breadth of ideas more shallowly.
It's a classic begging the question fallacy. Summary is absolutely a way to maximize certain outcomes of reading, but not all outcomes! Which outcomes to value is a question we can all reflect on.
Another way of thinking of it is that you are indexing. Perhaps you will come across something in the future which makes you recall that thing you read. This might give new significance to what you read and gives you a reference you can fall back on as needed.
For me this happened with distributed transactions and sagas in Building Microservices by Sam Newman. He went into detail on these techniques and pretty much the only thing I retained was that they existed and what problem they solved. I didn’t remembered the other 95%. But I ran into a need for them and instead of having no idea what to do I thought: “I should learn more about distributed transactions, sagas, or other alternatives.”
This is exactly how I look at it as well. Our culture seems obsessed with “takeaways” when a lot of the time I might not discover the takeaway for some time, until I happen to encounter some other experience that made reading that previous book completely worth it.
I guess it comes down to wanting a wide funnel of experiences to sort through or a narrow focus on whatever is going to help you achieve your objective. In reality, we probably need both but I sure wouldn’t trade some of the experiences and insights I’ve gained by having a wide funnel and not worrying about takeaways.
It depends on the books I am reading. I get the most out of philosophy and learning books when I actively engage with the text with responses in kind. But when I am reading mind candy? No, I don’t write back.
I took a course at UChicago on how to read a book based on Mortimer Adler’s book of the same name, and the takeaway is that the first reading of a book should be a quick one (table of contents, skimming, dipping into pages). Only after a book is shown to have promise are we then to engage in deep reading which not only involves summarizing but also syntopical reading, which is to read other books around the same topic.
One thing that has really helped me is to scribble notes in the margins and to write a précis after every chapter, then a précis on the inside cover of the book to summarize all my chapter précis.
Finally all good books should be read twice or more. Good reading is rereading. This is a hard rule to follow because nobody has time to read the same book twice but the truth is you can’t understand a book deeply on first reading because you don’t have the lay of the land and the benefit of retrospection. A rereading helps you focus on details missed the first time around. To be honest though, very few books meet my bar of my willing to reread them.
Why stop at two? Susan Rigetti suggests four times! [1] I've never tried that but I fully agree with her :) and just quietly dream about regaining my focus for reading so I could reread books 4 times.
Quote to save people from falling into the rabbit hole of her blog:
> Over the years and after much formal and informal study, I’ve learned a pretty foolproof method for studying philosophy: read everything four times. Here’s how it works:
> - First read: Read casually, as if you’re reading a novel or a newspaper or magazine article. Your goal here is simply to observe, not to engage (yet).
> - Second read: This time, read to understand. Take notes. Ask yourself, “what does the author really mean here?” Summarize things in your own words. Try to break down the arguments being presented into bullet points, identifying the premises and the conclusions. When you read a term you are unfamiliar with or want to understand better, google it or look it up in the SEP.
> - Third read: Read again, and this time engage with the text. Go back to your notes, where you identified the arguments being presented. Think of arguments in favor of what the author is saying and arguments against. Think of counterexamples.
> - Fourth read: Now read for one last time. Read casually, the way you did in the first read. Notice how your understanding of the text is now so much richer and deeper than it was on the first read.
> If you study this way, you’ll walk away with an incredibly solid understanding of philosophy and an intellectual foundation that will serve you well for the rest of your life.
This may be cultural but I just cannot bring myself write in a book even in pencil. post-its notes for me this is a great idea if I have the discipline
I prefer to write on ruled paper and tuck it into the front cover for the following reasons:
- ruled paper is easier to write on
- you won't run out of space (just add sheets)
- you can rewrite summaries as you revisit books decades later and retuck the new summary
- you can quickly scan the papers to archive a digital copy
- you can remove your notes to lend the book (or not)
- you can transfer your notes to a new edition trivially
- you can be more candid in what you write, knowing it's trivially discarded without giving up the book
- all the notes are in one place and you don't have to thumb through the book looking for where you wrote an idea that you half-remember
- you have space to draw diagrams if appropriate
- you can find something on the internet that importantly relates, print off a page or two, and adjunct your notes
- you can do extensive internet research and build a whole matching folder of contents on your laptop, but you can print a page of Title/URL's to adjunct your notes as a backup (and for anyone who borrows the book+notes)
Scholars from the middle ages wrote on the edges of their scrolls and codexes. Some of these notes are very interesting and useful to scholars. In elementary and primary school most are taught not to write in books because they have to be used for decades, but there is a long tradition of taking notes in books. They are very inexpensive now compared to the past and when you write in the you leave a little extra something for posterity.
I had the same problem but my instructor told me: a book devoid of scribbles is a book that hasn’t been engaged with deeply. If you have to, buy two copies of a book — one for display and another to scribble in, knowing that you’ll truly own the scribbled copy because you won’t be able to sell it.
A book you won't write in is a book that owns you, rather than you owning the book. A book is designed to convey information on the page, writing in your book only adds to and fulfills it's purpose.
It's not clear from these articles how soon damage becomes apparent; I haven't noticed any yet in books which had Post-Its. It may not matter if you don't intend your books to have archival value.
I've tried Book Darts for marking pages, and they can also be used like paper clips to hold notes. I write short notes in pencil, but try to avoid dark leads which make marks hard to erase.
Used to feel the same way. But I've developed an appreciation for secondhand marked books, thinking about who was the previous reader. It kind of destigmatized it for me.
> Finally all good books should be read twice or more. Good reading is rereading.
Fully agreed!
> This is a hard rule to follow because nobody has time to read the same book twice
Disagreed. I read fiction and I tend to re-read a lot, sometimes three or four times. I read for pleasure, so I have the time. Reading is "me" time, and I spend it however I want.
It's only hard to re-read if you have some silly goal like "I must read N books this month". I find such goals worthless.
>It's only hard to re-read if you have some silly goal like "I must read N books this month". I find such goals worthless.
I'm on board. I have a great deal of fun hunting books and sitting down with the good ones I find. I don't care how many I go through or how many pages. Reading good stuff is a matter of quality of life for me. "A life without books is unlivable" Erasmus
I built a tool for myself for the purpose of grokking ideas from books called Emdash [1]. Over the years I've collected reams of highlights from books and articles but until recently, rarely reviewed or absorbed them. The core of this app uses on-device ML to show related passages with similar ideas from other books you've read, and I find that going broad and exploring concepts from different angles really helps in comprehension.
I'm testing out a summarization/rephrase feature backed by LLMs that you can try in the demo. In HN fashion I'm trying to build this openly and gather feedback to see what works. I'd like to push this further in the active direction the article mentions with something like a Socratic dialogue mode where you're nudged to re-explain and examine ideas.
If anyone uses this thing/has feedback, let me know. Source is available too [2].
This is cool. I imagine instructors creating instances for their classes so the whole class can engage with each other's notes.
I wonder if one could couple it with OCR so that you could point a phone at a page and drop into an emdash experience on the text that you've got a physical copy of. Or, you know, point it at your kindle so that your notes aren't locked into their ecosystem.
I'm building a backend that would support that kind of thing in a peer to peer kind of way (indexes content by piecewise hash so that you can recognize content you or your peers have annotations for and reattach those annotations despite differences in pagination, etc). If I ever get it into a demo-worthy state, I may reach out to see if we can make them work together.
This is such a neat tool. The presentation is very pleasant. Is the intention to have the snippets/notes be shareable in the future? I actually made a similar tool [1] (though your's is much more complete), which I use to quickly find passages and relevant text when I'm blogging. And, I was thinking it might be really useful to have highly rated notes on a snippet available so that you can get someone else's insight on a particular selection. I'll give this a more in depth look later when I want to write another blog post.
Thanks for sharing, I like the name and I'll try it out. Yes, I'd like to add opt-in sharing features in the future -- seeing others' notes can be very insightful as you said.
I tried 'related' with a couple of passages. For the first passage, the first result was a good semantic match, but the rest were a little too far off. For the second passage, the results were amazing.
Perhaps for the first you just didn't have any more snippets that were closer?
Are the related snippets taken from a selection of snippets you created, or from the full text of other books?
A nice workflow might be to select a passage I'm reading in a book, and then see related passages from other books. But that requires I have DRM-free ebooks, and that these have already been chunked and indexed.
Yes, the demo mode is a random subset of things I've highlighted and it's heavily weighted around certain topics and sparse on others, so that's why some passages don't have the strongest semantic matches.
You're right that it would be nice to see things in situ as you're reading, but it would seem that most e-reading experiences are locked down. I appreciate the feedback!
I've been looking for something like this to review books. Two suggestions: 1. allow to load a book from a url, so notes could be added to arbitrary books; 2. allow to select text and add notes to that selection.
Such a proccess- and goal-oriented approach to books doesn't resonate with me at all. Such a mechanical, soulless way of thinking about reading!
Is this for technical, self-help or startup/entreprenurship books? Sure, maybe this works.
I read a lot for fun though. Most of my reading is like this. The books I read are not about "answering questions" and I don't need to "optimize" my reading in any way, either to summarize them or to "process" as many books I can in a year. It's not a contest. It's about the joy of reading.
I had a similar reaction to a lot of the language in this post, but I think there's something to it here that is still valuable even for just the joy of reading.
For me it's important that I am paying attention as I read. I used to rarely re-read books, and have started re-reading my favorite ones, and it's often surprising to me how many interesting ideas I missed, or maybe just forgot about. I enjoy talking to friends about books too and I find that helps me explore the ideas more deeply. I've recently started trying writing up my takeaways for books I've enjoyed, partially as something to send friends to talk about with or try convince them to read the book too so we can talk about it.
I think the caveat here is that it's totally valid to not do any of these things if you are enjoying whatever process you have. I just appreciate being exposed to this idea because it's increased my enjoyment of my own reading.
This nuance gets missed in most conversations about reading. I see there are motivations to read a book:
1. For fun
2. For information
3. For understanding
If reading for fun, do what suits you… there’s really no wrong way. Like food, whatever suits your tastes is best.
If reading for information (eg on tactics in some battle or HR practices in some form when you are already broadly acquainted with tactics and HR) then there are tips for extracting essential points that apply to most everyone.
Likewise when reading for understanding (eg having no conception about how war works and trying to grok it).
Some books can be read in each way, other books only in one or two. In any case, making broad claims about “how to read better” without appealing to one of these modes usually sparks disagreement.
I disagree with this. Reading for the sake of summarizing takes the joy away from reading itself. I don't know anybody that'll read just because they want to read more books.
If I wanted to read summaries I would just read from Coles notes or Sparknotes, but both are essentially me just skimming headlines, and not getting to the juicy bits of the materials.
I don't think that this author's point is that we read for the sake of summarizing, per se, but rather that the act of summarizing forces us to engage more thoughtfully with what we've just read. It's that engagement itself that enriches our understanding of the book. By all means enjoy what you're reading while you're reading it!
That's the problem here -- for many books you don't need to develop a deep understanding of the book. Even for books in programming language, I may pick up a book because I am interested in the design of the language or a certain pattern of writing code, not because I want to use the language in the production or master the language, in which case understanding and thinking about pieces is good enough.
Well, anyway, I was reading this James Bond book, and right away I realized that like most books, it had too many words. The plot was the same one that
all James Bond books have: An evil person tries to blow up the world, but
James Bond kills him and his henchmen and makes love to several attractive
women. There, that's it: 24 words. But the guy who wrote the book took
thousands of words to say it.
Or consider "The Brothers Karamazov", by the famous Russian alcoholic Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It's about these two brothers who kill their father.
Or maybe only one of them kills the father. It's impossible to tell because what they mostly do is talk for nearly a thousand pages. If all Russians talk as much as the Karamazovs did, I don't see how they found time to become a
major world power.
I'm told that Dostoyevsky wrote "The Brothers Karamazov" to raise
the question of whether there is a God. So why didn't he just come right
out and say: "Is there a God? It sure beats the heck out of me."
Other famous works could easily have been summarized in a few words:
* "Moby Dick" -- Don't mess around with large whales because they symbolize
nature and will kill you.
* "A Tale of Two Cities" -- French people are crazy.
Well it really depends what your goals are, right? What kind of books are you reading, to what end? I personally struggle to think of any book I have engaged with which I got value out of, that could be meaningfully summarized in a couple of hours. The author was an expert on the subject and they only managed to summarize it down to a few hundred pages - if there was only a couple of pages worth of ideas in there presumably they would have just written a blogpost.
I find that most of the things I read can be pretty effectively summarized in a single thesis sentence and a few additional sentences to generally describe how that thesis was supported. If you're only reading things that can't even be summarized in an abstract, you must be reading a lot of unopinionated biographies?
If after reading an entire book you haven’t already internalized its main thesis, it’s probably not a very valuable thesis.
But reducing a book down to a single thesis minimizes the takeaway value of the book, surely?
Take a book like Gödel Escher Bach. Sure, that book has a thesis. But the value of having read that book is not captured in ‘strange loops are all it takes to create beauty, complexity and consciousness’ - all the different ideas that underpin that thesis are what makes it valuable. That book lives as a set of new connections and pathways between ideas in my brain. And I read it over 20 years ago.
The vast majority of literature has much of its value in the way it is told, not just in the story it is telling. You can summarize Hamlet in a sentence or two, but that's not the reason it is still being read and performed 400+ years later.
Summarizing is not the same as condensing. Just jotting down your view helps you. Such that you don't even have to worry about making your version for an audience.
It's up to you. For me, I may write the parts I presently find most useful in detail. And some high-level summaries for reference. Then I can search my notes to know what book I need.
I'm still not sure why someone would need to do this? What kind of information are you obtaining from books that you later find yourself wanting to search for?
These kind of productivity tips always confuse me when they lack context of what the person writing is trying to do.
Like: Anki flashcards and spaced repetition. I see a lot of people advocating for them. I have never understood why because, in my personal experience, retaining lots of disconnected facts has never really been something I've needed to solve for. I do sort of see how it could work for rapid language learning (though I still think immersion, reading and writing are better than randomized vocabulary memorization, if you can take the time to do it that way), and I think I understand it in the context of fields like medicine where there's just a lot of facts you need to acquire, but people will advocate it for everything, and I just don't get it.
When I read a book, the process of reading it adds to the sum of my knowledge; I absorb the ideas, combine them with my own, and come to a new understanding of a topic. At that point, the book has accomplished its goal, for me.
But I acknowledge that's just how I read. I'm not an academic who might be later on finding myself needing to recall where I read something so I can cite it (although I find in general I can remember where I read certain things)... is that the use case here? What's the goal with building up an externalized knowledgeable?
No, don't summarize. Remix! Write about your own ideas!
Your mind is a living collection of your own ideas, and a history of their significance to your prior life. Not a dead library of pointers to other dead libraries.
Books are great. But you shoudn't outsource your brain. The learning happens when you think for yourself. Reading is good. Thinking about what you've read is even better. But don't stop with the summary! Go further. Apply it to your context. Try it, it's fun.
I don’t disagree. I think this article isn’t written for people like me.
What I mean is I f someone is already remixing, they’re already writing about what they read and probably don’t need advices from articles like this because they already read differently from what the author imagined.
On the other hand, the article encourages people to write about what they read outside a formal academic context, and most people don’t have that habit.
To put it another way, writers don’t need rationale to write. But writers are not the target audience.
IMHO realistically for most people the ratio between "your own ideas" and everything else should be like 5% or so. If you're exceptionally gifted maybe up to 20%.. (unless you're writing fiction)
If you mash together two ideas, is the new composite idea yours?
I'd say it's yours. In that frame, there are lots of ideas.
Lets assume there are 10 000 known ideas. Then there's 10^8 combinations of two ideas, and 10^12 combinations of three ideas. That's a lot of ideas, even for the internet! I bet not all of them are named. And different people are going to frame ideas differently.
I also believe trying to form your ideas in reference to existing knowledge is a great way to learn existing knowledge.
Readit News
As a voracious reader, I've personally found that I got the most out of books when I stopped trying to summarize and highlight. I very rarely do either anymore.
I realize that what happens is sort of a Darwinian "survival of the fittest ideas" in my head, often subconsciously. Once I relaxed and decided, "If the stuff in this book is good enough, my brain will keep it FOR me" both my satisfaction AND utility of books increased dramatically.
(which is to say, it's not that I never write anything down. It's that if I do, it's not tied to the book, but to the "thing" or "topic" that I'm interested in, with a reference TO the book)
The good thing is that it’s not an either/or proposition. I often read a book straight-through then decide it will be useful enough to me in the future that there are elements I want to retain, in which case I’ll engage in a second cursory extraction process. Often I just don’t know in advance whether I will feel that way at the outset.
Insightful → process subconsciously;
Informative → summarize.
--
Update: yes, it is not just a matter of texts. The annoying snipers that infest these boards should summarize as a general practice: this will help them with an exercise in thinking, expression, so that maybe one day they will also be able to formulate and present an argument. And stop abusing the freedom they should not be granted.
If it's informative, you have to read and take your conclusions. And if you later decide to use the information for different conclusions, you'll have to read it again.
It's little wonder that informative texts don't usually come in the form of books.
For me this happened with distributed transactions and sagas in Building Microservices by Sam Newman. He went into detail on these techniques and pretty much the only thing I retained was that they existed and what problem they solved. I didn’t remembered the other 95%. But I ran into a need for them and instead of having no idea what to do I thought: “I should learn more about distributed transactions, sagas, or other alternatives.”
I guess it comes down to wanting a wide funnel of experiences to sort through or a narrow focus on whatever is going to help you achieve your objective. In reality, we probably need both but I sure wouldn’t trade some of the experiences and insights I’ve gained by having a wide funnel and not worrying about takeaways.
Deleted Comment
I took a course at UChicago on how to read a book based on Mortimer Adler’s book of the same name, and the takeaway is that the first reading of a book should be a quick one (table of contents, skimming, dipping into pages). Only after a book is shown to have promise are we then to engage in deep reading which not only involves summarizing but also syntopical reading, which is to read other books around the same topic.
One thing that has really helped me is to scribble notes in the margins and to write a précis after every chapter, then a précis on the inside cover of the book to summarize all my chapter précis.
Finally all good books should be read twice or more. Good reading is rereading. This is a hard rule to follow because nobody has time to read the same book twice but the truth is you can’t understand a book deeply on first reading because you don’t have the lay of the land and the benefit of retrospection. A rereading helps you focus on details missed the first time around. To be honest though, very few books meet my bar of my willing to reread them.
Quote to save people from falling into the rabbit hole of her blog:
> Over the years and after much formal and informal study, I’ve learned a pretty foolproof method for studying philosophy: read everything four times. Here’s how it works:
> - First read: Read casually, as if you’re reading a novel or a newspaper or magazine article. Your goal here is simply to observe, not to engage (yet).
> - Second read: This time, read to understand. Take notes. Ask yourself, “what does the author really mean here?” Summarize things in your own words. Try to break down the arguments being presented into bullet points, identifying the premises and the conclusions. When you read a term you are unfamiliar with or want to understand better, google it or look it up in the SEP.
> - Third read: Read again, and this time engage with the text. Go back to your notes, where you identified the arguments being presented. Think of arguments in favor of what the author is saying and arguments against. Think of counterexamples.
> - Fourth read: Now read for one last time. Read casually, the way you did in the first read. Notice how your understanding of the text is now so much richer and deeper than it was on the first read.
> If you study this way, you’ll walk away with an incredibly solid understanding of philosophy and an intellectual foundation that will serve you well for the rest of your life.
[1] https://www.susanrigetti.com/philosophy
- ruled paper is easier to write on
- you won't run out of space (just add sheets)
- you can rewrite summaries as you revisit books decades later and retuck the new summary
- you can quickly scan the papers to archive a digital copy
- you can remove your notes to lend the book (or not)
- you can transfer your notes to a new edition trivially
- you can be more candid in what you write, knowing it's trivially discarded without giving up the book
- all the notes are in one place and you don't have to thumb through the book looking for where you wrote an idea that you half-remember
- you have space to draw diagrams if appropriate
- you can find something on the internet that importantly relates, print off a page or two, and adjunct your notes
- you can do extensive internet research and build a whole matching folder of contents on your laptop, but you can print a page of Title/URL's to adjunct your notes as a backup (and for anyone who borrows the book+notes)
(edit: formatting)
Post-its work. For me I use a mechanical pencil.
A book you won't write in is a book that owns you, rather than you owning the book. A book is designed to convey information on the page, writing in your book only adds to and fulfills it's purpose.
https://siarchives.si.edu/blog/post-it-or-not-post-it
http://libraries.ucsd.edu/preservation/postits.html
It's not clear from these articles how soon damage becomes apparent; I haven't noticed any yet in books which had Post-Its. It may not matter if you don't intend your books to have archival value.
I've tried Book Darts for marking pages, and they can also be used like paper clips to hold notes. I write short notes in pencil, but try to avoid dark leads which make marks hard to erase.
I do keep a notebook where I write about random stuff and a lot of thinking about what I’m reading goes in there.
Fully agreed!
> This is a hard rule to follow because nobody has time to read the same book twice
Disagreed. I read fiction and I tend to re-read a lot, sometimes three or four times. I read for pleasure, so I have the time. Reading is "me" time, and I spend it however I want.
It's only hard to re-read if you have some silly goal like "I must read N books this month". I find such goals worthless.
I'm on board. I have a great deal of fun hunting books and sitting down with the good ones I find. I don't care how many I go through or how many pages. Reading good stuff is a matter of quality of life for me. "A life without books is unlivable" Erasmus
That's the same book mentioned in the footnotes of the article.
"How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading Mortimer J. Adler, Charles van Doren"
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/567610.How_to_Read_a_Boo...
I'm testing out a summarization/rephrase feature backed by LLMs that you can try in the demo. In HN fashion I'm trying to build this openly and gather feedback to see what works. I'd like to push this further in the active direction the article mentions with something like a Socratic dialogue mode where you're nudged to re-explain and examine ideas.
If anyone uses this thing/has feedback, let me know. Source is available too [2].
[1] https://emdash.ai
[2] https://github.com/dmotz/emdash
I wonder if one could couple it with OCR so that you could point a phone at a page and drop into an emdash experience on the text that you've got a physical copy of. Or, you know, point it at your kindle so that your notes aren't locked into their ecosystem.
I'm building a backend that would support that kind of thing in a peer to peer kind of way (indexes content by piecewise hash so that you can recognize content you or your peers have annotations for and reattach those annotations despite differences in pagination, etc). If I ever get it into a demo-worthy state, I may reach out to see if we can make them work together.
Your content addressable system sounds very interesting, let me know when you have a demo.
[1]: https://ishmael.app
Perhaps for the first you just didn't have any more snippets that were closer?
Are the related snippets taken from a selection of snippets you created, or from the full text of other books?
A nice workflow might be to select a passage I'm reading in a book, and then see related passages from other books. But that requires I have DRM-free ebooks, and that these have already been chunked and indexed.
You're right that it would be nice to see things in situ as you're reading, but it would seem that most e-reading experiences are locked down. I appreciate the feedback!
Is this for technical, self-help or startup/entreprenurship books? Sure, maybe this works.
I read a lot for fun though. Most of my reading is like this. The books I read are not about "answering questions" and I don't need to "optimize" my reading in any way, either to summarize them or to "process" as many books I can in a year. It's not a contest. It's about the joy of reading.
For me it's important that I am paying attention as I read. I used to rarely re-read books, and have started re-reading my favorite ones, and it's often surprising to me how many interesting ideas I missed, or maybe just forgot about. I enjoy talking to friends about books too and I find that helps me explore the ideas more deeply. I've recently started trying writing up my takeaways for books I've enjoyed, partially as something to send friends to talk about with or try convince them to read the book too so we can talk about it.
I think the caveat here is that it's totally valid to not do any of these things if you are enjoying whatever process you have. I just appreciate being exposed to this idea because it's increased my enjoyment of my own reading.
1. For fun 2. For information 3. For understanding
If reading for fun, do what suits you… there’s really no wrong way. Like food, whatever suits your tastes is best.
If reading for information (eg on tactics in some battle or HR practices in some form when you are already broadly acquainted with tactics and HR) then there are tips for extracting essential points that apply to most everyone.
Likewise when reading for understanding (eg having no conception about how war works and trying to grok it).
Some books can be read in each way, other books only in one or two. In any case, making broad claims about “how to read better” without appealing to one of these modes usually sparks disagreement.
I recommend getting drinks with friends and telling them all about the interesting stuff you read.
If I wanted to read summaries I would just read from Coles notes or Sparknotes, but both are essentially me just skimming headlines, and not getting to the juicy bits of the materials.
Well, anyway, I was reading this James Bond book, and right away I realized that like most books, it had too many words. The plot was the same one that all James Bond books have: An evil person tries to blow up the world, but James Bond kills him and his henchmen and makes love to several attractive women. There, that's it: 24 words. But the guy who wrote the book took thousands of words to say it.
Or consider "The Brothers Karamazov", by the famous Russian alcoholic Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It's about these two brothers who kill their father.
Or maybe only one of them kills the father. It's impossible to tell because what they mostly do is talk for nearly a thousand pages. If all Russians talk as much as the Karamazovs did, I don't see how they found time to become a major world power.
I'm told that Dostoyevsky wrote "The Brothers Karamazov" to raise the question of whether there is a God. So why didn't he just come right out and say: "Is there a God? It sure beats the heck out of me."
Other famous works could easily have been summarized in a few words:
* "Moby Dick" -- Don't mess around with large whales because they symbolize nature and will kill you.
* "A Tale of Two Cities" -- French people are crazy.
But reducing a book down to a single thesis minimizes the takeaway value of the book, surely?
Take a book like Gödel Escher Bach. Sure, that book has a thesis. But the value of having read that book is not captured in ‘strange loops are all it takes to create beauty, complexity and consciousness’ - all the different ideas that underpin that thesis are what makes it valuable. That book lives as a set of new connections and pathways between ideas in my brain. And I read it over 20 years ago.
These kind of productivity tips always confuse me when they lack context of what the person writing is trying to do.
Like: Anki flashcards and spaced repetition. I see a lot of people advocating for them. I have never understood why because, in my personal experience, retaining lots of disconnected facts has never really been something I've needed to solve for. I do sort of see how it could work for rapid language learning (though I still think immersion, reading and writing are better than randomized vocabulary memorization, if you can take the time to do it that way), and I think I understand it in the context of fields like medicine where there's just a lot of facts you need to acquire, but people will advocate it for everything, and I just don't get it.
When I read a book, the process of reading it adds to the sum of my knowledge; I absorb the ideas, combine them with my own, and come to a new understanding of a topic. At that point, the book has accomplished its goal, for me.
But I acknowledge that's just how I read. I'm not an academic who might be later on finding myself needing to recall where I read something so I can cite it (although I find in general I can remember where I read certain things)... is that the use case here? What's the goal with building up an externalized knowledgeable?
Your mind is a living collection of your own ideas, and a history of their significance to your prior life. Not a dead library of pointers to other dead libraries.
Books are great. But you shoudn't outsource your brain. The learning happens when you think for yourself. Reading is good. Thinking about what you've read is even better. But don't stop with the summary! Go further. Apply it to your context. Try it, it's fun.
What I mean is I f someone is already remixing, they’re already writing about what they read and probably don’t need advices from articles like this because they already read differently from what the author imagined.
On the other hand, the article encourages people to write about what they read outside a formal academic context, and most people don’t have that habit.
To put it another way, writers don’t need rationale to write. But writers are not the target audience.
I'd say it's yours. In that frame, there are lots of ideas.
Lets assume there are 10 000 known ideas. Then there's 10^8 combinations of two ideas, and 10^12 combinations of three ideas. That's a lot of ideas, even for the internet! I bet not all of them are named. And different people are going to frame ideas differently.
I also believe trying to form your ideas in reference to existing knowledge is a great way to learn existing knowledge.