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>For a long time I was very ashamed of how few books I read, compared to what is expected from an educated person, but I'm okay with it now.

As Nabokov put it: "Incidentally, I use the word reader very loosely. Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader." And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation.

I think trying to read countless of books really misses the point about reading. Reading is not about accumulating knowledge, which we constantly forget, it's to train the 'mental instruments' of reading. And for that one needs to study something deeply the same way some pianists dedicate themselves to one piece of music. If it's complex enough all that's relevant is in there.

Wow. I feel like Nabokov is validating how I've always read. I always appreciate and enjoy books (and short stories) more upon re-reading. I re-read multiple times, too. What he says rings very true for me.

I always had trouble explaining to my friends why I enjoy, while browsing a bookstore, picking up books I already own, looking for a parapgraph I know I enjoy and reading it. It's a bit like looking for clips of your favorite movies on YouTube.

I don't read for speed nor for retention.

Your process certainly help with retention. It engage learning strategies such as active recall and generation.

Myself, I don't try to answer questions that much, but rather I like to organize information into a bunch of interconnected facts like people, events, claims, and look them up.

For example, I discovered that a professor confused which Ruska brothers invented electron microscopy. He also made claims that I struggle to find citation for with a cursory google search.

Then I goes a step further. I input the information into a spaced repetition system. In this way, a book or an article or a youtube video gradually disappear into knowledge and become part of my long term memory about things.

Intensive or incremental reading is extremely slow for sure(I probably spent 8x times as long on my notes than reading), but knowledge creation is superior.

Unfortunately I do have problems with explicit retention. Probably some of the strategies in the comments would improve it a lot.

I have implicit retention of many things, but I often forgot the sources, I cannot list my favorite books on the spot, but if we discuss a topic I'd have flashes of relevant memories come back.

It's like I'd grapple with a book, dream about it, get confused, shaken, startled, questioning, then I integrate it back into normal life. Especially deeper books, like I had with The Selfish Gene which dispelled so many myths I had and confirmed things I thought to be correct.

You have to go through the Baader Meinhof effect of seeing that thing everywhere. With each book I view the world from an entirely new point of view, that each seem all encompassing (how ads manipulate you, how social status and prestige works, how the finance world works and cheats, how employers manipulate, how sexual behavior works, how quantum physics works or evolution or mental games we play etc), to get the smug feeling that this current book explains it all. After going through this with 5 books, you realize that no one story explains it all, but then what to do, read about narratives, move to nihilism, then realize the boundaries of rationality and faith, believing that "good" may be in one sense illusory but worth striving for. Then you read up on more traditional views on this etc.

Trying to "retain" is a bit like measuring the quality of your friendships based on how many life facts you've memorized about them. It's surely correlated, but also misses the point. The time you spent together and the experiences you had together are valuable in themselves.

Unfortunately I do have problems with explicit retention. Probably some of the strategies in the comments would improve it a lot.

This is pretty normal. For example, students who learned physics often forgot to apply what they already know to situations that differ slightly.

If you want to bring that knowledge to the surface more often, you're going to need to add cues.

Another meta skill is to decide when to use which type of reading. You have to do both the free-association, daydreaming, thinking-outside the-box, connecting-the-dots, aha-moment style but also the practical get-things-done down-to-earth concentrated reading.

For some reason the latter style has been difficult for me outside of exam prep. So when people say college is just a prestige scam, the exams are bollocks and pointless, I always remember how it at least got me to sit on my ass and crunch through the material in a focused way. Pretending is not enough. Learn it out of passion and enjoyment but solidify it with the boring exam-style stragtey is best. The latter without the former is rote memorization that many college students mistakenly equate with simply "studying" and it leads to the issue of not being able to use it outside a course context or quiz type scenarios.

Why work so hard to memorize facts, instead of focusing on the ideas and the consulting a reference for details when something jogs your memory?

Someone mentions the Ruska bothers, you remember something about thr microscope, so you go look it up to refresh your memory.

So I can look deeper the next time it comes up.

You'll always be looking up reference, but your understanding will be deeper.

> I read very few books but then "debate" it in my head, try to connect things to other things, life experiences, news, other books.

This, I think, is the only meaningful way to read something (at least when it comes to non-fiction).

In general I find supposedly impressive claims of speed, retention, number of books read to be infantile and completely besides the point.

I also incidentally can't imagine how somebody can actually read at 150 pages/hour. If you're going that fast the book you're reading is not challenging enough. To me that's a sign that you're stuck in your intellectual comfort zone.

I find the same is true when listening to lectures and non-trivial podcasts. I "can" listen to them at 2x speed (and many are proud of regularly doing it), but over time I found it's better to leave it at 1x, unless it's an 80+ year old person talking (sorry, Chomsky!). The point isn't to understand the words like some speech transcription algorithm, but to engage with them. "But FOMO! How will I catch up on all the JRE episodes then?!" Thing is, there are so many high quality podcasts out there that you cannot hope to digest them all deeply. Of course broad and deep are both needed. You need a view of "roughly what types of interesting things exist out there" in order to be able to dive into one, but endless "I'm interested in everything" is also untimately fruitless and let's you tread in place. Strangely enough once you do one thing deeply, it opens more avenues for understanding the other things.

I find it interesting that you see articles about how the general public don't read books. But thinking back to the 1980s when I was a teenager all we did was watch TV and play video games. Now with the Internet people are reading every single day. Sure maybe not books of a single theme or concept but people are certainly reading more overall.

Not sure it's that different. There used to be trash magazines about celebrities and mysterious UFOs and romance stories etc. And even today most people don't read articles, they read chat messages and tweets and short fb posts etc. The cliche thing everyone jokes about is how nobody reads the damn article (reddit, HN etc).

News portal reading is kinda similar to newspaper reading. Teens don't read "boring" political articles today nor in the 80s. They read their niche stuff, but they did have hobby magazines on electronics, fantasy or fashion or music even back then.

It could be that you yourself and your peers read more simply as a function of getting older and more mature.

This really resonated with me and is so well said. I have the same relationship with books and movies and consider choosing a book to read a very precise and intimate choice. I research a book I’m interested in thoroughly prior to committing. Glad i’m not the only one. Cheers.

The caveat is not to overdo it though. Learning calculus from not-the-best book is still way better then dreaming around and procrastinating on which textbook really is the very best. (Same with workouts, diets etc.)

And in terms of popular non-fiction books, like Harari or so, they are best thought of as textual Rorschach tests. He throws up topics and connectioms, activates certain parts of your mind and you can now fly from there. Even if you know a lot of background, many such books can be great thought stimulants.