Surgical Reading: How to Read 12 Books at Once
superorganizers.substack.com
superorganizers.substack.com
The only thing I can tell you from experience: Have the self confidence to drop a book, read what interests you, not what is on some "list of books" you have to work through. And take your time reading. I learned it the hard way, but I'd rather drop 10 books, find one extremely insightful, and read it slowly and carefully and twice if I have to than speed read 20 books and remember nothing.
I am extremely doubtful about "hacks" like this ; glad if it works for him, my experience is nothing of the sorts will ever work for me.
My opinion about that is deeply influenced by a professor I used to have. Once he spent one lecture just reading a brilliant essay by a British judge. He did not read it, he performed it, slowly, carefully, and it was the best lecture I ever had. And his advice was: "read slowly, or you might as well not read at all, forget the 'hacks', the speed-reading techniques, reading is enjoyment, if you have the right material, be thankful for every second, savor it", and if only I could have taken his advice more seriously at the time. I do now though.
The hard part for me is to stay focused and not drift off into multiple genres/topics. If I read about the period of the enlightenment it's easy to get sucked into 20th century authors covering (sometimes regurgitating) the subject. If I find myself drifting off in this manner, I make it a new category on my "to-read list" for a future time to maintain focus.
He also directly addresses your other concern regarding dropping a book. His "hacks" seem like a good way to evaluate the merits of finishing a book or just reading parts.
Every author explains things differently and explains key concepts in different orders, so it's a no-brainer to go through multiple books on the same subject at the same time.
But IMO you still do need to dedicate yourself to linear reading the truly good books.
If you did an Arts degree (like I did in the UK) you probably recognise this technique. I will admit it was some time back - my degree was all about reading from multiple sources. The goal was to have multiple perspectives on events (in my case history) which are inherently subjective. In reality, there was never enough time - so you "filleted" the core of each argument, grabbed some quotes and dug out some tiny element to "prove" you'd read it. Running 10-15 books - hah - I was researching multiple areas - 15 a week maybe?
And, that's how my degree was made - I'm sure lots of people have similar experiences and skills. I totally accept that this form of reading is possible.
But, beyond "professional learning" it's terrible. It's unenjoyable, develops poor understanding, limits comprehension of nuance and destroys enjoying the flow of the argument. Unless you have to do it, I can't see why you'd put yourself through it. Ultimately reading for learning is not about volume, it's about considered thought.
He mentions the book "How to Read a Book". I've read Mortimer Adler's version several times. It really changed how I read and learn from books. It's well worth the investment. I haven't read the Mortimer & Van Doren version.
I've found that doing the inspectional reading really helps. I've described it to friends as "giving me something to hang my hat on" while reading. Having the high level overview acts as a conceptual glue while reading a book through for the first time.
I think it was Naval Ravikant on an episode of Tim Ferriss' podcast that described reading as the "meta skill". If you can read you can learn just about anything.
Back to "How to Read a Book": Adler makes a distinction between able to read, e.g., "See Jack run", and learning from reading. I believe he describes 4 levels. The first, the ability to read, leading to the last, reading from multiple sources to learn. It's unfortunate that our ( U.S. ) educational system doesn't emphasize this much, or at all.
it completely changes your approach to learning to be significantly more rigorous, and i can't speak highly enough about it. and of course, it's not just good for reading from books, but any kind of reading you want.
The book, effectively, says "There are different levels of reading, which are skills, and those skills can be honed or improved. In addition, those skills may need to be applied differently to different types of books. The "most advanced" type of reading when, given multiple books with some related elements, you can form a coherent idea of those concepts based on the books you've read.
Here are a few high-level tips, just in terms of reading mechanics at a basic level that I use (If I recall inspired by the book in reference, I've pulled out my copy to see some of my marked notes as well):
(1) Read the first and last sentences of a paragraph first. At that point, decide whether to skip or read the entire paragraph.
(2) Try to read without subvocalizing the words in your head. Then, once the words aren't polluting your head, try to digest or consider the ideas as you go. I find having a pen handy helps with this.
(3) A "basic" reading has four questions to answer:What is the book about as a whole, what is being said and how, how true is the book, what is the significance of this information. These questions are the foundation to being able to talk about the book.
I like useful 'hacks', but...there is so much more to reading than speed and efficiency. Reading is not a quantitative game of accretion. And the author gets a lot wrong about how and why books are organized the way they are.
To me, this shows what little quantity of value these books actually have. That doesn't mean that the small number of useful ideas aren't of quality, just that they would have been better formatted as essays. Tragic that we can't find a way to align value with form.
But Blinkist also provides summaries for books that have a lot of ideas and depth (e.g. 'The book of why' by Judea Pearl) which would not benefit from being shortened. In these cases, a summary or blog post can whet your appetite, but isn't a substitute for the book.
The one way I thought about using it that would probably actually work reasonably well but I was too ADHD to stick with without structural support to keep me on task, would be listening to every single book in an entire category (there can be like 30 odd) and triangulating the core of the subject based off that. Taking copious notes on what shows up in multiple books etc.
That idea is basically the 'how to read a book' blinkist version. Though it kind of defeats the purpose of the nice quick summary I still like the idea. Maybe I should try it now that I could probably pull it off.
I do agree with the “reading of multiple books in parallel” part though. It’s a natural way of reading, when curiosity is the driver.
But what’s the rush? It’s not a competition (I think). Let’s just read the books like the author intended them to be read (which, for non-fiction often is suggested in the preface or similar).
If I only read the stuff I suspect of being useful before I start, there's less of a chance to be surprised by useful information.
Is that efficient? Bot really. It's enjoyable though.
It does seem a technique that is more suited to physical books though, I don't see myself easily skipping to and back on an e-reader, but maybe I'm doing it wrong.
I gotta say, this method seems less relevant if you want to allow yourself to be changed by dialogue with an author. Reading a book or even essay by bell hooks in this way, for instance, seems like a tragic waste of time. You don't read bell hooks to 'extract a knowledge nugget', you read bell hooks to look in a mirror and see your own experiences differently.
It makes it very easy to switch books in midstream if you get stuck, gain more understanding from another book, and then come back to the original book with renewed insight.
If you grab a few books and go through the table of contents, and flip around or drop a book for a bit for another book, you’ll get a good sense of if the book you’re trying to consume is even good.
Basically destroys the notion of ‘curling up with a book’ and takes them off a pedestal.
As in they jump around collecting nuggets and surprising people with what they have collected.
The advantage kids have is their brains are different (see Allison Gopnik + Explore vs Exploit Dilemma) and they are surrounded (hopefully) by people paying attention to what they are learning, correcting them when they get lost, nudging them in the right direction, making sure they are housed,fed and watered etc.
Same thing works out well with Adults when you place them in the safe caring confines of a research lab.
It always amazes me how little attention the preface gets from readers. It's the one place where the author gets to explain why the book exists, and why you should care. If you really want to understand what you could get from a book, pay close attention to the preface. And then maybe don't read the rest of it at all! You may learn from the preface that this is not the book for you, and that could save you a tremendous amount of time.
The only part that differs is they approach with trying to get a big picture rather than focusing on the only the parts you need.
I tend to agree with the Surgical Reading on focusing on the parts you need. Time is at such a premium that just in time learning is a great strategy.
It's like the people that watch YouTube videos at 2x speed to gain more time for...what, exactly? Reading 12 books at once?
Our society needs to dial it back a bit.
My unsolicited advice for how to read 100 books a year, while still working full-time and fulfilling other important life-roles? Don't watch YouTube/TV/movies and minimize time spent reading articles. Have Alexa read kindle e-books to you when you're on the go. And if you aren't enjoying a book, drop it and find something you can tear through.
In case you're interested, here's my currently-reading list on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2589152-jason-comely?s...
Back to reading books!
It wouldn't make sense to demand an exact term when you're looking at something that was originally written in a different language (like the Bible, which was mostly written in Ancient Hebrew and Ancient Greek) because whether or not that word is exactly matched depends on how it's translated rather than something inherent in the original work.
Most of the books, for example, introduce a radical new idea and then elaborate on that needlessly for 400 pages. I found Sapiens to be one such book.
Even if the idea/premise is insightful, there is often a lot of redundancy in the pages. We should value brevity more.
Of course, this might not apply to all books. Textbooks/Reference books can happily coexist with online tutorials/blogs. Even certain nonfiction books (Thinking Fast and Slow comes to mind) might be best presented in a book format.
I think some people that see online essays and podcasts as a more efficient way to consume information might ironically be the most "orthodox" sort of readers. Most well-written non-fiction books provide a clear index, a table of contents that makes the process of the book clear, and introductory matter in each chapter that summarizes things for you. If you want a certain piece of information, you can go into the book and get out within 5 minutes. You don't owe every book you pick up a cover-to-cover read.
Highly recommend "How to Read a Book". It calls the author's process of "surgical reading" "syntopical reading", though they might have slightly different meanings in reality.