Comment by lemonberry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lemonberry | Hacker News Reader

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Good article.

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.

"How to Read a Book" is one book that I think every school and university should teach from cover to cover.

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.

What are some of the key points that you took from it?

I'm going to mirror the original commenter's recommendation, but also provide a bit more information.

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.

Some of the advice in that book is difficult to implement in the age of electronic devices.

The blog post seems like a more applied, personalized and re-imagined version of "How to read a book". And shorter. I quote like it too.

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