Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

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The problem of having to finish every book is you’re not only spending time on books you shouldn’t be but it also causes you to stall out on reading in general. If I can’t start the next book until I finish this one, but I don’t want to read this one, I might as well go watch TV. Before you know it, you’ve stopped reading for a month and you’re asking “what have I done?!”

Yeah I've found that many people have a weird hangup about this. I guess it's because of how they learned to study in school. You're "supposed to" finish the book.

In my mind, the point of reading is learning/retention/permanent change, not "completionism" in finishing the book. I just get a bunch of books from the library, and read the PARTS of the ones I feel like reading, that I feel have some relevance. I get 5 books for every one I finish, and I don't feel bad about it.

Often when I get to a "bad part" (and most books are filled with bad parts), I just read the first sentence of every paragraph, and nothing is lost. Paradoxically, you may get more retention that way! The bad parts have low information density.

But there has to be some retention, and I have a couple tactics for that:

- I take notes on every book I read. Key point: it's not a lot of notes. It's not page-by-page notes, and I don't do it while I read. It can be 4 sentences for some entire books. If you can't remember the notes you want to write after 24 hours, then the book might not be that good.

- I take notes in a wiki and use hyperlinks. If what you read doesn't cause you to think of some other book you read, or something someone said, then you probably didn't learn anything. Everything is related, and different authors say the same thing in different ways. If you're not recognizing that, then you're probably reading the material without understanding it.

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Related:

http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html

What use is it to read all these books if I remember so little from them?

Most non-fiction has a recursive introduction, body, conclusion structure. The nature of the structure varies a little from author to author, but can be identified pretty quickly. In pop non-fiction (and especially in business/management/productivity non-fiction) at a certain depth in the tree the body will be entirely filler and can be skipped wholesale. This is how I "read" most non-fiction now: first and last paragraph of each chapter (or section), first sentence of each paragraph in between, if something strikes me as particularly interesting or unintuitive I'll backtrack and read the full paragraphs before and after. Once I've done a first pass like this I'll decide whether I want to go back and read the full thing word-for-word. Typically the answer is "no."

I need a service to summarize pop non-fiction books in some similar way, cut out all the bullshit and leave the perhaps blog length substance and list of references.

I can’t stand where a good 1/3 to 1/2 of the book is spent on trying to convince me to read the book, extolling the benefits I’ll get from reading it. I don’t need to be sold on it, I already wasted the money for the book, now all I want to do is avoid also wasting time on filler.

Derek Sivers has good summaries on some of these: https://sive.rs/book

That’s what Blinkist is, isn’t it?

I've never actually used this, but I remember the story from a few days ago from a guy who's doing exactly that?

https://durmonski.com/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24469292

If you use it, tell us how it is :)

I used getabstract[0] in the past, where they give you a five page summary of the entire book. After reading a lot of them though, you start realizing a lot of business books are rather full of fluff.

[0] https://www.getabstract.com/en/

I agree, there's a lot of fluff in business/productivity/self-improvement books. They're repetitive and often refer to the same decade old studies. I've also found that I need to be in the proper state of mind for a message to sink in. Maybe the regurgitation helps but I should reread a good book instead.

I wrote a multi-paged essay on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and all the nerve-themes it touched for me. Not because I had to, but because the reading of the book itself compelled me to do so. It's become lost in time, but I want to re-read the book just in order to re-write the essay. The Picture of Dorian Gray had a similar effect, but for only one perspective that rocked my worldview:

Life experience as art.

Do you keep these notes somewhere. Have you ever considered sharing them? I would be delighted to read some

I haven't shared them -- they're interesting and valuable to me, but I don't think they're polished enough to be interesting to others.

Actually I had a conversation with someone on HN who had made notes over a similar time period (16 years now for me), and some of the topics even overlapped (CS, programming, etc.) They are hyperlinked as well.

So you could simulate the experience by reading some of these notes, which are published in a raw form:

https://gitlab.com/kragen/dercuano

Personally I found it compelling enough to browse through about 20 notes over an hour or three, but no more than that. It didn't hold my interest -- not because the topics aren't interesting or they're not good notes, but because of the "shorthand problem". Notes to yourself have a lot of shorthand that doesn't need to be expanded, which makes it hard to read for others.

If you actually spend a lot of time reading those notes, I'd be surprised and interested to hear it :)

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