Ask HN: What's your strategy for reading dense books with too much information? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's your strategy for reading dense books with too much information?

I'm reading The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, which isn't my first super-dense biography, but it got me thinking once again about reading strategies.

The book has an infinite wealth of details, down to specific dates on which a relative of the main subject said or did something - information I don't need and can readily forget.

But it makes me stop and wonder why I'm spending time reading it in the first place. I feel like I need to be careful in how I read something like this, lest the time just be wasted altogether on the forgettable minutiae of history.

What's your strategy for reading similar books, such that you take something away from it but don't waste time on information you'll immediately forget?

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I write up a review for almost every book I read, to post to my Goodreads account. If somebody else profits from the review, great, but the main reason is that it causes me to stop and reflect on what I read. Sometimes I go back and dip into the book again to clarify my thinking. Mostly, it's just a kind of exercise/reminder, after all is read, to turn that into a condensed bottom line summary. I think it's like doing homework after hearing a lecture; it helps to solidify the knowledge, by forcing your brain to grapple with the content.

This is a great suggestion. I really need to start taking the time to do this — jumping into the next book is just so tempting!

Life is the constant exercise of synthesis.

Just read for enjoyment; and from your particular life experiences, certain facts and stories will stay with you, but most will disappear.

This is true for almost any life experience, because the infinite complexity of this universe is too much for any individual human.

These new learnings will add a little facet to your beautiful sparkling life.

Hand-written diagrams are not a bad idea. That whole 'memory palace' idea of using an architectural model of some kind as a map to the information is also useful (even a simple linear timeline on a piece of paper noting important events would be useful for a biography).

There are some open-source tools you can play around with to make timelines too, although such things can take up more time than pencil and paper. Some are more accessible than others:

https://schoolofdata.org/handbook/courses/timeline-tools/

> But it makes me stop and wonder why I'm spending time reading it in the first place. I feel like I need to be careful in how I read something like this, lest the time just be wasted altogether on the forgettable minutiae of history.

No human can recall every fact they read in a book (Google for studies on info retention over time — not great).

I think some desirable reading outcomes include

- enjoyment

- retention of a handful of particularly useful facts

- hopefully quite a bit of high-level context about the subject matter (including summaries or take-aways)

- AND, as Cal Newport points out [0], reading is just good for your brain — especially if you are a knowledge worker

As far as tactics go, I have been using Newport’s suggestion of highlighting interesting text (and, for physical books, highlighting the corner of the page so I can find the highlights easily). I then make sure all of the highlights make it into an app called Readwise [1] which gives me spaced repetition of these highlights over time.

Whatever you do, keep reading! Being a reader in an industry which seems to rarely read is like having a superpower.

[0] https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2015/01/05/deep-habits-read-...

[1] https://readwise.io/

When I hit a section that seems to be packed with details that aren't relevant to me, I'll skim or even just skip ahead.

If I find I'm lost after skimming or skipping, I'll circle back. This rarely happens.

I've skipped 100 page sections of books using this strategy and don't feel like I missed anything.

I skipped those books entirely, and also felt I did not miss anything.

I've gotten a lot out books that had sections I skipped. I guess YMMV.

Seems like you’re reading an encyclopaedic account of events. Go for books that aren’t meant to be read sequentially. Matt Haig’s books are great for random soundbites. You can read random pages and still learn from them. His books are written like a collection of blogposts.

I'd recommend a strategy involving finding the right book first. I use an onion strategy where I read broadly, but shallowly to start and get an initial "lay of the land". Then I can dive into more detail on the subject without getting lost.

Extract your own notes and make your own "Jefferson's Bible" out of it. Laborious but can be worth the effort to share, too.

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