Building a Better Book Club: A Strategy for Efficiently Ingesting Nonfiction
spin.atomicobject.com
spin.atomicobject.com
What do you mean by efficiency here...just getting an utterly shallow understanding of some random topic, trusting that someone else, be that human or GPT, has understood it?
Part of the benefit of the slowness of reading is that it gives you time to actually mull over the topic, so you can build it into your own mental framework. The repetition, with slightly different wording, helps anchor the idea in your mind and provides spaced repetition to help you remember.
Other people's summaries are poor because _they don't have your experiences_, so the things that they found relevant might mean nothing to you, and the things they find shallow and skipped might be exactly what you need. Even if the highlight is useful, without the context, it's hard to actually make sure it sticks in your brain in order for it to be functional.
Lists might feel useful because the information is condensed...but how much of it do you _actually_ remember? Efficiency is being able to _use_ the information. Just getting through the material may be _fast_, but that's (in my view) antithetical to efficiency--it leads to shallow understanding and likely poor memory.
We all like to think 'I just need the 1 line summary'...in reality we're not special. You need to put the effort in.
Or reading 50 books (with whatever technique you choose) on a topic like programming versus actually opening a IDE and building something.
A summary also serves well as a 20,000ft overview of a topic that gives you the breadth before you dive into the depths of the parts that are more useful. You can pick up context that might be locally helpful but not really something you want to spend a great deal of time on, you can have some idea of what you are going to learn from what you do focus on, and you can perform a sanity check on what you believe you already understand (ie if the summary doesn't make sense, you probably don't know it as well as you might have thought).
Of course the only way to guarantee you don't miss anything at all is to read through everything 100%, but generally what you are looking for is not going to be hidden in a throwaway line in an otherwise unrelated section. Very often the gist is all that really matters.
Real nonfiction books are better not to skim. Pick better books.
- Dr Ricken Lazlo Hale, PhD
"good" non-fiction like Thinking, Fast and Slow, The Selfish Gene, Structure of Scientific Revolutions etc. are books that are not easy, or even worthwhile to summarise that way. You'd lose too much information.
1. Keep a simple text file of your top books to read. Line number indicates priority: line 1 is the #1 book on the list, 2 is #2, etc.
2. Rearrange the list, or add new books as you learn about them in the appropriate place, over time.
3. Go to your library every few weeks and check out #1 and #2. Delete books you've finished. Let the limited duration of borrowing push you to keep reading.
*you should ideally have a very complete library near you, probably with branches you can also request books from, for this to work
was it from pareto's butt