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Comment by ahalbert | Hacker News Reader

I recently started writing reviews of each book I read. I found it helps me retain the contents of the book and often people give positive feedback about what they learned from my review.

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how many hours do you invest in this per book and per month?

I did this for a few months in 2017 but it was taking like 90 minutes per chapter, and at full saturday morning 8am attention! It's like doing math homework. And math homework is not the most important thing I can spend the best 90 minutes of my day on.

I don't know, but I wrote nearly 3000 words on the last book review I did. I'd say I spend less time than 90 minutes per chapter. I'm also sharing the reviews, which I find the most rewarding part.

Is there any review(er) in particular you used as inspiration here? Curious if you treat this more as personal notes, or a public-facing review?

I do the same, since the Start of the year. I write personal notes and if a book really gets to me I will write a public review

I do it on my college alum slack channel, but I recently wrote one up that made it to the front page of HN:

https://ahalbert.com/reviews/2023/06/04/the_culture_map.html

I took some inspiration from the book review contests of "Astral Codex Ten"

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-publi...

Not GP, but https://fourminutebooks.com comes to mind. It's also just incredibly useful to get a "4 minute precis" and decide whether or not it's worth it to you to spend more time on that book.

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