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Am I really a better person for having read more books? For having been exposed to certain ideas?

Yes. Even if you can't directly recall what you have read, if you understood it while you were reading it you would have internalised some of the world view, if not the blow-by-blow account.

As somebody else replied, discussing it with your friends (or, making friends of the people who would discuss such books with you) is a great way of integrating the ideas into your thinking.

As to the list: Anybody interested in reading Arthur Koestler (and he is really worth reading) might want to start with The Sleepwalkers. It is a very readable account of the development of science - if you like it you will be motivated to delve into some of his other work.

I was going to say this. Specifically that this is particularly true when you are young. I recall discussing Atlas Shrugged with a friend not long ago. I can see that book permanently influencing someone's world view. (For better or worse, positively or negatively, I cannot say.)

Yes. Even if you can't directly recall......not the blow-by-blow account.

Thank you! I believe this is applicable to everything that is related to the dominating senses -see/hear. So i try my hardest to narrow my information overload. I have accepted the fact, that i can't know everything - politics..knowing why situation in iran came to be,why this vocal outburst doesn't happen in other places...to feeling like the dumbest guy after looking into google research papers.

This is very true, the important thing about reading is in actually doing it. It is probably more helpful if you can remember a fair amount of detail on the book, but the act of reading will certainly improve not only your understanding of ideas but your ability to read and write too.

I remember reading a psychological study on musicians and that they can selectively hear their favourite instruments in a piece. Personally as a bass guitarist I can relate, in fact I have a problem listening to music without good bass playing.

I believe this will happen with all artistic talents including reading and writing. The more you read, the more it will increase all of you abilities related to it. I can barely remember any songs on bass because I haven't played since before I moved country, but I'm still highly proficient at playing.

Stephen King once stated that there is no point in writing if you don't read and from my understanding, virtually all writers are well read and it largely doesn't matter what you read, just that you read. Hopefully scientists will come along and prove this sentiment some day as it's almost universally held in writing circles.

So I would say with a certainty to the OP that with a margin of doubt so small that it would be too big to write out here, that you truly are a better person for having read more books. Not only have you likely enlightened yourself to a broader world view, but you have likely also distanced yourself further from the unpunctuated and grammarless masses. Also, this maybe because of the reading, but you seem quite adept at philosophising so kudos.

Agree. Last week I was discussing with a friend about the significance of certain writer (wich I read in highschool and havent reread again) and I was surprised I could come up with some significant hindsigths about his work. I guess I internalized and talking about it years later, at the ligth of many other things I have read and received, I was able to articulate about it.

What I do to avoid this is whenever I read a book I put a little dash in the margin next to anything that's worth remembering, and then after I finish the book I copy down all these sentences into a mindmap. The means that I've read all the insightful/informative parts at least twice, typed them once, and then have them in a format that makes it really easy to refer back to them.

What sort of mindmap do you use?

http://freemind.sourceforge.net

I'm using .9RC4 right now, it's great. The only problem is that the flash exporter doesn't seem to be working with Firefox 3.5RC1, but that's a Firefox bug so who knows when it'll get fixed. It worked fine until this week, and it still works in Safari and every other browser :-/

If you want to see an example map check out http://www.alexkrupp.com/earth.html

The only caveat is that some of the default appearance preferences are a little wonky in the .9 release. I'd recommend turning on full antialiasing, and checking the box that says "Edges start from one point at root node." (And turning off the text editing box at the bottom unless you are going to use it.)

That's a really interesting approach to reading and remembering books. Thanks for sharing it.

No problem. The reason I like it is because writing full marginalia breaks my train of thought and makes it harder for me to get through the book. If I'm reminded of something I'll still write it down on the spot, but otherwise this system is more efficient than other things I've tried.

Cool - I wish I had the discipline (and time, but really discipline) to do this.

A very lightweight and simple way of improving retention is to re-expose yourself to the ideas. If you're reminded of a book, go flip through it again and read whatever bit strikes you at the moment. Just enough to satiate your interest, but not so much that you feel like you have to re-read the whole thing again. I like this because it's purely interest-driven. The books that plant the most seeds in your mind will draw you back the most, and consequently get the most re-read, and the get the most retention.

Just as you can remember the words to a song better when you hear the tune, you'll find that just reading a few pages of a book can reactiviate your recollection of the rest of the contents, you find that you remember much more than you thought you did. Another nice thing is that by re-exposing yourself to things you read before, you can connect them to things that you've read or ideas you've had since then. Connections that you couldn't have made the first time start forming. This, too, helps retention. It also feels good.

Not all books are great for this. Pop science books, as entertaining and informative as they can be, can frequently be summarized on a napkin without much loss. They tend to have one big idea and lots of details. The ones that work best are books packed with ideas, the ones that you finish on first reading knowing that you haven't fully wrapped your head around.

Incidentally, all of the books on Kay's list that I have read happen to be of this kind. I think that bodes well for the rest.

You may want to read How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren.

http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Touchstone-book/dp/06712...

The best part of How to Read a Book is that when you buy it you get a free book to practice with!

Personally, I find that I remember much better with a pen in hand. If you've really engaged with a work – scribbled all over the margins, written a review, discussed it with your friends – you're much less likely to forget either its insights or your own reactions.

I wrote a little flashcard script that lets me enter and later test myself on facts. If I get the answer to a question right, the delay before a repeat of the question increases. If I get the answer wrong, the delay decreases. When I read something I want to remember, I just enter a bundle of relevant questions into the program. It's helped a lot with retaining knowledge.

Reading books is mostly something you do for entertainment, like going to the movies, or eating nice food. There's nothing wrong with that! It's very pleasurable, and occasionally useful. But generally most reading doesn't make you a better person, any more than watching opera or other "high" art does.

Thats sounds shallow. If I have a great meal or watch a good play in a theather or any other "high" art, and im able to pay atention and find interesting stuff in the work,I engage with the sensitive side and that alone, makes me a better person.

7 or 8 years ago I read the Book "In the Pond" - Ha Jin. Its a story of a Chinese man that pushes against society and gets his butt handed to him countless times. While reading it, I didn't appreciate the subtle wisdom I would gain from many years since of reflecting on it while living in China.

For me, it's a little like feeding coral, or having a rich environment for enzymes to operate on: if my thinking is ready for particular new insight, it's great if that idea comes along. It then becomes a part of my thinking. Similarly, if I'm working on a problem, I often get insight from other activities, including reading.

Reading well-written books and essays influences the way I express myself, unconsciously.

I also think it keeps the mind supple, to be able to absorb new perspectives. Perhaps even more important, is to be reminded that they are things I don't know, and didn't even suspect (the particular things aren't so important, just feeling of not knowing as much as I thought.)

Your question is a common one. Literary critics often joke about how critics in general rate James Joyce's "Ulysses" as a top novel, yet "no one has actually read it." The same goes (to a lesser extent) in cinema for "2001: A Space Odyssey."