“My challenge for 2015 is to read a new book every other week” | Hacker News Reader

“My challenge for 2015 is to read a new book every other week”

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21 pointskernelv7 comments

I've been trying to do this for a few years, this was the first year I hit about 24-30 books/audiobooks. I know pg wrote about remembering books a few weeks ago but I recently developed a strategy, thanks to "Make it Stick", to help me remember content far better then just reading.

1. read the chapter's summary before reading the chapter - I generally use https://www.blinkist.com/, but amazon reviews and goodreads are good alternatives. This allows you to know what the key elements of the chapters are so you can pay closer attention to the important stuff.

2. read the chapter

3. when you get the time write a short summary (usually a paragraph). You generally want some degrading to occur so don't write it right away.

This is great advice. I would also recommend adding just a bit of additional synthesis to your summary if possible, connecting what the chapter/book talks about to other topics or ideas you may have. Creating strong and varied connections helps to build a robust schema in your mind.

I'm curious about your assertion that some degredation should occur before this activity. Can you elaborate on why? My thought is that it forces you to do a bit of reconstruction which aids in the goal of truly writing in your own words.

So this was from the book "make it stick", recalling memory strengthens the network, which is why quizzing yourself or doing the simple sample problems at the end of the chapters are more effective then highlighting/rereading notes. The gap is mostly because you want what you've learned to settle into long-term memory where you can find it. Think of it as being a rat in a maze, you are on one side and the memory somewhere on the other, you want to work towards strengthening the path towards the memory, so it's easier to recall the next time around.

I highly recommend "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer J. Adler, it was quite an eye opener for me.

That can be quite an inspiration for people who spend most of free time on Facebook (Including me who didn't finish 10 books Goodreads challenge last year :D)

This is great. Every one should do something like this, most people underestimate the amount of knowledge they lack. My biggest breakthrough(s) by far came from going bibliography to bibliography and just absorbing it.

Let me phrase this another way, some people are always going on and on about the tragedy of not having enough intelligence and how some people never got a chance[1] to get started on whatever it is they wanted.

However even more tragic is the people who did have the intelligence to absorb masterpieces and classics that would otherwise benefit them, but still did not!

I'd like to add that libraries are a severely under utilized resource and that most people learn better from books.

[1] - I make no statements here about this.

Perhaps I'm weird, but I enjoy reading precisely because I can do it on my own schedule. Some days I'll read nothing, other days I'll spend hours reading. It's one of the few 'unstructured' things I have, and I would be loathe to put any kind of schedule on it.

Besides that, looking at my bookshelf, I have books ranging in length from roughly 200 to 1000 pages, some of the larger books with very small print. A fixed 2-week schedule seems to ignore the actual time required to read different length books; it imposes a possibly impractical 'beat' on what IMO should be a more organic process.

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