How I Read Books

nnomilk about 3 hours ago 5 comments

HI version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

I think many people misunderstand how to use books generally. They're such simple things. Many people think you have to read every page of a book starting at the first page and go to the last page, before moving on to the next. Maybe because that's what they were taught in school?

How I read:

- as many books as I want concurrently (from 0 to infinity)

- sometimes I skip entire chapters to get to the bits I find important

- sometimes I read parts of a book and decide it's a bad book, or not useful to me, so I put it aside

- sometimes I read the same paragraphs/pages/chapters/books multiple times, rarely, but occasionally, many, many times (e.g. some essays I read approximately every 3 months, since they're so important to keep front of mind).

- very often, I take notes, often many pages of notes. These are an amazing resource for years to come

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

100% Positive

Analyzed from 99 words in the discussion.

Discussion (5 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

ytoawwhra92•about 1 hour ago

What you're describing requires a level of literacy possessed by less than 10% of the adult population.

jimekus•about 3 hours ago

I also listen, as I've done for 40 years since my first SpeechThing. Now I have end-to-end harmonic mixing thrown in. I automate Firefox scraping of daily articles, but for longer books, I read as much as I want and when the session closes the remainder is queued up at the rear, so I get back into those queued books in the quiet weekends when then articles are exhausted. I listen from very early morning until midday.

Slow_Hand•about 1 hour ago

I'm not familiar with the tech; what is harmonic mixing for audio book readouts? Would you please elaborate?

Preston67•about 3 hours ago

Thank you, this has been very helpful information

Onplana•about 3 hours ago

I like to listen instead of reading books.