Faster Reading

I’m trying to read more non-fiction books. I still have so much to learn, and yet I only read one book per month. It has to change.

The problem is probably my reading methodology. 

Reading books twice takes too much time. I like to go through a whole book while sitting comfortably in a chair with my Kindle. Once I’ve enjoyed reading the book, I wait a week or two before diving into a deeper SQ5R analysis. That’s basically how I write my summaries at Sipreads. 

A better way to proceed would be to plan my reading sessions beforehand. If a book is divided into 28 chapters, I would need to read 3 chapters per day for a week to finish it. 

A single session would consist of reading one chapter in one go on my Kindle, before switching to my laptop to highlight the key questions and answers of each paragraph. 

I hate the experience of reading on a laptop, it feels too much like work. But it’s the most efficient way to obtain practical and publishable notes from my readings.

An alternative when I’m reading outside would be to take a piece of paper and briefly write down the questions and answers I identified using bribes of sentences. This way, I can use any idle time I have to make some progress with my books.

I never highlight things or take notes on my Kindle. The former is worthless because I always try to formulate the main ideas I identified with my own words to get a better grasp of what the author is saying, and the latter is too slow and cumbersome. There are rare cases where sentences are already well-written, simple and elegant, but I think they are worth writing down manually. 

Speed reading is out of the question since it takes out all the joy I’m feeling when I’m trying to decipher the author’s wisdom.

In non-fiction books, not all content is directly valuable. Stories are important to trigger an emotional response in the reader, but they aren’t as “useful” as the message they convey, or at least, in the context of reading a book for studies. It’s not unusual for non-fiction authors to use examples to illustrate core principles: a smart reader should be able to see through those to obtain the underlying truth. Managing to do so eventually reduces the amount of reading time required to mind-download a book.