Ask HN: How Do You Read?

I think it is just a matter of the source in your case, which may have led you to feel that 90% of what you read doesn't contribute to your knowledge.

I think you're being a bit harsh on yourself here. If you understand and learn from a text when you're reading it, I would contend that it's likely you've learnt quite a lot from that book without realising it.

To me, the important part is the next book: while reading it, do I understand it, is it interesting? That means that I've come to that book with the correct prerequisites, so I am happy that my previous books have served me well.

Now, to answer your question: I am pretty undisciplined. I generally read programming books and maths textbooks. I jump from book to book. Sometimes I start in the middle, sometimes I start from the beginning. Sometimes I feel the same concept baffles me, so I like to read about it from multiple sources. But once I grok them, those chapters in new books are skippable.

I have a subscription and generally pick up a new book I've heard of that interests me right away either with a credit or just buying it.

This allows me to read while walking and riding the bus and doing the dishes and generally turns uninteresting chores into something interesting while also allowing me to read. Something about having someone read to me is way less difficult than reading it myself.

I generally don't worry about explicitly remembering anything unless there's something particularly amazing. I read nonfiction mostly and my theory is that the goal is to generally educate myself so that my worldview is shifted to be more accurate, and instead of asking "what would that book advise me to do?" I can ask, "What would I do?" and what I would do has been influenced by the book.

Good books I just read more than once. It's much faster for me to listen to a book twice than to read it carefully once. And regardless, someone said something like it's better to read the best book 100 times than 100 books 1 time.

My record is 4 times that I read Antifragile by Taleb. A scarce few are 3 times, several twice. As I once heard, keep reading books until the ideas start to repeat themselves.

Maybe I don't remember everything as much as I would if I took copious notes, but I certainly get a lot of books read this way (sometimes one in a few days if it's good enough) and it's in a way that happens without effort. I've been mulling on the idea generally that best practices that I won't actually follow are inferior to slightly less than best practices that I will do.