This is just an unashamed ripoff of "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren. Seriously, he didn't even get "syntopical" right.
The Art of Reading More Effectively and Efficiently
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Re: The Art of Reading More Effectively and Efficiently
#32For such a long blog, I still didn't understand how does one read more effeciently, or did I miss something? Or is it just a clickbait title, since the majority of the blog just defends reading and counts it's pros.
Agreed. Go straight to the source: How to read a book, by Mortimer Adler. Ironically you will find there that you must grapple with the good books, which arguably disqualifies just reading about it in a blog.
Re: The Art of Reading More Effectively and Efficiently
#33I have noticed an interesting trend in our discourse about reading lately - there seems to be more and more moralizing and virtue signaling. So much self-help and "motivation porn" focuses on reading books, as if it's a magical activity that will unlock the best version of oneself. It's part of the new aspirational message - imagine yourself rich, happy, driving a Lamborghini, living off dividends from your stonks, a…
> But ultimately you could learn just as much about yourself and the world by doing pottery, woodworking, kayaking, knitting or whatever else you like to do with your spare time.
I agree with the rest of your post, but this sentence is a hard disagree. Books let you live a version of the lives of other more intelligent people from almost any point in history. How can pottery and kayaking do that?
Re: The Art of Reading More Effectively and Efficiently
#34I think this is missing an important fourth objective: reading to remember. I'm not sure how much others can relate, but I am hopeless at remembering most of what I read or watch. Even when I spend several days pondering the same book chapter / paper / recipe / etc, taking thorough notes, there is no guarantee I will remember it six months or even one month from now. I started to realize that I was collecting new dat…
I'd be interested in learning how to read poetry. It seems like a different enough thing involving emotion and experience that your steps may not apply.
If any poetry fans here remember what it took to start to crack the code, I'd love to hear it.
Re: The Art of Reading More Effectively and Efficiently
#35I have noticed an interesting trend in our discourse about reading lately - there seems to be more and more moralizing and virtue signaling. So much self-help and "motivation porn" focuses on reading books, as if it's a magical activity that will unlock the best version of oneself. It's part of the new aspirational message - imagine yourself rich, happy, driving a Lamborghini, living off dividends from your stonks, a…
Is reading good for you because other forms of entertainment have gotten worse? I suspect reading is so great because time spent reading is not time spent toiling away on social media or other shallow distractions. The same reason tea is good for you simply because it's not soda.
Or do successful people tend to read because successful people don't tend to get dragged into shallow activities. The reading didn't make them successful- the reading is a side affect of already having that trait.
I dislike the article's take on reading for pleasure with a goofy emoji. It mentions reading to broaden your world and make connections between disparate things. Reading for pleasure also accomplishes this.
Re: The Art of Reading More Effectively and Efficiently
#36I think this is missing an important fourth objective: reading to remember. I'm not sure how much others can relate, but I am hopeless at remembering most of what I read or watch. Even when I spend several days pondering the same book chapter / paper / recipe / etc, taking thorough notes, there is no guarantee I will remember it six months or even one month from now. I started to realize that I was collecting new dat…
We need to _do_ something with it. Reading is not enough, we must apply it somehow. That's why there are exercises in school or uni. That's why some people write summaries of books on their blogs. Another idea might be to make youtube videos about the books we read. Just to summarize them in our own words. To do more with the material that just reading. (P.S. It's also the reason why I like and recommend Zed Shaw's "…
Yeah, that's why I started taking notes. For topics that are important to my work / hobbies I write my own wiki-style summary to synthesize information from all the sources I've read. When I inevitably forget later, I basically have written myself a textbook that explains things in a way that I know I'll understand later.
I will also happily try to summarize the info to my partner or whoever will listen. But outside of an academic settings it's really tough to find other people to have those sort of deep discussions with, especially ones who will do their own reading and bring an interesting perspective about the same niche topic.
Re: The Art of Reading More Effectively and Efficiently
#37I have noticed an interesting trend in our discourse about reading lately - there seems to be more and more moralizing and virtue signaling. So much self-help and "motivation porn" focuses on reading books, as if it's a magical activity that will unlock the best version of oneself. It's part of the new aspirational message - imagine yourself rich, happy, driving a Lamborghini, living off dividends from your stonks, a…
The worst is some arbitrary goal of reading X books per year. That clearly optimises for short, easy to read books (eg New York Times Best Sellers) and avoids more technical and difficult books (eg Art of Computer Programming)
Re: The Art of Reading More Effectively and Efficiently
#38I have noticed an interesting trend in our discourse about reading lately - there seems to be more and more moralizing and virtue signaling. So much self-help and "motivation porn" focuses on reading books, as if it's a magical activity that will unlock the best version of oneself. It's part of the new aspirational message - imagine yourself rich, happy, driving a Lamborghini, living off dividends from your stonks, a…
> But ultimately you could learn just as much about yourself and the world by doing pottery, woodworking, kayaking, knitting or whatever else you like to do with your spare time. I agree with the rest of your post, but this sentence is a hard disagree. Books let you live a version of the lives of other more intelligent people from almost any point in history. How can pottery and kayaking do that?
Doing pottery and kayaking is a better choice for me than reading someone do pottery and kayaking.
Edit: and not everything can be learnt from books
Re: The Art of Reading More Effectively and Efficiently
#39I have a contrarian view about reading productively, which is: READ WHAT OTHERS AREN'T READING. It's as if there is a similar process as the Efficient Market Hypothesis happening with books: the best-sellers define our shared reality, and apparently (at least for me), they aren't worth reading. For example, think of Outliers, by Malcom Gladwell. Virtually everyone has heard of the 10'000 hour rule. That means that th…
If you're paying attention to what people are saying about the books "everyone" is reading, then sure, you can probably skip them. Lots of popular books I never read because I got 90%+ of the content from a podcast interview. But this doesn't answer the question of what you should read. Simply "not the popular stuff" could land you at an amazingly insightful but ignored classic, or a celebrity gossip tabloid you picked up at the grocery store checkout.
Re: The Art of Reading More Effectively and Efficiently
#40I think this is missing an important fourth objective: reading to remember. I'm not sure how much others can relate, but I am hopeless at remembering most of what I read or watch. Even when I spend several days pondering the same book chapter / paper / recipe / etc, taking thorough notes, there is no guarantee I will remember it six months or even one month from now. I started to realize that I was collecting new dat…
I'd be interested in learning how to read poetry. It seems like a different enough thing involving emotion and experience that your steps may not apply. If any poetry fans here remember what it took to start to crack the code, I'd love to hear it.
I'm unexperienced reading poetry, but I'm not sure I would treat it any differently.
Poetry to me seems like it requires a lot of context to really understand. Who is the author and what kind of life have they lived? Who are their contemporaries and what cultural context are they responding to? etc.
So maybe I'd do an initial "blind" read and take a quick note about my reaction. Then, I'd do some research about the author and try to figure out why they might have written that piece, followed by a second reading.