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How to Read a Book [pdf]
- ptio 10y agoIs this a good technique for reading programming and technical books as well?
- tapan_k 10y agoI have the same question. I recently read a programming book on Go [1] and this book reminded me of the pleasure of reading a programming book cover to cover. For a reader whose purpose is not to just get through the coursework (as in a graduate school), a well written programming book can be as pleasurable a read (if not more) than the most gripping novel. The author's style of writing has a lot to do with the readability of a programming book. I think. [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Addison-Wesley-Professional-Computing-ebook/dp/B0184N7WWS https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Addison-Wesley-P...
- magic_beans 10y agoIt sounds like you had the good fortune of reading a well-written book. Any well-written book, regardless of subject matter, will be a pleasure to read cover to cover.
- hoodwink 10y agoThis is basically a modernized, summary version of Mortimer Adler's classic of the same name which changed my life. Beforehand, I was reading much too quickly, letting information, and more importantly understanding, pass through me. It's better to be well-read than widely-read.
- rokhayakebe 10y agoChanged my life as well. I am starring at the 50+ volume collection of the Great Books and usually have one within an arm's length.
- hoodwink 10y agoSame. Another benefit of reading How To Read a Book is that it inspired me to read higher quality books such as the Great Books.
- fjk 10y agoFarnam Street has an excellent overview of how to read a book that is based on Mortimer Adler's book: https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/how-to-read-a-book/ https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/how-to-read-a-book/
- copperx 10y agoI'm trying to reconcile your statement with Alan Kay's, who said he has read about 16,000 books in his life. Should I read slowly and be well read? Or read quickly and get the big ideas of lots of fields?
- grub5000 10y agoDepends on your goal IMO. You can't do both - it's something I've struggled with in my life so far... Interested in too many things to become an expert at any one
- davegauer 10y agoWell, I think you can't do both with all of the things. Figuring out priorities is surely one of life's biggest challenges for those of us with many interests.
- brudgers 10y agoTo me, deep and broad aren't mutual exclusive. My take is that well read persons are, to use the technobabble du jour, "tee-shaped". Or rather double/triple/quadrouple/n-ple tee-shaped having read broadly across many fields and comparatively deeply in more than one. Relative depth in multiple areas becomes easier and more likely with age as interests change and realized opportunities to read to greater depth accumulate. Reading deeply requires time. Reading broadly requires time. Neither has a shortcut. Neither precludes the other given a lifetime.
- komali2 10y agoThat's kind of funny because there's a major trend now following people like Elon Musk who promote skimming through engineering texts. The idea being that you're not going to learn rocket science reading a dissertation on rocket fuel, but you will become aware of things you hadn't done before, and retain random knowledge that could be useful and will be useful as you continue skimming more and more technical books.
- greenshackle 10y agoAdler doesn't say you should read every book deeply though. He defines four levels of reading, from reading the table of content, to deep reading and synthesis of multiple works in the same domain. Elon's technique makes sense, but you can't just do that. The most impressive people seem to be T-shaped: they have very deep understanding of their specialty, but they also a familiarity with a wide breadth of fields. I skim a bunch of technical software books that are not immediately useful to me. My goal is not to remember every detail, it's just to get an idea of what's out there, and where to find more information if I need it.
- hoodwink 10y agoThis type of reading is described in Adler's practical book. It's called "syntopical reading" in which you read multiple books about the same topic in furtherance of some particular idea. In this style of reading, you're encouraged to skim, skip sections, etc.
- swiftisthebest 10y agoMusk is a CEO, not an engineer.
- feklar 10y agoSomebody here once recommended when doing any kind of text with exercises to open to a random chapter and attempt the first exercise. If you can't do it research through the index/book where the information to help you solve it is likely to be found and repeat for all exercises. I've been doing this ever since, finished my library of unread books I had collected over the years but never had the time to read.
- copperx 10y agoWhat kind of books did you read using this technique? Also, did you end up reading most of the text? I'm a bit surprised that your techinque is more efficient than reading the chapter and then doing the exercises, because most of the chapter's content is on your short term memory and you know exactly where to find the information if you need to review a concept to solve the exercise.
- gremy0 10y agoI guess if you do the exercise first you actively know what information you need. So you can skip the content that's irrelevant and the stuff you know well enough already.
- notyourloops 10y agoI think there's more to it. By turning material into a problem or an exercise, you've already turned on an active learning response. There's no way to coast through the text if you have something to grapple with already.
- greenshackle 10y agoIt's not about efficiency, it's about effectiveness. Sequential reading may be more efficient, but it's infinitely less effective if you never pick up the book to read the next chapter. It's a workaround for the 'I started this useful, interesting book, read 50% of it, then never touched it again, for no good reason' bug. You solve the problem by nerd-sniping yourself with an exercise. If you don't experience this bug perhaps it's not good advice for you. My 'technique', if I want to read a particular book, is to carry it, and no other book, in my backpack. I'll inevitably read it in my down times.
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago>> It’s satisfying to start at the beginning and read straight through to the end. Some books, such as novels, have to be read this way, since a basic principle of fiction is to hold the reader in suspense. Your whole purpose in readingfiction is to follow the writer’s lead, allowing him or her to spin a story bit by bit. Depends. Here's how my (much) younger self used to read novels: a) Start at the begining b) Read a few pages until you're reasonably sure all major characters have been introduced. c) Skip to the end to find out if they're all alive and well at the end. d) Skip back, approximately to where you were before (c) e) Read a few more pages until something major happens f) Skip a few chapters ahead to see how the major happening pans out g) Repeat from (d) until it all goes quiet again h) Skip a random number of pages ahead (but no more than the size of the book; duh) i) If that makes no sense, return to where you were before (approximately) j) Repeat from (h) until you've read the whole book. I read about all of Jules Verne, Hector Malot, Enid Blyton and A. J. Cronin like that (I know, right?). On the other hand I remember a particularly tedious passage in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea where several pages passed describing various molluscs found at the bottom of the sea. I actually read it all very carefully because I was curious to see how much it would last for and whether there was some bit of plot hidden in between the discussions of various species' chiralities etc. Jules Verne could eat Stephen King for breakfast when he got into his stride. I only stopped doing that sort of thing to books when our lord Umberto Eco decided to write Foucault's Pendulum to punish me for the mistreatment of literary works. That hurt.
- yomly 10y ago> On the other hand I remember a particularly tedious passage in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea where several pages passed describing various molluscs found at the bottom of the sea. This reminds me of the passage in The Picture of Dorian Gray which amounted to some detailed description of gemstones or worse, the chapter in The Great Gatsby that was essentially a list of names. I usually aim to read a text in its entirety out of respect for the author, but I had no qualms fast-forwarding through those sections.
- gknoy 10y agoI still laugh about the chapter in the middle of Les Miserables where the author spends something like 20-30 pages talking about the battle of Waterloo. It was interesting, and very detailed, but had nearly no connection to the plot of the story (other that one of the people there left an heirloom for a character, or something?). Later, he did the same thing for the sewers of Paris, and I believe I skipped that. ;)
- oDot 10y agoWhat bugs me with some books is that they have excellent content but are written redundantly. This leaves me reading 300 pages instead of 120. Why can't this: > We cannot talk to the designer, so we rely upon whatever information is available to us: what the device looks like, what we know from using similar things in the past, what was told to us in the sales literature, by salespeople and advertisements, by articles we may have read, by the product website and instruction manuals. be written like that: > Unable to contact the designer, we rely on preexisting information from sales material, salespeople, ads, articles or the device appearance. or even: > Unable to contact the designer, we rely on preexisting information. Not every book should feel like Harry Potter, no matter how great the content.
- rubiquity 10y agoWould you have been able to distill the information down like that without reading the more thorough/verbose versions first? If you come back to the reduced sentence in 6 months will you find yourself wondering where the pre-existing information comes from?
- oDot 10y agoI have actually opened to book on a random page I don't remember reading, then looked for a relevant sentence. You're right about excluding information (as in my third example), but my second example has practically all of it and is still much shorter
- sosuke 10y agoJust like in school, authors sometimes have length requirements that make it necessary to pad their writing.
- ProAm 10y agoAnd not everyone learns in the same manner, sometimes repetition is necessary for people.
- dombili 10y ago
- Isamu 10y ago> Know the intellectual context This is often what I am most left wondering about. I guess nowadays I end up trying to wikipedia the heck out of the topic, or look for similar books. What do you do? Also I was confused by > Read the whole thing! Which makes me think of careful reading, but they mean "read straight through, not stopping for details." I had been unable to do this for years. Eventually I was able to just plow through a book and it turns out to be more helpful than I imagined. It is often better to proceed than to be stuck, putting it aside forever.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoFor now my "hack" is to "just read the damn book". I don't care anymore if I get 100% out of it, because I keep finding myself surprised what I can suddenly recall as needed anyway. But you won't have anything to recall if you don't read the book.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- to_string 10y agoA book about how to read a book ? Hmmmm
- clifanatic 10y agoTL;DR
- logicallee 10y agoIf you actually read and follow it, it's only 30 pages.
- thallukrish 10y agoI have seen the following happen to me while reading books. Event driven - you go back to a book based on thinking around a problem and look for information around it. I have found this very effective to understand the content, especially something not so trivial and those that you may not get by passive reading. However, this requires more time and effort from you in terms of self-thinking around problems. The second way is passive reading - just read because you got interested in the topic. You don't understand a lot of it immediately, and so either your interest may carry on and you may get more than where you began or you may give up. But if you give up, in the interim you may encounter some things related to what you read and you go into the first mode. Or you find that what you started is not your cup of tea at least for the moment. You iterate over other topics of interest.
- znpy 10y agoMy rant from when I was reading "getting things done" by David Allen: on about 250 pages, the first 80-100 pages are about how good is the GTD system. I ALREADY GAVE YOU MY MONEY, I DON'T NEED TO BE CONVINCED, I'M ALREADY SOLD, JUST TEACH ME THE GODDAMN THINGS.
- macintux 10y agoI have similar complaints about most YouTube "how to" videos. The first few minutes are typically spent providing context which I usually don't need, especially if I'm rewatching. All digital content should have a "jump to point X if you don't need background" option.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoThis is actually recognized as the Wadsworth constant[0]. It used to be the case, though it doesn't seem to work anymore, that you could add "&wadsworth=1" to the YouTube video URL to immediately jump to 30%. [0] - http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-wadsworth-constant http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-wadsworth-constant The original comment by /u/Wadsworth that coined it: "For EVERY youtube video, I always open the video and then immediately punch the slider bar to about 30 percent. For example, in this video, it should have just started at :40. Everything before :40 was a waste. This holds true for nearly every video in the universe."
- macintux 10y agoFascinating, thanks!
- ralfd 10y agoSpeaking of that, what is the GTD system? On the 'Hello Internet' it is a running joke that GCP Grey swears on it and his podcast-partner finds the system a triviality.
- znpy 10y agoThe "Getting Things Done" system is a book about management of work in the sense of things that you have to do. It really shines when you have multiple aspects of your life.
- clifanatic 10y agoAnd, if it's a math (or math-ish) book that works through example problems: try to work the example problems yourself, based on the material preceding it, _before_ reading the author's worked-out solution. Then you'll be able to make a lot more sense of the presented answer. (I wish I had figured that out as an undergraduate).
- ryanmarsh 10y agoMay I offer this as an alternative? https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/how-to-read-a-book/ https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/how-to-read-a-book/
- BellsOnSunday 10y agoEzra Pound's ~ABC of Reading~ changed the way I read poetry and literary fiction. When, much later, I started to be interested in technical things I don't think I found it too hard to adapt, but I still focus on style, allusion, irony and so on in the things I read. That's generally a recipe for disappointment of course but when you come across technical writers with a voice of their own it's a lovely surprise. Wilfrid Hodges, for instance, is a great writer who becomes a friend as you work through his books.
- ElijahLynn 10y agoFantastic read, I have been reading technical books cover to cover, slowly. I am going to try this new technique out over the next year, it will take time but I am game.
- mathattack 10y agoI thought he was referring to this [0] which is a more detailed plan of attack along similar lines. [0] http://www.evergladeshs.org/ourpages/auto/2015/5/28/58122395/Adler%20Mortimer%20-%20How%20To%20Read%20A%20Book.pdf http://www.evergladeshs.org/ourpages/auto/2015/5/28/58122395...
- soufron 10y agoAren't You supposed to learn that shit at school? Like when you're ten? Man, Silicon Valley engineers are so uneducated :)
- combatentropy 10y agoIf you want to be a friendly explanatory writer: 1. Adopt the inverted pyramid structure. This means to front-load your conclusion, to put the summary sentence first. In other words, if the reader stops reading at any point, they know the answer, at least in outline. Continued reading just results in more and more detail, more and more zoom-in. 2. Read The Elements of Style (100 pages) or On Writing Well (just need to read the first four chapters) or both. Both are short. These will help you word things efficiently. This doesn't mean you're leaving things out. But mysteriously human language is like computer languages in this: there are infinite ways to write something, and some ways are shorter than others --- shorter by several times!
- zzrg 10y agoI like reading physical books, but don't like writing directly on the pages. Does anyone have a good alternative?
- esfandia 10y agoI use post-its, and I let some of it stick out of the page in question to serve as a bookmark for important notions. Or if I need more space I write on a separate sheet of paper that I leave in there, at the risk of losing it though.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- teddyzetterlund 10y agoI use index cards as bookmarks and for note-taking. Post-it's also work. I also wrote down references to pages, paragraphs and sentences, etc. on those cards, e.g. p42p3s5. Nowadays I just make a light x in the margins, with a pencil (so that I can erase it if I want to).
- shanusmagnus 10y agoI don't mean to be flippant, but can I suggest trying really hard to get over that hangup? I used to feel terrible for marring them, now I feel like it's not mine if it doesn't have my writing all over it. Writing in the books has been an amazing boost for my relationship with the ideas contained therein.
- ashark 10y agoCommonplace-style book indexed by works you're reading. Don't really need to index further within each work, even 5-10 pages of notes per 100 pages or so isn't hard to flip through to find something, especially if you've got little drawings and such here and there to act (as a secondary function) as signposts. Note the exact edition you've got at the beginning (so you can probably track it down again if your copy is lost/sold/destroyed/whatever) then feel free to use page numbers liberally to reference stuff you don't want to copy completely. Consider using a set format, maybe with a box around it or something, for making note of extended quotes or passages you want to refer back to in the work—something like two lines consisting of a short phrase describing it (this is just for you to recognize later, don't worry about precision or even making sense), the first few words of the quote, then a page number(s). Use headings however they make sense to you. Chapters/sections from the book are usually all I use. I use notebooks roughly trade paperback sized, 120-200 pages. Can usually fit a few books in each one. Keep a separate sheet or (much smaller) notebook for a global alphabetical (or whatever makes sense to you) index of the notebooks to answer "which notebook did I use for that book I read six years ago, again?" questions. Done right you can use these, with the book itself, to do super-fast refreshers on the high points of a book. Really handy. If you want to use it for that, include very rough plot outlines and such, too, at least for fiction. Bonus: writing all that stuff helps you remember some of it unaided, too.
- andai 10y agoHas anyone here tried PhotoReading? It's the same principle of reading the same text several times, along with an additional preparation by "photo reading": taking in the whole book with a relaxed gaze, one page at a time (about 1 second per page). This makes it easier to find relevant information later, as you instantly familiarize yourself with the high level structure of the material: the relationship between the layout of the page and the information contained. Highly recommended!
- op00to 10y agoHas anyone found an epub/text version of the same content?
- emptybits 10y agoI was able to save it as RTF and it preserved formatting quite well. (Used DEVONthink, FWIW.)
- 0xCMP 10y agoDoes anyone use the citation advice he gives? If so, what tool do you use? It sounds like it might be a good way to store the important parts of books, especially when you get 100s-1000s of books in.
- 0xCMP 10y agoDoes anyone use the citation advice he gives? If so, what tool do you use? It sounds like it might be a good way to store the important parts of books, especially when you get 100s-1000s of books in.
- douche 10y agoI love the fact that "How to Read a Book" and "How to Write a Novel" are back-to-back on the front page.
- Seanny123 10y agoI literally just wrote a book review on this goddamn thing with a summary for hackers. This book is way too wordy and redundant. https://medium.com/@seanaubin/book-review-how-to-read-a-book-cb10ed8c2d13#.b1ytcobcz https://medium.com/@seanaubin/book-review-how-to-read-a-book...
- nimnio 10y agoDid you click the link? This isn't "How to Read a Book" by Adler.
- andrepd 10y agoI have to say this is contrary to my experience. For example, whenever I try to do what this tells, and jump ahead and skip around the text to try and grasp the general points I invariably get confused and lost because some detail from further back is need to understand the text further ahead. It's only when I invariably need to start over and read it properly that I understand and assimilate the knowledge.
- dominhhai 10y agoread without any purpose is more valuable, sometime. Without valuable, you can meet some interesting valuable things in unexceptional way. Somethings like other world view, life view...
- wonkaWonka 10y ago...and when you're ready to write your own book, here's a helpful text that can guide you through the lumber selection process, before you start producing the pulp that will go into the paper for your book: https://www.amazon.com/Identifying-Wood-Accurate-Results-Simple/dp/0942391047/161-4038110-1441338 https://www.amazon.com/Identifying-Wood-Accurate-Results-Sim...
- Mironor 10y ago> 1-3 pages of notes per 100 pages of text is a good goal to shoot for; more than that is often too much. I often used a technique of transforming a book into a mindmap, it's much more visual and readable than a simple plain text with notes.
- kercker 10y agoI am afraid to skip a book, because I am afraid to miss some important things that I just skipped. I can't easily get over this feeling, when I'm reading a book, so I keep reading every detail of the books I read. I also think that taking notes will take too much time, so I'm always reluctant to take notes when I am reading something. After reading this directive, I will try the steps it says.
- dredmorbius 10y agoI got over that attitude when I walked into my uni library the first time. Seven million volumes. No way I was going to read them all. I focused on specific interests, though also sampled other areas.