I’ve found that the real value I get out of a nonfiction book is rarely the conclusion or any particular fact found within its pages. Instead, it’s a guide map

I’ve found that the real value I get out of a nonfiction book is rarely the conclusion or any particular fact found within its pages. Instead, it’s a guide map for how to look at the sorts of things that the book is about and draw the sorts of conclusions that the author finds. The act of reading a book permanently alters how you think a little bit, so the most important factor in deciding whether to abandon a book is whether or not you want to think more like the author does. Like any other skill, the sort of thinking that any given book is training you to do benefits from repetition. The variation in the different scenarios also helps make this skill more robust so that you can apply it correctly to more diverse situations. Fortunately, all this means you don’t need to make much of an effort to actually remember anything the book says— the book’s real value comes from subtlety altering the way you think which will happen so long as you’re attending to what you read. The later chapters should be easier and more relaxing to read because you’re familiar with the pattern of the author’s argument and they act more like a mental exercise than anything else.