Reading
Reading Archive
I have kept track of all the books I have read since 2017. It’s fun to look back at years of reading and genres / themes I was interested in.
Learning to read
Authors can spend years working on their trade, researching, and writing. They distill stories, knowledge and wisdom into a couple hundred pages, and we can absorb it within a few hours. What a great trade off…for us.
One mindset I struggle with occasionally when reading is just reading to check a book off a list. There’s little point in investing hours of time to read a book if I don’t plan on remembering anything other than the synopsis on the back cover, yet that’s what I have done for years.
With that said, my goal is to become a better reader. I define improved reading as the following: Better retention, greater volume read, higher quality book selection.
Better Retention
Taking more notes while reading and including chapter summaries. My plan is to include notes of books I am reading as a link on the image of the book in my archive pages. At the time of writing, it is Dec 2020, so books read before then will likely not have links to notes.
Greater Volume Read
Often when I start a book I feel compelled to finish, but if a book is not interesting, or providing anything useful, it’d be a better use of time to give it up and move on, instead of forcing myself to slog through a book. Being willing to stop reading a book will somewhat paradoxically help me to read more books.
Higher quality book selection
There’s an interesting article on the Farnam Street blog that speaks to not reading books that everyone else is reading. The most persuasive point they made to this point in my opinion is that reading what everyone else is reading makes it harder to think differently from others about problems, decisions or life.
Farnam street also has an article directly tailored to my attempt at better book selection entitled How To Choose Your Next Book.
Another interesting point they made is not reading books that are too new. Which is contrary to my take especially with my interest in more cutting edge topics like AI or neuroplasticity which change rapidly. I think some balance is needed here to account for topics on the cutting edge, but I again agree with the sentiment that books should have to stand the test of time, as a lot of what is published becomes fluff.
I think they sum up the point on not reading books that are too new with their quote:
Knowledge has a half-life. The most useful knowledge is a broad-based multidisciplinary education of the basics. These ideas are ones that have lasted, and thus will last, for a long time. And by last, I mean mathematical expectation; I know what will happen in general but not each individual case. In the words of Charlie Munger, “take a simple idea and take it seriously.”
Since this page seems to be a plug for Farnam street, here is another really interesting blog post on why we should read less news.
P.S. It’s always challenging to select the right books. I was researching what books to read next and came across a couple different lists. The first is the great books list. There are a few variations of this lest, but in general, they are the most influential books in the western canon. There are various university programs that align around these great books. One of the names I saw come up several times was the St. Johns Great Book list. I am considering diving into some of the titles. But no promises. Typing out the list alone nearly killed me. Lots of Greek names, and some seriously boring sounding titles.
There is also a list of books I came across called the Everyman’s library that I am interested in working through. The Everyman’s library is similar to the Great Books list in that it is made up of classical literature primarily in the western canon. But it has a much less heavy emphasis on the hard sciences or philosophy that are found in St. Johns great book list and includes a lot more fiction.
