How I Read
I learned to read in the usual way.
Find a book that looked interesting, start the book, read through sequentially to the end. Read as many as you can. Never read a book twice.
Clearly, this is straight-forward. Clearly, this is bollocks.
Over time I relaxed some of these behaviours. I re-read some books: either favourites or ones where I felt a second pass would reveal knowledge that I was unable to see on first reading.
I’ve never really read the foreword or acknowledgements and rarely do much more than skim the intro. Footnotes are strictly optional. Depending on the topic or author they can be uniformly ignored, gobbled down greedily or more typically, sampled at will like a bit of tiny textual tapas.
I’ve always read multiple books in parallel.
With ten or twenty books on the go, reading through them sequentially meant that some books were in-flight for more than 7 or 8 years. That had to stop; it’s simply too many open loops, too much work-in-progress.
To close those loops, I tackled the tyranny of sequential reading.
Nowadays, I treat books like a blog archive. I browse the table of contents and go immediately to the chapters that pique my interest. If those chapters are sufficiently good, I might go back to the beginning and the paradigm of usual reading. If they’re reasonably good but require reading the previous material, I’ll go back as far as the nearest interesting jumping-in point.
This is quite clearly the behaviour of someone raised in the internet age. For someone who learned to read pre-internet, it’s also obviously guilt-inducing. Nevertheless, it serves me well.
This is why I created some Principles for Reading. The intention is that I re-read these regularly, to make sure I’m not falling back into old patterns of behaviour that no longer serve me well.
Principles of Reading
The Chapter is the unit of currency. Sequence is strictly optional.
Finishing a book does not mean reading to the end. It means extracting what you need from it.
Drop a book that is not making your life better.
Footnotes are optional. Skipping ahead is allowed.
Spend an internet search session with the Bibliography.
Don’t read the fluff at the start.
If in doubt, buy the book.
Don’t hesitate to buy hardcopy and kindle version of the same book.
Sources, Inspiration & Notes
Most of these habits were lifted from others. Who, I don’t recall, but likely some combination of Tyler Cowen, Paul Graham, Kevin Kelly, Tim Ferriss, Tiago Forte, David Perrell, Nassim Taleb.
None of this applies to fiction, bar the rule to mercilessly drop books that are tedious.