This is a smol log as I try to reason out what is bothering me about getting the most out of the books I want to, uh, get the most out of.
Something is rankling me, but I don’t know what.

As I go through How to Read a Book, I’ve realised that I need to digest a book in a manner of speaking, specially on my subsequent reads.

My ideal is to pick up a book, and read through it at the speed it ought to take; highlighting, annotating and writing down my thoughts as I go.
And while I do that, also write things down here on the blog, as I’ve been attempting to do with Adler.

Rather, I thought I would do that with Adler.
But through force of habit, I’ve gone and done the same thing I’ve always done.
Read through the entire book, highlighting as I go.
So now I have a book full of notes, and a few thoughts, but all the “brilliant”1 insights that struck me as I read the book have vanished from my mind, as has any tentative mental model of the structure of the book.
And I’m frustrated with this state of affairs.
What happens then, is me having just a page full of notes without any of my thoughts in there, or trying to recapture lighting in a bottle over months of agonising effort.
Neither appeals to me.

The only things I can think of doing right now are:

  1. Keep a notebook beside me and write my thoughts down. The flyleaves are barely enough for me to keep track of running highlights across pages.
  2. Intentionally slow down, even more. I don’t know what this will do to my flow.
  3. Read in chunks. And then stop and write about them. I’ll probably miss the big picture. But I’ll arrive at it slowly, eventually. And the writing will reflect that. Is that good or bad? I don’t really know.

So I think I’m going to buckle down and finish getting my notes from Adler into posts in the coming weeks and try the above on my next book.

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  1. very debatable 😂 ↩︎