Ask HN: Books - how do you read? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Books - how do you read?

6 pointstamersalama12 comments

I'm having problems finishing up books lately.

My info intake is usually online, and to some extent, I feel it's becoming a fast-food diet.

On the other hand - I can't finish up books from cover to cover. I become easily bored, distracted, paranoid.

Any advice?

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If you become easily bored, distracted, and paranoid, then reading is the least of your problems.

Attention and focus can be trained-- this is what most meditation techniques consist of.

There are a lot of centers around teaching meditation, that don't require any membership, fees, or particular sets of beliefs you must subscribe to. See if there's one near you.

If you fall into a positive feedback loop where your mental responses to a particular goal starts to negatively affect your ability to complete it, step back for a moment then chop the goal down into chunks.

With technical books, I get those post-it flags and place a green one at the end of the chapter that I'm reading. In the chapter itself, I place purple flags at intervals of about 20 pages. Now I peg my attention to the amount of pages in those small intervals (rather than staring at some huge tome) and it relieves a huge amount of emotional burden because the goal is more clearly defined and realistic.

I read one of those chunks a day or ever other day. As I read, I highlight all the relevant info in the subsections with two different colors (one for "concepts" and the other for "practical application of the concept").

This method works great for me because going back to read the highlighted area indulges that "fast food" information intake and solidifies my understanding of what I'm reading. Doing it every other day also takes a lot of load off of the mind. A pot of coffee gets filled drop by drop.

What kind of books? I discover that I'm usually cherry picking chapters or section in technical or books where there is no strong interrelationship between the various elements or the topics. As already pointed previously, marking or taking notes inside those kind of books is useful to keep a trace and easy find back what you discovered or learned in a technical book.

There is a good reading about taking notes and especially the approach of thinking while relying on our current readings : Notebooks of the Mind, Exploration of Thinking, Vera John-Steiner (ISBN13 978-0195108965).

We are often learning at school to always finish a book even if we don't like it or we have some difficulties to read it. I tend to agree for the difficult books where sometime, you have to force yourself to finish it. But sometime, giving up is not so bad and relaxing your mind with more "easy to read" or "easy flowing" books is helping us to relax before reading more complex books. That's why I always keep around 4 or 5 books in my reading queue... and jumping back to some of them when my mind is more ready.

"We are often learning at school to always finish a book even if we don't like it or we have some difficulties to read it."

could you elaborate on this?

From my experience in EU school, a class is given a book (often fiction) to read and everyone should have read it for a specific date and everyone got a test about that book. So we are "forced" to finish the book as the test is usually including question to be sure that the student actually read the book. So by doing so, the school indirectly told the student that not finishing a book is not appropriate. I think (IMHO) this is just an effect of the evaluation process but not really a good effect to improve reading or thinking about your own reading process.

i don't have 'solutions' for your "easity bored, distracted, paranoid", but can point out to interesting comments here :

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=666407

hope it helps.

It helped me understand that I am not alone in reading books at a sloth's pace (and feeling guilty about it)

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-googl...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1273705...

Thank you

I am not sure that its a problem.

See it all depends on why you're reading a specific book, is it to a story which shouldn't be interrupted or is it a technical book that you just need one thing from. You see the difference?

Better and faster access to information means we can optimize the time spent on retrieving information that we need.

I no longer feel guilty about not finishing books(although I try to do that), because i found out that I do finish them if they're interesting enough but technical books i just read enough to get what i want and then abandon.

Depends on the book. Technical programming books i can never finish, i tend to skip topics and read them in phases. I don't think thats bad, in fact i tend to favor books written to be read this way, books that both teach you a technical topic, but can later be used as a reference.

Whit fiction, i also have trouble, mostly because im not a fiction fan, but if its good enough i just don't push it, i read the book little by little, and naturally i would like to find out how it ends.

This is the only thing that has worked for me and it worked fantastically:

1) Hemmingways Hack: http://www.secondactive.com/2009/08/boost-your-productivity-

...

2) And the Pomodoro Technique http://www.pomodorotechnique.com This has hemmingsways hack built in. If done right (read the PDF) it is amazing.

Paranoid?

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