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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

Most popular nonfiction books these days contain very little information, should be about a dozen pages long, and can indeed be mostly skipped.

There is a good art to skimming and carefully selecting books that get your full attention, there is a lot of garbage out there.

If you only have, say, 20 minutes with a book, you can get a lot out of it.

This does offend people who really like books who read most of their books every word. Lots of books don’t deserve that and you’ll get more out of books if you realize that.

And yes you can absorb a lot of a topic by only spending a short time with many books.

But still, some books do deserve to be read word for word, others studied for years.

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Most of these books arent even worth buying. You can watch 2-3 interviews in Youtube/Podcast and get the concepts the author wrote about in 250 pages.

Most books aren't worth buying. Add those books to the waitlist on the library website and once a week pick up 20 books. 18 of them will be crap. 1 will be ok. 1 will be awesome and maybe worth buying. Try before you buy. Ehem, libgen works this way too.

And those podcasts could be condensed into well-edited text, for ingesting the same information even faster?

I'll argue reading non-fiction books is not solely about information. It's more about insights and actions, actually. You might have a lot of information, but if you can not use them, then they are as good as useless. The hardest part is not acquiring information but gain a personal insight from what the author presented. And to do that, you have to convinced yourself; set yourself in the mind frame and the experience of the author to gain the (same or different) insight. And that takes more than bit of time to read and digest. If you really want to understand deeply, you have to answer the question of how did the author come to these conclusions. That takes even more time than just reading. That is also the reason why distilled summaries (like these on Blinkist or 12 Minutes) read almost all the same and are outright banal. The key ideas are often simple enough. But how to get there is in reality the big question.

I tend to agree. While some nonfiction is enjoyable I find a lot of the better writing to be in fiction or textbooks.

This is very surprising to me. Can you tell more about your method and a couple of books you read like this and what you learnt from them.

The book How to Read a Book (by Mortimer Adler) goes into some detail about the levels of reading (skimming, full reading, analytical, and syntopical) and attention that should be paid to books, and describes good technique for quickly skimming a book to determine what it says, how well it makes its point, and whether more careful reading is needed.

Yeah, I have actually read that book. But he doesn’t say you can learn a lot by reading like this. In fact he says that a book should be read twice, second time soon after finishing it the first time.

Agreed, the older I get the more I tend toward exclusively reading novels and histories.

The Blinkist app is great for getting the next out of these books.

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