Disclaimer: this approach might already be obvious to many people. (So I wrote it in a blog post instead of a book.)
Dexter Bell is my dad, and he is known for reading. I know him more particularly for checking out stacks of books from the library, and perusing the prologues.
1. Look at the prologue/introduction + jacket
2. Read the first page or two
3. Skim the table of contents
4. Flip to a random page and read a bit
5. Put it down or read it more
The goal isn't to skim every single book; in fact, an article about Internet browsing from Wired Magazine provides a vision of the detrimental effects of allowing this to be your only type of reading.1 The real goal is to learn a lot, quickly, and find out which books are worth more attention.
My dad and I both like to read about social psychology, economics, self-help, and in general books that have a few central ideas. Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, and The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb are three recent examples. They all have big points to make, and spend 300-600 pages making them.
I have to admit that growing up I believed the only way to read a book was to start from the beginning and read every page. It was news to me that authors often give away their big points in the introduction. The rest of the book is usually to convince and entertain. The reading hack that I learned from my dad is to never commit to the book. In short, apply marginal cost/benefit analysis continually to reading. Even shorter: skim. You'd be surprised how much information you can get by spending 30 minutes in a bookstore aisle with this approach.
The process is a little like this:
1. Look at the prologue/introduction + jacket
2. Read the first page or two
3. Skim the table of contents
4. Flip to a random page and read a bit
5. Put it down or read it more
The goal isn't to skim every single book; in fact, an article about Internet browsing from Wired Magazine provides a vision of the detrimental effects of allowing this to be your only type of reading.1 The real goal is to learn a lot, quickly, and find out which books are worth more attention.
Amazon.com reader reviews are another useful tool. Smart people take the time to read the books, and then give you their synopses. In my mind, the most informative reviews are the ones that give the book 1 star. This method of reading is an even quicker hack than the prologue approach, with even more of the downside that you don't get the benefits of thinking it through yourself.
The final qualifier is that novels, history narratives, and reference books are immune to this hack, but those are also the types of books that nobody would want to hack anyway.
Update 7/27/2010: There is a website called "getabstract.com" which condenses books into 5 page summaries. The quality of the reviews is supposed to be high, but comes at the price of a subscription. It is the premium book hacking service for books about business and related subjects.
1. http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_nicholas_carr/all/1
I like how you made the post skimmable by giving your point away at the beginning.
ReplyDeleteAlso...do you worry that your threshold for believing something from anyone who can write a nice prologue is lowered by your willingness to skip the part of the book dedicated to evidence?
That may be a problem. This method forces you to go with your gut a lot of the time. The value to me is in learning which ideas motivate people to write books. I get utility out of having a list of those ideas in my head, for a number of reasons.
ReplyDeleteA way around this detrimental effect on your belief threshold might be to read a couple of 1 star Amazon.com reader reviews. They often contain sharp reasoning about why you shouldn't believe the book.