How to read your books better
The answer is not "more."
You don’t need to read more books.
You need to read your books better.
Most thinkers get this wrong about information usually. They think the secret to become smarter or well-read is through reading more, more, more.
They don’t realize they don’t need anymore information.
You consume more information in a single year through your phone than most people did in their entire lives before the digital revolution.
This presents a very profound idea:
More information does not make you smarter, but how you think about information does.
You don’t read 300 pages of a book for the sake of lifelessly scanning your eyes across 300 pages. Most people don’t think about what they read (or consume full stop) and would rather rack up a 52-book yearly total as an intellectual status metric.
Average thinkers do that out of vanity, and this is how most people read. Every time you read a book passively, you are strengthening passive thinking patterns that make deep thinking harder for your mind.
If you want to be a profound reader, you must read a book for the sake of thinking about said book.
This newsletter is for a very select few.
Those who want to genuinely think about what they read.
Those who want to synthesize more than they consume.
Those who want to become profound thinkers.
This guide can apply to you when reading any form of written information, but hey, who doesn’t love a physical book? I’m more of a Kindle man myself personally.
But physical books look fucking great on a bookshelf.
Let’s start thinking friends!
What to do before you read
You focus on reading more books because you think that’s what makes all the difference, when in fact it has always came down to how well you think about what you read.
A pre-reading process is an absolute must if you want to improve how much information you retain.
Your brain is a forgetting machine. It is unbelievably effective at discarding information which does not relate to (1) your survival and (2) your current knowledge.
Another way of putting it, your mind forgets information when it doesn’t seem to have a purpose - it doesn’t connect to anything and therefore has no place.
Thankfully, you don’t have to worry about a tiger attacking you from a bush walking home from work at 10:02pm.
But this means that you need to prime your mind before you start learning.
You do this by skimming and creating anchor points that you can start making connections to immediately.
It’s like building a concrete foundation before you start constructing a house. Even if the house looks rough at first, the foundation is always there to keep building upon. Your house will never be stable without a foundation to work with no matter how hard you try to while building it.
If you’ve ever read a single page from a book and forgotten it instantly, it’s because you’re not integrating your learning. You’re not thinking about the big picture - you’re not making any connections.
To do this properly, you need to become familiar with what you’re about to read before you read it.
This is so you can lay down some firm ground posts, for your brain to start thinking and making new connections easily.
This will prevent you from feeling lost and overwhelmed before you reach page 5.
You will always have a big picture to think within, even if it’s an incomplete picture right now. It will become clearer as you read and comprehend more in time.
Here is a simple pre-reading process:
Skimming - Smartly skim through the book in its entirety. Give it 1-2 hours tops. Read the introduction and conclusions if present. Read chapter names. If it’s a non-fiction book, read headings and subheadings. Quickly skim over the first sentence of every paragraph or so. Skim through the odd paragraph looking for words that stand out based on what interests you initially. Look for words in bold or italics. Read some sections that interest you, not because you need to know them.
Contextual Research - Read encyclopedias about the author for context behind why they wrote what they wrote. Read about core concepts and ideas. Read about the author’s background.
The goal of reading is to think about unknown information, problems, and questions, you have voluntarily exposed yourself to out of curiosity.
And you want to synthesize what you read as quickly as humanely possible.
Because your mind will retain information within your long-term memory much better if the information can be connected to something else.
Something important.
An idea you like. A past experience you’ve had. Another book you’ve read. A contrary philosophy or argument.
This is why you need to engage in a pre-reading process.
You are laying a rough foundation you can easily start building new knowledge upon.
If you’re like me reading The Gulag Archipelago at the minute (currently 200 pages in), understanding that the first part of the book is specifically broken down amongst the whole of the book in dealing with the Russian prison system specifically, this might set you up for noticing some details as to what was involved in getting yourself thrown into said system.
The first few chapters deal with this precisely:
arrest → the waves of arrests → interrogation and the torture methods → your first cell.
Me personally, I like to skim through a whole chapter just before I read it. I do skim through a whole book initially, but I always skim, read, and think on a chapter-by-chapter basis. I look for headings, read the first and last pages, read the first line of most paragraphs throughout. This primes my mind and makes creating new connections and integrating my reading a lot easier.
This really helps a lot. Try it.
Once you have laid down your initial foundation, now it’s time to start reading.