Rational Reading: Thoughts On Prioritizing Books

Note that despite it being a blog post, I continuously update The Best Textbooks on Every Subject in response to commenters leaving qualifying recommendations.

Anything that maximizes the speed of information extraction from the book is obviously a win - whether learning to speed-read / skim or finding summaries[2] or "Cliffs Notes" or Anki cards.

Note that Anki is useful even if you don't have pre-made cards. Probably even more so. I've been working my way through CLRS lately, and I notice that I'm able that extracting all of the important content in a chapter and transforming it into cards takes maybe about 30-60 minutes. Previously I would spend much longer on the same material, and comprehend it much worse.

Admittedly this is my second read through the same material, after my first attempt to pass this course failed. So part of the speed advantage is probably in that I've had exposure to the same content before. But I also worked through a statistics course not too far ago, and even though I wasn't that fast there, I was still definitely quicker than if I'd have tried to read it the old-fashioned way.

I've mentioned it in earlier posts, but I like to emphasize once more the use of audio books; as they allow you to fill a lot of your otherwise-idle time (say, commuting, running, shopping etc.), you can effectively get a lot more 'reading' done.

Obviously, audio books are not very good (unfortunately) for really technical expositions, but one can use them to read a lot of fiction, popular science, history, that kind of thing. I've been doing that for a few years and I got more 'reading' done than I ever thought possible.

Another little 'trick' for reading more is to read PDFs and the like with 'autoscroll' turned on (at least Evince and Acrobat support this). Using autoscroll forces me to really concentrate and also allows we to sit back and 'experience' the book. Again, this does not work well for highly technical books, but quite well for more 'prosaic' material.

I balance non fiction by reading multiple non-fiction books at once and then prioritizing and making time investment judgements based on current needs. I typically am reading 4-7 non-fiction books, where 1-2 are related to the professional development component of my work, 2-3 are related to the research component of my profession, and 1-2 are for personal interest or personal development. I would assume the ability to do this correlates with how comfortably a person is with multi-tasking, which you seem to be. And, of course, I abandon what is not of interest and skim when I am less engaged.

I always keep a subset of these books with me, one in my purse and a couple in my car trunk, and read while waiting in line at the grocery store or other opportune moments. I prefer reading to using the iphone/smart phone when waiting, as I consider myself more productive reading a book and tend to engage in time kill activities on the phone. I also keep 1-2 fiction books going, but limit those to reading at home. 9 books is around my breaking limit for remembering what I read where, but I am sure some people can handle more.

This is an awesome post. Some thoughts:

• You can get basically any even slightly popular book for free on the internet. You can use this to compare books before you decide on one to buy. You can get books either through torrents or (more easily) through file-hosting services. For the latter, you can usually find what you're looking for easily by googling the author's name, book title and 'rapidshare'. This is probably illegal.

• Interest can be a useful heuristic for deciding on books, since it filters out things too far above or below your level.

• Another heuristic: whenever you read anything, keep in mind that, a year from now, you will almost certainly have forgotten almost all of it except what you put into spaced repetition. I find it ridiculous that so many people, a few years after getting out of school, have barely anything to show for it.

• Yet another heuristic. Pick a field you like and use, say math. Realize that you will never know all the math there is to know. So whenever you read a book, ask yourself whether you would really prefer to know this over more math.

• Amazon reviews of books are usually brilliant and show at a glance how well-written and controversial a book is.

• Perhaps reconsider whether you need to read fiction at all. If everybody else thought immersing yourself in imaginary worlds was some strange perversion, would you still do it?

There are two ends to optimize here; you can focus on selecting the best things, or focus on getting rid of the worst things. I used to read way too much news, for example; and after reading something good I'd usually go on to read its comments even if I knew (or would have known if I'd thought about it) that they wouldn't be worth it. Before deciding which of two good books to cut, install a time profiler like RescueTime or ManicTime to make sure you know where your reading time's really going.

How do I decide what to read? Here's one, non-optimized, person's response.

For practical subjects, it's pretty obvious within a short period of nosing around what the standard texts are. I also have access to some very knowledgeable individuals whose book recommendations I'd take unquestioningly. I recently decided what Python book to learn from; it wasn't a particularly tricky process, since the consensus on StackExchange and among my friends happened to agree with my own assessment of which books covered the topics I'd need. In my experience, the question "What's the best book to learn X?" usually has one or two clear right answers, and if there's disagreement, then you haven't defined "X" precisely enough. (Occasionally, my favorite textbook is not the standard one, because I'm biased towards simplicity/ease of learning more than most people, so sometimes I have to account for that.)

For pleasure reading, I've developed a pretty fine ability to be sensitive to what I like and only read what I like. I don't find myself mired in crud I don't enjoy. It may make me a bit lopsided (my non-math bookshelf currently contains mostly science fiction) but as long as it's pleasure reading, it ought to be pleasurable, right?

I've kind of refined my internet reading to be in that intermediate place, "good for me in the long run but not immediately goal-oriented." Politics is out -- gives the illusion of learning but I'll never use it down the road. My Google Reader is mostly blogs on technical subjects now -- learning, compressed sensing, that kinda thing. When I'm too tired to think, and I want the internet to soothe my weary brain, I go for a short story or BoingBoing.

I've never really read life-improvement books. I'm don't take advice readily; part of that is just stubbornness, and part is that I suspect that successful people don't usually know why they succeeded, and so they don't know how to tell you how to reproduce it.

One of the most useful tools I have found to maximize speed of information extraction from books is RSVP technology. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Serial_Visual_Presentation)

Rather than deciding independently how much to read and what to read, you might try to read any given book when reading it seems like the best among all possible activities.

Some of the questions you are asking seem like artifacts of fixing a total amount of time to spend reading, which doesn't really make sense unless the act of reading itself is important to you.

I rate books’ perceived potential from 0 to 10 (I actually just label anything below 7 as bad as I’ll never read those). I use Goodreads/Amazon’s ratings/reviews, the source I used to find the book, its Goodreads summary, and its authors to estimate its relevance to my goals, its quality in achieving its purported aim, and its relative quality in the memesphere it tries to elucidate. I use Goodreads exclusive shelves to label each book’s potential and also shelf it under what it teaches. I then browse my Goodreads’ shelves when I’m out of books. This whole approach doesn’t work very efficiently though, as I have trouble assessing books’ qualities and my own priorities.

For many people overplanning things like which books to read that are usually spontaneous and unplanned is an example of trying to control more aspects of life than is desirable. We need to be free and unfettered in many parts of our lives. There is endless variation possible. For instance if a book is not fun for you, you may persist in reading it all if that fulfills a specific goal for you, or abandon it, or skip to the end etc. depending on the circumstance. Having a list of books to read and having books in front of you you plan to read are both good things, but from that point on anything that happens is fine. Serendipity plays a very positive role in life and trying too hard to organize things that are by nature somewhat disorganized does not enhance the marvelous accidental discoveries of serendipity.

For any reading that doesn't directly impact my areas of expertise, my selection criterion emphasizes prose quality over almost everything else. To a very great extent, if something is well-written, I don't care what it's about. Well written prose is both easier to read and easier to remember.

A not-very-deep strategy is to follow the prizes. I have never been disappointed by a book that won a Pulitzer Prize.

I deplore the use of tricks like Cliffs Notes and Anki Cards. I don't think that these actually increase comprehension and/or productivity, and they are probably unpleasant to use compared to a well-written book.

drethelin it is an easily solvable formula to determine whether you are right. How many books do you have, how often do you lend them and how many do you lend, how long does it take to read the title of each book, how good is your memory of where books are when randomly distributed? Only if you have a very large number of books or a very poor memory, or both, does it make sense to actually alphabetize etc. On the other hand leisure time activities are personal choice, not everything in life needs to be logical!

Cyan, you could make an analogy with cataloging and organizing the books you have on your shelves at home. It might make for interesting cocktail party conversation to say you had done that, but it would be of no practical value to you, just a waste of time, an expression of compulsive tendencies.