Reading Nonfiction Selectively

[skims article]

Skim more. Got it.

Meta-discussion: There was a comment a while ago along the lines of "I wish we had more sharing of personal anecdotes as anecdotes rather than n=1 justifications for theories." This is my attempt at what this would look like, and I'm curious if people found it interesting or valuable, and if there are specific elements they would want to change.

I haven't tried to polish this extensively, mostly because my drafts folder is full of articles somewhat started or awaiting polish, and I decided to publish instead.

I have the same feeling.

The only caveat I have with skipping pages is that it's a slippery slope. I sometimes feel if I let myself skip the boring parts, I'll gradually start skipping more and more until all I read are the funny anecdotes. This is definitely true of any book I'm reading because I have to (say, for school), less so for books I genuinely enjoy.

Suggestion: when you read a piece of nonfiction, have a goal in mind

Agreed. See also: Chase your reading

You are encountering a problem, which is that there is much more to read than you have time to read it, and the only way truly to know for yourself whether a specific book, or part of a book, is worth reading, is to read it. You can ask people what to read, but their interests do not perfectly match yours. You can read a summary, but summarizers are unreliable. You can sample the text (e.g. jump into the middle and start reading), but this may fail to enlighten you for a variety of reasons.

It's a problem and there are only partial solutions. The problem is reproduced in science. You want to make a great, important discovery. But by hypothesis, you do not already know what there is to discover, for otherwise it would not be a discovery. So what do you do? The typical scientist picks an area of research, and pursues it, hoping to make a great discovery. The vast majority of them, through no fault of their own, pick wrong - as we can expect from the nature of the problem.

I just skim- read this post twice in 60 seconds.

My summary of what you just wrote:

*You often skip massive blocks of text; words in sentances, sentances in paragraphs, paragraphs in chapters and even entire chapters.

*This doesn't seem to impare your learning, because books have masses of redundancy.

*However, it would be handy to be more willing to skip, even though this is psycologically hard - even now you're spending too much time reading!

*This is especially true if the author has a different focus to you, or you already know the stuff.

I would add another reason: Writing Quality.

Some people just have a gift for writing. They make the process enjoyable so I don't want to skim. It's much like how I wouldn't want to fast forward thru a good movie. A good writer could write a book about a subject i have little interest in, lets say sports, and I would want to read it -- word for word.

In the interest of sharing anecdotes... I used to have a similar problem. I had a strong desire to read books in their entirety but found that large portions were a waste of my time or were not relevant to what I was studying. For most of my life if you'd asked me to recommend a book, I wouldn't have been able to do so without a list of caveats ("but I only recommend part 1 and the conclusion" or "this is a great book as long as you ignore x, y and z"). Then I went through a period of intellectual development where I renounced a great many of my earlier beliefs. Since then I've found many authors whose work I want to read in full and, conversely, when I read outside these authors I have an easier time skimming because I know exactly what I'm looking for. To me this suggests that my earlier problems were due to being wrong about big, important things.

I do this very frequently (perhaps too much). I think it's mostly because I usually have a specific goal in mind (learn subject X so I understand Y). If I can't see how a book is going to help me achieve my goal, I will often put it down. Interestingly, this focus makes me more likely to pay attention to prefaces and introductions since those will often tell me whether the book is useful to me.

I want to develop my personal awareness and control over my muscles and posture, and the subgoal is extracting information to aid that goal from this book.

Part of Feldenkrais, as I understand it, is developing your kinesthetic sense so that your innate (reflexive?) physical competence is more able to take effect. Your conscious mind doesn't need to be in charge of the details.

On the other hand, this sort of knowledge might be best gained by doing the exercises rather than by reading the more theoretical sections.