

Ask HN: Books - how do you read? - tamersalama

I'm having problems finishing up books lately.<p>My info intake is usually online, and to some extent, I feel it's becoming a fast-food diet.<p>On the other hand - I can't finish up books from cover to cover. I become easily bored, distracted, paranoid.<p>Any advice?
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michael_dorfman
If you become easily bored, distracted, and paranoid, then reading is the
least of your problems.

Attention and focus can be trained-- this is what most meditation techniques
consist of.

There are a lot of centers around teaching meditation, that don't require any
membership, fees, or particular sets of beliefs you must subscribe to. See if
there's one near you.

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anatta
If you fall into a positive feedback loop where your mental responses to a
particular goal starts to negatively affect your ability to complete it, step
back for a moment then chop the goal down into chunks.

With technical books, I get those post-it flags and place a green one at the
end of the chapter that I'm reading. In the chapter itself, I place purple
flags at intervals of about 20 pages. Now I peg my attention to the amount of
pages in those small intervals (rather than staring at some huge tome) and it
relieves a huge amount of emotional burden because the goal is more clearly
defined and realistic.

I read one of those chunks a day or ever other day. As I read, I highlight all
the relevant info in the subsections with two different colors (one for
"concepts" and the other for "practical application of the concept").

This method works great for me because going back to read the highlighted area
indulges that "fast food" information intake and solidifies my understanding
of what I'm reading. Doing it every other day also takes a lot of load off of
the mind. A pot of coffee gets filled drop by drop.

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adulau
What kind of books? I discover that I'm usually cherry picking chapters or
section in technical or books where there is no strong interrelationship
between the various elements or the topics. As already pointed previously,
marking or taking notes inside those kind of books is useful to keep a trace
and easy find back what you discovered or learned in a technical book.

There is a good reading about taking notes and especially the approach of
thinking while relying on our current readings : Notebooks of the Mind,
Exploration of Thinking, Vera John-Steiner (ISBN13 978-0195108965).

We are often learning at school to always finish a book even if we don't like
it or we have some difficulties to read it. I tend to agree for the difficult
books where sometime, you have to force yourself to finish it. But sometime,
giving up is not so bad and relaxing your mind with more "easy to read" or
"easy flowing" books is helping us to relax before reading more complex books.
That's why I always keep around 4 or 5 books in my reading queue... and
jumping back to some of them when my mind is more ready.

~~~
justlearning
"We are often learning at school to always finish a book even if we don't like
it or we have some difficulties to read it."

could you elaborate on this?

~~~
adulau
From my experience in EU school, a class is given a book (often fiction) to
read and everyone should have read it for a specific date and everyone got a
test about that book. So we are "forced" to finish the book as the test is
usually including question to be sure that the student actually read the book.
So by doing so, the school indirectly told the student that not finishing a
book is not appropriate. I think (IMHO) this is just an effect of the
evaluation process but not really a good effect to improve reading or thinking
about your own reading process.

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justlearning
i don't have 'solutions' for your "easity bored, distracted, paranoid", but
can point out to interesting comments here :

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=666407>

hope it helps.

It helped me understand that I am not alone in reading books at a sloth's pace
(and feeling guilty about it)

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kirpekar
[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-
googl...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-
making-us-stupid/6868/)

[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1273705...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127370598)

~~~
tamersalama
Thank you

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scorpioxy
I am not sure that its a problem.

See it all depends on why you're reading a specific book, is it to a story
which shouldn't be interrupted or is it a technical book that you just need
one thing from. You see the difference?

Better and faster access to information means we can optimize the time spent
on retrieving information that we need.

I no longer feel guilty about not finishing books(although I try to do that),
because i found out that I do finish them if they're interesting enough but
technical books i just read enough to get what i want and then abandon.

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pavelludiq
Depends on the book. Technical programming books i can never finish, i tend to
skip topics and read them in phases. I don't think thats bad, in fact i tend
to favor books written to be read this way, books that both teach you a
technical topic, but can later be used as a reference.

Whit fiction, i also have trouble, mostly because im not a fiction fan, but if
its good enough i just don't push it, i read the book little by little, and
naturally i would like to find out how it ends.

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csmeder
This is the only thing that has worked for me and it worked fantastically:

1) Hemmingways Hack: <http://www.secondactive.com/2009/08/boost-your-
productivity->

...

2) And the Pomodoro Technique <http://www.pomodorotechnique.com> This has
hemmingsways hack built in. If done right (read the PDF) it is amazing.

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kimfuh
Paranoid?

