
Surgical Reading: How to Read 12 Books at Once - yarapavan
https://superorganizers.substack.com/p/surgical-reading-how-to-read-12-books
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artistsvoid
I read 4 or 5 books at a time usually. There is no problem if they are in 2 to
3 different languages, and span across multiple genres (historical, biography,
non-fiction, fiction), he already lost me at "think about the title, I know it
sounds mundane", yep, cause titles are always what the author comes up with,
not what the publisher wants...

The only thing I can tell you from experience: Have the self confidence to
drop a book, read what interests you, not what is on some "list of books" you
have to work through. And take your time reading. I learned it the hard way,
but I'd rather drop 10 books, find one extremely insightful, and read it
slowly and carefully and twice if I have to than speed read 20 books and
remember nothing.

I am extremely doubtful about "hacks" like this ; glad if it works for him, my
experience is nothing of the sorts will ever work for me.

~~~
yagami1139
I think even the publishers suggest a title thats best suited for the content
too, and the author still gets the final say. I too am skeptical when it comes
to so-called “hacks” in general but I’m happy to try this one out.

~~~
artistsvoid
I am not yet fortunate enough of having been published, but I think the number
of authors in any position to "demand a title" is extremely limited, they are
glad about being published at all. If a publisher says "I think this title is
more marketable", well, ... but it's of course not the main point I was trying
to make. If you find a method that works, great, I think most "methods" are
highly individual, if not flawed, and in the end, reading is reading, and
that's it.

My opinion about that is deeply influenced by a professor I used to have. Once
he spent one lecture just reading a brilliant essay by a British judge. He did
not read it, he performed it, slowly, carefully, and it was the best lecture I
ever had. And his advice was: "read slowly, or you might as well not read at
all, forget the 'hacks', the speed-reading techniques, reading is enjoyment,
if you have the right material, be thankful for every second, savor it", and
if only I could have taken his advice more seriously at the time. I do now
though.

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fouc
When I was in my teens I used to go to the library and pick up 20-30 books on
the same subject and basically sort them into various piles of difficulty, and
then start reading and move to the next book if I hit a blocker, and possibly
come back to the same book with renewed insight.

Every author explains things differently and explains key concepts in
different orders, so it's a no-brainer to go through multiple books on the
same subject at the same time.

But IMO you still do need to dedicate yourself to linear reading the truly
good books.

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slgeorge
Why would you do this?

If you did an Arts degree (like I did in the UK) you probably recognise this
technique. I will admit it was some time back - my degree was all about
reading from multiple sources. The goal was to have multiple perspectives on
events (in my case history) which are inherently subjective. In reality, there
was never enough time - so you "filleted" the core of each argument, grabbed
some quotes and dug out some tiny element to "prove" you'd read it. Running
10-15 books - hah - I was researching multiple areas - 15 a week maybe?

And, that's how my degree was made - I'm sure lots of people have similar
experiences and skills. I totally accept that this form of reading is
possible.

But, beyond "professional learning" it's terrible. It's unenjoyable, develops
poor understanding, limits comprehension of nuance and destroys enjoying the
flow of the argument. Unless you have to do it, I can't see why you'd put
yourself through it. Ultimately reading for learning is not about volume, it's
about considered thought.

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lemonberry
Good article.

He mentions the book "How to Read a Book". I've read Mortimer Adler's version
several times. It really changed how I read and learn from books. It's well
worth the investment. I haven't read the Mortimer & Van Doren version.

I've found that doing the inspectional reading really helps. I've described it
to friends as "giving me something to hang my hat on" while reading. Having
the high level overview acts as a conceptual glue while reading a book through
for the first time.

I think it was Naval Ravikant on an episode of Tim Ferriss' podcast that
described reading as the "meta skill". If you can read you can learn just
about anything.

Back to "How to Read a Book": Adler makes a distinction between able to read,
e.g., "See Jack run", and learning from reading. I believe he describes 4
levels. The first, the ability to read, leading to the last, reading from
multiple sources to learn. It's unfortunate that our ( U.S. ) educational
system doesn't emphasize this much, or at all.

~~~
cryoshon
"How to Read a Book" is one book that I think every school and university
should teach from cover to cover.

it completely changes your approach to learning to be significantly more
rigorous, and i can't speak highly enough about it. and of course, it's not
just good for reading from books, but any kind of reading you want.

~~~
ciarannolan
What are some of the key points that you took from it?

~~~
alextheparrot
I'm going to mirror the original commenter's recommendation, but also provide
a bit more information.

The book, effectively, says "There are different levels of reading, which are
skills, and those skills can be honed or improved. In addition, those skills
may need to be applied differently to different types of books. The "most
advanced" type of reading when, given multiple books with some related
elements, you can form a coherent idea of those concepts based on the books
you've read.

Here are a few high-level tips, just in terms of reading mechanics at a basic
level that I use (If I recall inspired by the book in reference, I've pulled
out my copy to see some of my marked notes as well):

(1) Read the first and last sentences of a paragraph first. At that point,
decide whether to skip or read the entire paragraph.

(2) Try to read without subvocalizing the words in your head. Then, once the
words aren't polluting your head, try to digest or consider the ideas as you
go. I find having a pen handy helps with this.

(3) A "basic" reading has four questions to answer:What is the book about as a
whole, what is being said and how, how true is the book, what is the
significance of this information. These questions are the foundation to being
able to talk about the book.

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stakkur
Revised title: 'How to skim a nonfiction book'.

I like useful 'hacks', but...there is so much more to reading than speed and
efficiency. Reading is not a quantitative game of accretion. And the author
gets a lot wrong about how and why books are organized the way they are.

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surfsvammel
I’ve read tons of ideas about how to extract “nuggets of information”, and
reading more effectively, etc. Blinkist, for example, creates great and short
summaries of books. That’s all good and fine. But it does not work for me. I
need to read through a book. I need it to take time. I don’t want the nuggets,
I need it all. I need all of it to help me let the points sink in. I might
remember a book years later, but I cannot recall a Blinkist summary after even
two weeks.

I do agree with the “reading of multiple books in parallel” part though. It’s
a natural way of reading, when curiosity is the driver.

But what’s the rush? It’s not a competition (I think). Let’s just read the
books like the author intended them to be read (which, for non-fiction often
is suggested in the preface or similar).

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SamBorick
My objection to this is that I'm really bad at anticipating where interesting
or useful information will come from. Many times I've been watching or reading
something and find a offhand that is really useful to some part of my life.

If I only read the stuff I suspect of being useful before I start, there's
less of a chance to be surprised by useful information.

Is that efficient? Bot really. It's enjoyable though.

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alextheparrot
Commoditization of this form of reading is happening as well, the idea usually
being something linked to reducing a book to 20 minutes of reading [0].

To me, this shows what little quantity of value these books actually have.
That doesn't mean that the small number of useful ideas aren't of quality,
just that they would have been better formatted as essays. Tragic that we
can't find a way to align value with form.

[0] [https://www.blinkist.com](https://www.blinkist.com)

~~~
james_s_tayler
Blinkist honestly just never really helped me. I can't say I feel like
anything really stuck.

The one way I thought about using it that would probably actually work
reasonably well but I was too ADHD to stick with without structural support to
keep me on task, would be listening to every single book in an entire category
(there can be like 30 odd) and triangulating the core of the subject based off
that. Taking copious notes on what shows up in multiple books etc.

That idea is basically the 'how to read a book' blinkist version. Though it
kind of defeats the purpose of the nice quick summary I still like the idea.
Maybe I should try it now that I could probably pull it off.

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noema
Any non-reference book which can be "read" in this manner probably isn't worth
engaging with anyways. This reminds me of that "Lamborghini in my garage" guy
who claimed to be able to read a book in five minutes, and whose entire
library was self-help / pop-psych / finance-bro fluff with no intellectual
substance. Of course such material can be digested quickly.

------
hymnsfm
Every year I try to read 100 books, and up to a dozen in tandem. I've
succeeded the past few years, but this year I'm a bit doubtful as I've taken
on "Why You Like It: The Science and Culture of Musical Taste", a 720 page
behemoth.

My unsolicited advice for how to read 100 books a year, while still working
full-time and fulfilling other important life-roles? Don't watch
YouTube/TV/movies and minimize time spent reading articles. Have Alexa read
kindle e-books to you when you're on the go. And if you aren't enjoying a
book, drop it and find something you can tear through.

In case you're interested, here's my currently-reading list on Goodreads:
[https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2589152-jason-
comely?s...](https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2589152-jason-
comely?shelf=currently-reading)

Back to reading books!

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alltakendamned
This is an interesting approach and I can see the benefits for non-fiction
books, as many of them have a certain degree of "fluff" anyway you want to
skip quickly.

It does seem a technique that is more suited to physical books though, I don't
see myself easily skipping to and back on an e-reader, but maybe I'm doing it
wrong.

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kaitai
If you're a person who, while reading, is constantly arguing with the author
and digging into their and your point of view, you may find this article and
method of reading shallow. The method of "surgical reading" is most suited
when you really don't care about the point of view of the author, don't want
to have a dialogue or understand their deeper philosophy or context; you just,
as he mentions, want to extract the 'knowledge', whatever that may be.

I gotta say, this method seems less relevant if you want to allow yourself to
be changed by dialogue with an author. Reading a book or even essay by bell
hooks in this way, for instance, seems like a tragic waste of time. You don't
read bell hooks to 'extract a knowledge nugget', you read bell hooks to look
in a mirror and see your own experiences differently.

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say_it_as_it_is
Is this easier than reading one book at a time, because that's the rate that I
find difficult?

~~~
fouc
It is hugely effective to have multiple physical books around you on the same
subject at different levels of detail and different explanation approaches.

It makes it very easy to switch books in midstream if you get stuck, gain more
understanding from another book, and then come back to the original book with
renewed insight.

~~~
cptnapalm
Getting stuck... that's a killer. Now, if I've decided to learn something, I
get at least 2 books on the same topic. If one author's explanation doesn't
click for me, it's good to have that second book for a different explanation.

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op03
This is how babies/kids learn init?

As in they jump around collecting nuggets and surprising people with what they
have collected.

The advantage kids have is their brains are different (see Allison Gopnik +
Explore vs Exploit Dilemma) and they are surrounded (hopefully) by people
paying attention to what they are learning, correcting them when they get
lost, nudging them in the right direction, making sure they are housed,fed and
watered etc.

Same thing works out well with Adults when you place them in the safe caring
confines of a research lab.

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sevensor
Well done emphasizing the value of the preface!

It always amazes me how little attention the preface gets from readers. It's
the one place where the author gets to explain why the book exists, and why
you should care. If you really want to understand what you could get from a
book, pay close attention to the preface. And then maybe don't read the rest
of it at all! You may learn from the preface that this is not the book for
you, and that could save you a tremendous amount of time.

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tmaly
A lot of this technique seems to overlap with the classic book How to Read a
Book by Adler & Doren.

The only part that differs is they approach with trying to get a big picture
rather than focusing on the only the parts you need.

I tend to agree with the Surgical Reading on focusing on the parts you need.
Time is at such a premium that just in time learning is a great strategy.

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groby_b
I'd add "read better books" \- if you need to surgically excise info, it's not
a good book in the first place.

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blackbear_
This technique has potential. I kickstarted my interest in machine learning by
going to the university library, picking a book with an interesting title and
reading a random section for about half an hour, before fleeing to classes. I
had a quite good overview by the end of the semester.

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forgotmypw17
I come across many interesting books, and I read few of them cover to cover.
But rarely has there been a book which didn't add something meaningful and
useful to my life from just reading one random page of it.

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booleandilemma
12 books at once seems like more unnecessary hyper-optimization to me.

It's like the people that watch YouTube videos at 2x speed to gain more time
for...what, exactly? Reading 12 books at once?

Our society needs to dial it back a bit.

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redisman
Why not save yourself all the trouble and read a in-depth review or Wikipedia
summary/Cliffnotes of the book? Doesn't seem like this technique goes all that
much deeper.

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ajaalto
This is somewhat similar to how scientific articles are typically read.

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durmonski
Love the post and the process

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RickJWagner
Without trying to start a flame war, the author is not accurate in what is in
(or not in) the Bible.

~~~
jdshaffer
Hmm... accurate point. There are several items in his "not in the Bible" list
that are most definitely mentioned, several times!

~~~
bryanrasmussen
I think they're looking for the exact term, so in that way it's not in the
bible even if what the exact term refers to actually is.

~~~
quietbritishjim
As I said in my other comment, it's clear from the context that by "parts of
the Bible" they mean named contiguous sections, and by "not parts of the
Bible" they mean topics that are raised intermittently thoughout. So there's
no homosexuality "part of the Bible" just in the sense that there's no Book of
Homosexuality.

It wouldn't make sense to demand an exact term when you're looking at
something that was originally written in a different language (like the Bible,
which was mostly written in Ancient Hebrew and Ancient Greek) because whether
or not that word is exactly matched depends on how it's translated rather than
something inherent in the original work.

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romanovtexas
Probably will get downvoted for this, but I think the halo around reading
books is overrated. You can gather ample amount of knowledge just as well via
a series of essays online, podcasts, and sometimes even twitter threads.

Most of the books, for example, introduce a radical new idea and then
elaborate on that needlessly for 400 pages. I found Sapiens to be one such
book.

Even if the idea/premise is insightful, there is often a lot of redundancy in
the pages. We should value brevity more.

Of course, this might not apply to all books. Textbooks/Reference books can
happily coexist with online tutorials/blogs. Even certain nonfiction books
(Thinking Fast and Slow comes to mind) might be best presented in a book
format.

~~~
sfotm
What radical new idea did Sapiens introduce? I ended up not liking it as much
as I thought I would because I expected it to be little more concentrated on
known factors around human evolution, but it ended up providing a lot of
conjecture and best-guesses.

I think some people that see online essays and podcasts as a more efficient
way to consume information might ironically be the most "orthodox" sort of
readers. Most well-written non-fiction books provide a clear index, a table of
contents that makes the process of the book clear, and introductory matter in
each chapter that summarizes things for you. If you want a certain piece of
information, you can go into the book and get out within 5 minutes. You don't
owe every book you pick up a cover-to-cover read.

Highly recommend "How to Read a Book". It calls the author's process of
"surgical reading" "syntopical reading", though they might have slightly
different meanings in reality.

