
A note on reading big, difficult books - MaysonL
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/12/a-note-on-reading-big-difficult-books.html
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crazygringo
Here's the thing: most books, for most people, don't _need_ to be absorbed or
understood in their entirety.

If you're a professional in your field and ought to be expected to be able to
write a similar book? Then sure, you should understand it 100%. But this is a
very rare circumstance for most people.

For most books, the reality is that you only need to know the Big Idea and its
main justifications. Or that, depending on your needs, there are a few
additional details that might come in handy. But that reading the whole book
a) really ensures you'll remember the big idea and its main justifications, in
a way that a one-page summary you might totally forget later, and b) lets you
skim for specific details that might be especially relevant to you personally.

You shouldn't generally feel guilty that you don't remember enough from a
book. You're not _supposed_ to. (Again, unless you have a very specific and
necessary professional reason to.)

Fully understanding a book might take 100 hours. In that time, you could read
10 other books in 10 hours each and get the main gist of each. Which one do
you think is going to be more productive for your life?

~~~
riversflow
>Which one do you think is going to be more productive for your life?

I think it's better to carefully select which books you read, and really get
everything that you can out of them. For example, you could read 10 self help
books or you could read The Republic and really understand it. And you could
probably quickly read 100 self help books and books on leadership in the time
it would take you to go through the relevant
Plato->Aristotle->Kant->Schopenhauer->Nietzsche books that build on each
other. I think you'd be far better off reading the philosophy than the self
help books, but that's just me. Those self help books are a garbage use of
language relative to works held up as being pillars of modern thought, there
is enough extremely high quality literature from human history and text books
from the modern era to keep me busy reading carefully and learning a lot for
the rest of my life if its all I did, I'm fairly certain.

>You shouldn't generally feel guilty that you don't remember enough from a
book. You're not supposed to.

Completely disagree, this might hurt some feelings, but if you can't remember
much from a book you read, you wasted your time reading it if you weren't
reading it just for pleasure. Either the book wasn't worth reading in the
first place or you didn't pay close enough attention.

~~~
crazygringo
I'm sorry, but I just can't disagree enough.

As someone who has read not just The Republic, but much of philosophy from
Aristotle through Rawls and beyond... it's been tremendously useful to me
academically and utterly fascinating, but of relatively little value in my
personal life (with the sole exception of Aristotle). I mean, the Republic is
valuable principally as a historical work, not because any idea within it
whatsoever is going to change your life. Its ideas are... quirky, to say the
least. Also, most philosophy classics are completely inaccessible to the
average reader, and make little sense on their own -- only making sense in a
much wider context that you really need to dedicate extensive study to.

In contrast, there are "self-help" books that can fundamentally alter the way
you look at and lead your life at a personal level -- your actual day-to-day
behavior and the relationships you have with people. Just like any genre,
there are plenty of garbage ones, but plenty of invaluable ones as well,
written by psychiatrists (e.g. "Too Perfect" or "Present Perfect") and artists
(e.g. "The Artist's Way") and literary/philosophy types (e.g. anything by
Alain de Botton).

Your thinking seems very black-and-white -- in that philosophy classics are
overwhelmingly better than self-help for people today, or that a book must
either be worth intense study or else is worthless. In reality, most books are
somewhere in between, kind of like a bell curve.

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__ka
Reading big difficult books is offered as a way to teach reasoning from first
principles. On how to go about it:

"We have our recommended ten-stage process for reading such big books:

1\. Figure out beforehand what the author is trying to accomplish in the book.

2\. Orient yourself by becoming the kind of reader the book is directed at—the
kind of person with whom the arguments would resonate.

3\. Read through the book actively, taking notes.

4\. “Steelman” the argument, reworking it so that you find it as convincing
and clear as you can possibly make it.

5\. Find someone else—usually a roommate—and bore them to death by making them
listen to you set out your “steelmanned” version of the argument.

6\. Go back over the book again, giving it a sympathetic but not credulous
reading

7\. Then you will be in a good position to figure out what the weak points of
this strongest-possible argument version might be.

8\. Test the major assertions and interpretations against reality: do they
actually make sense of and in the context of the world as it truly is?

9\. Decide what you think of the whole.

10\. Then comes the task of cementing your interpretation, your reading, into
your mind so that it becomes part of your intellectual panoply for the
future."

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daly
My research involves reading "big, difficult books" all the time. It usually
takes me 5 books on the same subject to get a firm grip on the subject.

The first book gives me the important words.

The second book gives me the paragraphs that show how the words are used.

The third book strings together the ideas.

The fourth book shows how the ideas are used.

The fifth book makes sense and I get a grip on the subject.

Breaking into a new area where you don't even understand the words, such as in
biology, is a very time consuming task.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
Considering it seems like you're just building up your understanding one step
at a time, wouldn't you also be able to read the same book 5 times?

~~~
DelightOne
Perspectives make the picture. None is complete, and all have assumptions.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
But that's not how the process was described. The first book is apparently
only for vocabulary, the second for diction (not sure about a better term for
this), third for basic concepts, fourth for application, and then finally a
holistic understanding of the subject. If the case was looking at various
ideas, I'd agree with you, but if the first book only "gives me the important
words" and the second "gives me the paragraphs that show how the words are
used" then it's not really giving you different perspectives as you're still
very much in the "understanding what the book is talking about" phase.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I think this list could be written as "after finishing book one, I have the
important words; after finishing book two, I have a grasp on how these words
are used", etc.

I.e. the process is additive, each book lets you tease out another layer of
understanding, and it's best if these are different books, because then there
are more things for your brain to diff, making the understanding process
faster.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
Totally fair, but given that you only pulled out the basics the first time
through the book, why not go through it again to see what the book has to say
about those basics? You clearly didn't get everything out of the first book on
the first run through.

~~~
jacobolus
Sure, after you have skimmed 2 or 3 other books, go back and read the first
one more carefully again.

* * *

I strongly endorse this method. Doesn‘t have to be books either. Want to learn
about some cutting edge research topic in a highly technical field, but don’t
want to first go through 3 years of grad-student-level coursework?

Jump right in, but don’t start with a textbook or a survey paper. Start by
skimming 10 or 20 (or more) arbitrary papers about related topics. Don’t worry
that many terms seem like nonsense. Try to get the gist (to the extent
possible) of each paper quickly. Let the methods and terminology wash over
you. After that go back and read the survey paper, which should hopefully
start to make sense after prior exposure to some of its ideas. Then if there
are parts of that which still don’t make sense, go find the relevant
textbook(s).

It’s not worth reading research papers in an unfamiliar community too
carefully right off the bat; most of the papers are garbage and without some
exposure/context it’s sometimes hard to tell which ones. Sweating all of the
details before you have the right high level impression is going to confuse
you and waste your time.

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lcall
Skimming is helpful, especially I think if in a structured way: reading the
beginning and the end first, then deciding if more is worth it, and if so,
reading the first sentence (or so, maybe last) of each paragraph, and then
deciding if more is needed.

The optimal approach might vary sometimes, but I have found this helpful even
for some fiction (to relax, but get thru boring parts faster), and to get
through more material generally, because things are of very unequal worth.

Also news articles tend to put the most important things at the beginning so
there is less reason to read the end, or anything once you get far enough to
answer your purpose.

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msie
6-9 hours per book seems impressive to me.

~~~
jkingsbery
That was my reaction too. Maybe this is an argument in favor or reading
slower?

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commandlinefan
I thought when I was younger I couldn't read big, difficult books and (since
it never occurred to me that there might be people smarter than me) I
concluded that nobody could read big, difficult books. It was quite an
epiphany when I actually really forced myself to get through one - and once I
had pushed past that first barrier, it's gotten easier and easier to read
really meaningful books.

~~~
hogFeast
Most of these books are very poorly written. Smith's Wealth of Nations, as an
example, is mostly very well-written and abysmally bad through the minority
(Marx/Keynes probably the opposite). And meaning isn't really constant either,
you read something and then come back to parts of it.

~~~
chasedehan
Keynes is known as being one of the best Economist writers of all time.

~~~
hogFeast
First, no he isn't. Second, the book we are talking about (again) is a
textbook (this view isn't remotely controversial btw -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_Theory_of_Employme...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_Theory_of_Employment,_Interest_and_Money#Observations_on_its_readability)).
Economic Consequences of Peace is very good, a lot of his stuff aimed at the
general public (Persuasion/How to Pay for the War) is good...General Theory is
not.

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tunesmith
He certainly makes Wealth Of Nations sound compelling. I haven't read it
before and want to see how it's structured as an actual argument with premises
leading towards conclusions.

~~~
arafa
As suggested, it's an excellent but difficult read. But like many such books
(say The Beginning of Infinity), they reverberate in my mind for years
afterwards, with interesting inferences and callbacks.

That said, you might skip the digression on silver (ugh).

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hogFeast
This isn't really how most people should read books. You aren't reading a book
to learn arguments like a parrot. The meaning of all the books he mentions has
changed over time, and you won't have the same understanding the second time
you read it (i.e. years after, re-reading it straight after is pointless...it
is robotic).

Also, just generally I think the structure of the course is bad. Reading three
books cover-to-cover is basically pointless (Keynes esp. so as it was a
textbook, I think he would turn in his grave if he thought people were being
subjected to this, both Marx/Smith are very dry in areas too). It would be far
better to look at the key ideas across more periods and get students to engage
directly with those ideas...which is why similar courses in philosophy,
theology, etc. do this.

~~~
jkingsbery
I agree, and I don't think I appreciated this point enough when I was in
school. In high school or college, I would do literally what is said here -
get assigned a book, and read the book. In my professional reading, or also
hobby reading as an adult, I would never approach learning a topic that way.
As an adult, I supplement my reading of a text with secondary sources about
the text (things people have written about the text, wikipedia articles about
the text or things in it, etc.).

To take an example of an edition that does this really well: the "Landmark"
series for Thucydides [1] and Herodotus [2] both qualify as "big, difficult"
books, but the book comes with additional secondary sources that aid in the
reading to orient the newbie in how to approach the text.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Landmark-Thucydides-Comprehensive-
Gui...](https://www.amazon.com/Landmark-Thucydides-Comprehensive-Guide-
Peloponnesian/dp/0684827905) [2] [https://www.amazon.com/Landmark-Herodotus-
Histories-Robert-S...](https://www.amazon.com/Landmark-Herodotus-Histories-
Robert-Strassler/dp/1400031141)

~~~
hogFeast
Yep, tbh it is kind of wasteful to just go into Thucydides...like you read it,
and 95% of it will go over your head (that is a particularly good choice of
example because it is at the nexus of sp many important subjects...if you just
come in without anything...it is just a normal book).

And, imo, dipping between books is far more effective. Even at university, you
are given a few sources and you move between them but it isn't natural. Going
between sources naturally at your own pace and based on your own
interest/understanding will build far more actual knowledge than trying to
shortcut your way there (and yes, Wiki is great for that). It is a shame that
doesn't fit into some kind of formal education system...definitely in a
subject like history, the end result would be far better work from academics.

~~~
nubbins
Ouch, that really hit home about Thucydides. I was going through the Classics
at one point, and did get a lot out of Herodotus and some of the philosophers,
but Peloponnesian War just seemed like a list of islands they sailed to, and
fought at. I did get a general sense that diplomacy and debate hasn't changed
much in 2500 years though.

~~~
yesenadam
Hehe I had to stop reading Thucydides because my flatmates were fighting each
other at the time, and the book was way too reminiscent of what was happening
at home.

~~~
hogFeast
One of the funniest things I have heard said about Thucydides.

Were you just like: "Bro, if the Delian League could see you two now?" _laughs
quietly to self and walks out the room shaking head_

~~~
yesenadam
There was me and 4 or 5 others renting a huge, cheap Sydney house. My
girlfriend and her best friend (early 20s, involved in uni politics) were
fighting, and there was a couple in their 40s that had split up, he (a
playwright) wanted her out immediately, and she was being hilariously cruel. I
came back from visiting my parents to find everyone fighting with each other.
I'd just gotten through Herodotus, with great pleasure, but the Melian
Dialogue was too much, too in-my-face, sickening.

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smallcharleston
Realizing you don’t understand the point comes from understanding the point
more than you did before you read the book.

