What has worked really well for me has been to follow Peter Bregman's reading technique, which he got from history professor Michael Jimenez (story and full article here: https://hbr.org/2016/02/how-to-read-a-book-a-week):
1. Check out the author’s bio online to get a sense of the person’s bias and perspective.
2. Read the title, subtitle, front flap, table of contents. Figure out the big-picture argument of the book, and how that argument is laid out.
3. Read the introduction and conclusion word for word to figure out where the author starts from and where he eventually gets to.
4. Read/skim each chapter: Read the title, the first few paragraphs or the first few pages of the chapter to figure out how the author is using the chapter and where it fits into the argument of the whole book. Then skim through headings and subheadings to get an idea of the flow. Read the first sentence and last sentence of each paragraph. Once you get an argument, feel free to move on to the next argument, skipping over the many repeated case studies or examples.
5. End with the table of contents again, looking through, and summarising each.
I've found that this has worked wonders for my reading. A year or so later, I refined this technique further, as I found that it didn't work for all books (it works for 'single-idea' books, which I call 'branch books'; it doesn't work as well for 'map of ideas' books, which I call 'tree books'.) For example, The Long Tail is the an example of a branch book, and Thinking: Fast and Slow is an example of a tree book.
I'm trying to just not read "single-idea" books at all any more, especially of the "take a 30 minute TEDx talk and turn it into 352 pages" variety. If a book isn't worth reading cover-to-cover, it's not worth reading at all.
After suffering through most of "Grit" I just couldn't take it any more and vowed not to read a book like that again. It was one of a few books I've read that's just taking an existing idea (in this case, trait conscientiousness), re-branding it as something else (grit), and then page after page of hammering the same point + anecdotes.
I am glad other people get that feeling too. A lot of pop-sci books are not terribly bad but could be cut down to 1/4 of their length. Another example for this is "Deep work" by Cal Newport. Great idea, something to actively think about. But not necessary to be spread out across 300 pages...
Wow. Yes. I have seen this book recommended endlessly online, but I found it near unreadable when I finally picked it up.
It reads like a student paper trying to meet a word count. Constant detours, references, and needless, lengthy quoting (says Prof xyz, in his paper [paper] of June 8th....) to pad out a blog post into a book.
I did find its aimlessness useful for falling asleep, though.
I felt like The Information was published when the author got tired of revising halfway through. It started very well but the quality seemed to slide as it progressed. It certainly wasn't the low quality meandering pop-sci book you'll find so often, but I found it lacking in different ways. You might also like Dark Hero of the Information Age
That's a book I've approached conversationally -- asking it questions, essentially. And been somewhat frustrated by promising hints of deeper meanings not revealed.
I'm reading "Deep Work" currently, and I agree with your sentiment. I find myself ironically losing focus and thinking about how I can get the meat of this book from a blog post a tenth of the size. The case-studies he presents are interesting though, so I keep reading.
A better question is 'did this book have to be written?' and with most of what you see in the bookshop window the answer is 'no'.
If the answer is 'yes' then I can tolerate the single idea taking up a whole book.
If the author then goes on to write a second, third, fourth book then they have probably crossed over from writing books that needed to be written to just regurgitating the same idea, based on the fame of the first book.
Publishing is an industry and they know how to do marketing.
Opening a book at a random places and reading a couple paragraphs was easy in physical bookstores but now so difficult online. In particular, Amazon insists on showing only the very beginning of a book (preface, table of contents, intro) and the end of a book (the index). You can no longer browse random pages out of the middle of the book.
> 1. Check out the author’s bio online to get a sense of the person’s bias and perspective.
> 2. Read the title, subtitle, front flap, table of contents. Figure out the big-picture argument of the book, and how that argument is laid out.
> 3. Read the introduction and conclusion word for word to figure out where the author starts from and where he eventually gets to.
> 4. Read/skim each chapter: Read the title, the first few paragraphs or the first few pages of the chapter to figure out how the author is using the chapter and where it fits into the argument of the whole book. Then skim through headings and subheadings to get an idea of the flow. Read the first sentence and last sentence of each paragraph. Once you get an argument, feel free to move on to the next argument, skipping over the many repeated case studies or examples.
> 5. End with the table of contents again, looking through, and summarising each.
I really appreciated the ideas of that book but felt it would have been better delivered at a quarter of the length. Much of the volume was spent inventing or explaining classifications and definitions which seemed wholly unnecessary.
To clarify, I didn't think the unnecessary parts were obvious, I thought they were manufactured and arbitrary... inventing classifications for books and discussing them at length in a way that didn't serve any purpose.
This applies, generally, to nonfiction works (and I apply a similar strategy, often focusing heavily on the index and endnotes, or their lack (a very bad sign)).
At the end do you still read the book straight through? Even so, it seems equal in effort to just read the book. Though to be fair I haven't tried your method, I just feel skeptical.
I routinely use a similar method, and the idea is not to reduce the amount of work, but rather to increase the degree of comprehension.
Roughly 30% of the text in your average book occludes understanding if you read through it linearly. This is a technique for getting at the essential thesis, which can then be supplemented with a thorough, cover-to-cover re-reading.
(I've written a longer post about the categories here: https://commoncog.com/blog/the-3-kinds-of-non-fiction-book/)
Edited for formatting