“As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power.”
- Arthur Schopenhauer (1851)
But I wanted to make an additional point myself, which is: the key part of reading for information is not consumption, but rather memory. It doesn't matter how many books you read if you only remember a small percentage of each one. Like any educated person, I've read thousands of books in my lifetime. And yet I could probably only name the details of a few dozen. This strikes me as horribly inefficient.
As such, I've been trying to incorporate Spaced Repetition (with Anki) into the reading process itself. My initial idea is to do two things:
- add specific lines and information into Anki. E.g. quotes, statistics, and so on.
- write a brief one-paragraph summary of each chapter or, in shorter books, each page. Then add this summary to Anki.
So far, I've been able to recall far more information about the books I've read, even if it takes 5-10x times longer to read them. Overall, I'd consider that an effective sacrifice.
Just because you can only remember specific parts of a few books, doesn't mean the information from those books hasn't been incorporated into your mental model of the world.
If it really takes 5-10x as long, it might be more efficient to reread books you decide are worth remembering. Reading the whole book 5 times (with months in between, of course) seems like it would be more effective at helping you remember the book itself, rather than your summaries and statistics from a single reading. You might not remember all of your takeaways from your first reading with this method, but you should be able to make new observations and connections each time you reread it, which you have a 0% chance of remembering with your current method.
I think a thousands of books are only read by a very slim percentage of educated people over their lifetimes. It would mean about a book a week on average for several decades.
"Hundreds" sounds more realistic, unless you have a very strict definition for "educated person".
- Arthur Schopenhauer (1851)
But I wanted to make an additional point myself, which is: the key part of reading for information is not consumption, but rather memory. It doesn't matter how many books you read if you only remember a small percentage of each one. Like any educated person, I've read thousands of books in my lifetime. And yet I could probably only name the details of a few dozen. This strikes me as horribly inefficient.
As such, I've been trying to incorporate Spaced Repetition (with Anki) into the reading process itself. My initial idea is to do two things:
- add specific lines and information into Anki. E.g. quotes, statistics, and so on.
- write a brief one-paragraph summary of each chapter or, in shorter books, each page. Then add this summary to Anki.
So far, I've been able to recall far more information about the books I've read, even if it takes 5-10x times longer to read them. Overall, I'd consider that an effective sacrifice.