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davidscolgan | 6 years ago
I have a subscription and generally pick up a new book I've heard of that interests me right away either with a credit or just buying it.
This allows me to read while walking and riding the bus and doing the dishes and generally turns uninteresting chores into something interesting while also allowing me to read. Something about having someone read to me is way less difficult than reading it myself.
I generally don't worry about explicitly remembering anything unless there's something particularly amazing. I read nonfiction mostly and my theory is that the goal is to generally educate myself so that my worldview is shifted to be more accurate, and instead of asking "what would that book advise me to do?" I can ask, "What would I do?" and what I would do has been influenced by the book.
Good books I just read more than once. It's much faster for me to listen to a book twice than to read it carefully once. And regardless, someone said something like it's better to read the best book 100 times than 100 books 1 time.
My record is 4 times that I read Antifragile by Taleb. A scarce few are 3 times, several twice. As I once heard, keep reading books until the ideas start to repeat themselves.
Maybe I don't remember everything as much as I would if I took copious notes, but I certainly get a lot of books read this way (sometimes one in a few days if it's good enough) and it's in a way that happens without effort. I've been mulling on the idea generally that best practices that I won't actually follow are inferior to slightly less than best practices that I will do.
tony|6 years ago
On audible, I highly recommend lectures from The Teaching Company / Great Courses.
Great narration: https://www.audible.com/pd/Platos-Republic-Audiobook/B01CO38..., https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Art-of-War-Audiobook/B00URXOQ... (familiar voice to you?)
I've also had one of the worst narrations I've ever heard: https://www.amazon.com/Monkey/dp/B0162SWL4G/. I believe it was delisted on audible.com
LeonB|6 years ago