Ask HN: How can I read faster? Books are a great way of building onto the knowledge of people but the problem is that there are so many out there. What are some of the ways I can read faster so that I am able to process more information faster. I am talking about non-fiction primarily. |
You won't process the information faster or retain it any better. Instead, learning to put down a book when it's not good rather than forcing yourself to finish it and taking good notes or writing a book review are better approaches (for the goal of processing and retaining information for longer).
There are more books, films, programmes, and games out there than you can ever consume in one lifetime; there's no point forcing yourself to keep going with something you're not enjoying. Moving on to something else doesn't mean that it's bad, or even that you might not come back to it and see it differently in the future.
* Always have 2-3 books going that span multiple topics, matching books to mood. This will increase your consistency.
* Separate data collection from data processing. When reading with book in hand, you're doing data collection - preferably with a highlighter and/or pen for margin notes.
* Read more. On the surface this sounds circular but as you read more you find ideas are repeated across several books which makes them faster to process than new ideas.
* A small speed trick: decide when a book is worth skimming (vs. reading) and learn how to skim accurately by reading the first sentence of the paragraph and last few words of the paragraph. These positions often contain language indicating whether the paragraph will have meaningful content worth actually reading. I use this trick when a book is too long by half or more.
Others have written about how to apply it more specifically to different kinds of writing, which can be structured differently, like in academic papers, vs. news articles, vs. essays, etc.
Though there are times when one reads to relax, or to learn deeply, and then I don't care much about how long it takes. Longer can even be better, sometimes. :)
Edit: I think Mitt Romney said he likes to be reading 2 books at any given time: a serious one and a fun one. Maybe the fun helps us think about the serious things we read & consolidate memories?--but either way that makes sense to me.
- Do not recite the read text using your inner monologue: process it purely visually
- Start two or three words after the beginning of your sentence so it’s still on your visual field but not at the center
- In the same manner you should be able to finish reading a sentence before your eyes gaze on the last word
Your reading speed in this mode should be a lot faster and becoming quicker with experience. However it’s only useful to check information until you find some useful gems. You cannot skip the traditional way of reading if you hope to learn or grasp some concepts because the cognitive cost is incompressible.
Also learn to detect non-informative paragraphs to accelerate when you see them and even skip them completely if there is 0 chance that they contain some surprising information.
Using this method you are just really learning to scan text using your visual cortex to detect parts which are informative / have a high surprisal factor (which depend of your previous knowledge and your beliefs), which you have then to read normally to assimilate.
Edit: As others have also mentioned for books, if it’s not a mandatory reading and it’s not really informative / you don’t like it the best course of action is to stop reading that book. Scanning through an entire book just to feel good having read it is pointless. NNT gave a neat heuristic: only read books you would read again, and usually if you can skip / visually scan a lot of a book, you would better spend your time reading a more interesting one.
I find it good actually because it’s a good signal to drop a book if I was able to exhaust my eyes on it like this.
Another change is I’ve stopped worrying about “completing” books. I now take a “subject” and read about 2-3 books (along with several articles) on it. It gives me multiple perspectives, sort of climbing a mountain through different paths. For instance I developed interest in 2008 credit crisis and am reading 5 books.
That said if you really can read faster and retain the content then it’s super amazing. But it wasn’t for me.
I've always found it a bit hard to keep focused while reading long text and books. So after trying a lot of things I noticed that this method works really well for me and I was able read almost 7 books in a month with it. Though for me it only works when I set the speed to at least 2.5x normal otherwise I get bored. Also only non-fiction. It's 100% free because I made this only for myself, but maybe try it and see if it works for you too!
If your goal is to learn information from non-fiction books more quickly, you might be in search of a book summarization service. They outline the main points and cut a typical 4-6 non-fiction pop-science book down into a 15 minute summary. And even if you do read the whole book, it can be helpful to see the main contents outlined if you don't take your own notes.
There is a cottage industry of book summarization services aimed at business types with many to to choose from, like Blinkist or Instaread. Just Google and you'll find several you can look at and see what looks appealing to you.
This might not apply if you are mainly reading textbooks or something more information-dense. But most popular nonfiction books are pretty fluffy and can really be cut down if you aren't reading for enjoyment.
I usually go through several spurs in a year where I go through a series of books in a couple of days... I might not recall everything that's being said, but I get the main message, and assume a lot of information is stored subconsciously.
Simply knowing that there's more details available if/when I need it is usually enough for me...
The technique to learn to speed-read is easy, but it takes a lot of practice. I posted a reply explaining it; no idea why it got downvoted TBH.
Anyway, I'd strongly suggest you to start practicing; it tends to be a very valuable skill to have.
If I were reading about about Rust, which I am not familiar with, I'd be focused on what's different about Rust relative to languages I am familiar with and what problems the authors say it solves. How might I solve X with Rust? I'll read the introduction deliberately, toward what is the intention of the authors for readers of this book, and look at both the table of contents and index in terms of seeing what's there. Then I'll skim, and dive in where it's relevant at the time.
Tacitly, I am viewing a non-fiction book here as a searchable index of concepts and examples vs as a purely linear narrative.
In a nutshell the author argues that the goal of reading is to increase one's understanding. For this the writer needs to have a better understanding than the reader. The reader must be able to overcome that inequality in understanding to some degree.
A critical first step is deciding whether the book deserves a detailed reading in the first place. Clearly, this is critical for time efficiency.
Once deemed worthwhile, you can move on to a thorough analytical reading where I think note taking trumps speed. The process of actively reading the book will help digest the author's main points and help you remember them.
Finally, if you're trying to grow your expertise in a particular area, consider reading and contrasting multiple books on the subject (comparative reading).
[1] https://lifeclub.org/books/how-to-read-a-book-mortimer-j-adl...
Your first challenge (and the one that will allow you consume and absorb more knowledge) is choosing which books to read in the first place.
When it comes to non-fiction, a lot of it either repeats the same information available in other books in the same genre or is crap.
I'd recommend choosing material starting as close to whatever the first principles are of your chosen subject and working up from there. Starting with first principles allows you to understand something enough to help you determine where you need to go next, with the added advantage of giving you the basics so you can synthesise more knowledge from there yourself.
Starting the other way round is fine if you really need to attack a certain area quickly, but it's no substitute for starting with foundational knowledge.
If you were (or want to become) a pianist good at reading sheet music it would likely help your language reading. Instead of reading one line of text at a time your brain can read an inch or two of lines at a time. Many of my musical colleagues and I saw this anecdotally in our lives. It only works for material below a certain density though, Its not possible for me to read more than one line of a math textbook at a time, but I can do it easily with say, fantasy fiction.
If your goal is to save time in the total course of your life though this may not help you. Reading sheet music quickly takes some time to learn!
You can try improving your reading speed in fiction books as it's easier and less mentally straining and see if that helps you with non-fiction processing too.
Immersion reading (reading and listening at the same thing at the same time) has been great for me to improve both the speed at which I'm reading but also my processing and language skills (non native English speaker). Kindle and audible support this out of the box, but you can also do it by listening audiobooks and just using a pdf reader.
Oftentimes understanding will improve with faster reading, rather than the opposite.
Personally, I considerably increased my reading speed after using a speed reading application in my phone. I used the app only to read novels, but my reading speed with real non-fiction books greatly benefited too.
As many people have pointed out, reading faster does not always mean learning faster. However, reading is a skill that can be trained and, for most of us, there is quite some room for improvement. You can probably read faster than you do without any drawback.
Also IMHO the slowness of reading is not a bug, it's a key feature. It's supposed to be slow. That's why audiobooks can't compare. They just exist because we are a generation of hyper-distracted fear-driven overworked .. crazy people. ;)
You can check it out here, [1] and here's a video [2] that shows how to activate the BeeLine feature. The app and BeeLine functionality are free!
Feel free to contact me through my profile if you have other questions — wish I'd seen this thread sooner!
Some books really can't be read fast (e.g. math books). So the moment a book is not information dense, read strategically.
Also, skim topics fast you already know.
Specifically, How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler describes how one should approach reading a book. I find that even the Wikipedia entry is useful.
An alternative is audiobooks. You can listen to them while commuting, cleaning, cooking, etc. All time you would not be able to spend reading. And you can also speed up the playback in most/all players.
After a while, you can stop tracking line by line, but just scan a page by moving your finger diagonally across a text. After doing this for a while, you can skip using your finger all together, and glance over texts to get the main idea.
I have been doing this for over 2 decades, and can glimpse at contracts for peculiarities by glazing over a page, or go through books taking only a few seconds per page if I'm in 'scanning' mode.
It's a nice party trick as well ;).
(Note that reading contracts for the first time like this are good for a first review and general flow, but you miss a lot of details, so you need to do a proper review later on.)
I tend to take a little longer when I'm actually reading a text thoroughly, although I prefer to read texts really fast and re-read them after a while when they are interesting or need more attention.
IME not all texts are readable like that; some text is very information-dense and it gets really hard to keep track of the context if you try to speed-read it.
On a side note, glancing over code/search results might have contributed bigtime to this skill as well.
The biggest "disadvantage" is that - when on holiday - I need a gazillion books, because it takes me at most 2 or 3 days to get through a single book...
It depends if you want to acquire broad, general knowledge or deeper detailed knowledge though. For the former, skimming blogs and the internet; for the latter, you'll need to study instead of just read / skim.