How to Read A Book (or any text based material)
For a long time, I believed that “reading” meant simply going through the text on the page, word by word and sentence by sentence, hoping my brain would remember the most insightful content.
I do take notes. I copy the text and paste into my obsidian vault, sometimes I just underline a sentence/paragraph.
It’s been recently I know that I am doing it completely wrong.
I now understand that the real process of reading a non-fiction book and taking notes involves the following steps:
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Ask a few questions about the book (using the 5W1H method or any questions you want to explore).
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Read the pages while keeping those questions in mind.
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Identify insights that may help answer your questions.
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Take notes and mark the answers or any insights. At this stage, you might want to copy and paste sections or paragraphs from the book.
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The final and most important step: revisit your notes to summarize the book and try to answer the questions you posed.
I used to think the most important part of “reading” is reading pages and try to remember the ideas, but after these years of reading I realized it doesn’t matter how much pages you read or how many ‘ideas’ you remembered, it’s how much you really “absorbed”.
When you take notes, you aim to capture the ideas from the book. As you revisit the notes and summarize them in your own words, you verify your understanding. This is when you truly “absorb” the book, blending your knowledge with its concepts.
Related Reading
Even if you don’t plan to publish your notes somewhere public, conducting a summary of any written material is a great way to reinforce your understanding of the subject. For me, the writing part is where I actually get the text. When you’re given the chance to rephrase ideas from someone else you can only do it if you fully understand the whole concept.