The best General Books & Reading: Reddit reviews

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I would exercise caution with most 'speed reading' help books, they're the get rich quick scheme of wannabe intellectuals.

That being said, it's hard to understate the productivity of a skilled reader- the person who can rapidly digest and critically understand written word at the highest level is dangerously effective. Getting to this level takes more work than most speedreading guides will admit.

I've read all sorts of books on this topic and one stands head and shoulders above the rest: How to Read A Book - Mortimer Adler. Its an old book but a classic. If you truly want to improve reading speed AND comprehension, or just want some motivation, this is the definitive place to start in my humble experience. I'm sharing because this book helped me tremendously and I think it will for you as well.

Plenty of opportunity to become well-read in 2019. Best of luck!

P.S. the original edition of this book (1940) mentions prevalence of speed reading books... Fascinating that they were popular back then, and have been around much longer than one might think.

This isn't quite what you requested, but Adler's How to Read a Book gives you a framework for something similar that can be used with any reading you do. The book features a brief set of questions designed to get you to express the main idea of what you read, how to apply the knowledge, etc. It's far more difficult than it appears, but it makes reading much more rewarding.

The method was introduced to me in my college philosophy classes and has served me well ever since.

I would say that it was widely used. I’m reading through Owen Davies’ Grimoires: A History of Magic Books right now and he has a whole section dedicated to the SATOR square. It shows up in grimoires all throughout the Middle Ages from the Arab world to Spain and continues to appear all the way up until the 18th century. You’re correct that no one now has any idea why it was so important but it’s clear from the historical record that it was important enough that magicians kept spreading it about. No one thought to write down, however, why the SATOR square exists, what it means, or how to use it so it exists an enigmatic and intriguing magickal artifact, much like these items from Pompeii.

How to Read a Book. Actually really good and useful.

Show, don't tell.

Francine Prose put it better than I can in her analysis of Dulse, by Alice Munro.

>Finally, the passage contradicts a form of bad advice often given young writers—namely, that the job of the author is to show, not tell. Needless to say, many great novelists combine "dramatic" showing with long sections of the flat-out authorial narration that is, I guess, what is meant by telling. And the warning against telling leads to a confusion that causes novice writers to think that everything should be acted out—don't tell us a character is happy, show us how she screams "yay" and jumps up and down for joy—when in fact the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language. There are many occasions in literature in which telling is far more effective than showing.

source

You're starting to get it. You walked right past the real point.

I would suggest a book to you that you may find interesting.

Since you seem to like to compare religions for insight, this shows a method on how to do so.

NTA, but please don't intentionally let your grades slip. The best way to handle the situation is to talk with your teacher and also reach out to some friends to make a study group. Divide up the readings and share notes with each other! Since this is an AP class, there are hundreds of former, overworked, 16-year-olds who have been through the exact same class and posted their notes online. Reading those notes will save you a lot of time!

Also, you definitely don't have to actually read everything! There are strategies you can use to figure out the main concepts in each chapter/section. Below is a book a professor showed our class when I was in grad school that gives strategies on how to get important information without actually reading the whole book. Maybe your local library has it? https://www.amazon.com/dp/0671212095/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_Yc.yFbC67FTB0

I'm not an academic, nor am I extremely well read- however, I recommend you check out Mortimer J Adler's How to Read a Book if you haven't already, as you might find it helpful. It covers some of the different "levels" of understanding a text and you might find it helpful in developing a method to breeze through other texts and scan for potentially important passages.

Sure thing-- best of luck. Grab a copy of Adler if you haven't read it (look for the 1972 edition with Charles Van Doren's updates). Read part II carefully (that's the general methodology) and then read the sections of part III that are specifically about reading history. It'll take you an hour perhaps and that will be time well spent I'd say.

That's a good analogy lol. I've found it helpful to refer to Gravity's Rainbow Companion prior to starting each chapter, then when I'm confused, refer to The Gravity's Rainbow Handbook.

A friend told me he thought I was insane for reading two guides just to be able to get through the book but that's part of the fun for me

I have this template I made after reading How to Read a Book. In conjunction with How to Take Smart Notes, I find myself remembering most of everything I read once I read the notes from the books I've read in the past. Within Abdaal's levels, this puts me at a level 7.

Reading Like A Writer is a good place to start. If your goal is to improve your academic writing and you're in the US, look at English 1302 textbooks. These focus on composition and argumentation, which will be important in college essay writing.

I think there is something to be said for reading a book as a reader before you pick it apart as a writer.

Read the book once and if you enjoy it and think there's something to be learned from it, read it again (or read sections) and take notes or pay attention to the things you can use.

I tend to take notes in books using pencil. I underline and write directly on the pages. I also use sticky notes to flag pages for reference or when I have a lot I need to write. If I want to do an in-depth analysis of a section, I might photocopy or print out the passage.

I also recommend Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose which I haven't actually read yet, but god damn it, I swear I am going to.

It depends on the subject matter and what you need to do with it. How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading has great advice for the different purposes. Don’t just trudge through each reading from page one. Scan, skim. Be careful what you decide to give a close reading of.

Keep a journal of your readings and make notes. That will help review the insights you pick up and remember where important references are from.

Instead of one notebook per class I personally recommend keeping all your reading notes in one book. Save the first four pages as a table of contents. Number the rest of the pages. That way when you get a new reading assignment you can add it to the TOC list and next to it note what page it starts on. That way you can skim it quickly to find it again. These tips are from the Bullet Journal method.

Good morning!

I have one more suggestion for you/someone else with similar problems.

In grad school, it helped me a lot to do an initial quick read-through of the material before going back over the piece with a fine-toothed comb.

As you've said, a lot of these materials include a lot of fluff and it's easy to get distracted while trying to write as you read. The quick initial read (or skim, whatever you want to call it) is good for identifying what will be important to focus on when you go back and identifying what needs to be written down. I often found myself highlighting a lot of unnecessary stuff and writing a lot more than I needed because I wasn't really sure what was going to be important later on. This process helped to curb that and cut out A LOT of time that was being wasted.

I think it was in Adler and Van Doren's How to Read a Book that I learned the following strategy:

First, read all of the incidentals (title, author, abstract/summary, section titles). Then, read the introduction and conclusion. Then, look at the first and last sentences in every paragraph.

After that, go back through and give the piece a good read-through. You should be able to do so fairly quickly because you already know what to expect, for the most part. You'll pick up whatever you missed the first time around, and gain a really strong sense of the piece.

I really recommend their book if you ever get a chance. It's broken up really well, too, so you can just pick out sections rather than reading it front-to-back. I consult it whenever I need a refresher.

How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and the reading list at the back is a good place to start.

Started reading the Great Books of Western World after seeing the list in the Appendix of How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler. Set a goal of 50 pages a day, 6 days a week. Some days I read more, some less. Missed a few days here and there because life happens. But was consistent and just kept at it. Started shortly after my 30th birthday, just turned 41 and still reading my 50 pages a day most days.

How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler covers when and how to “judge a book by its cover,” and also how to X-ray it, read critically, and extract the author’s message from the text. Plus there is a great reading list in the Appendix.

Sim. Defino a lista de livros que quero ler durante o ano e sigo a lógica FIFO, mas se aparecer algo muito legal ou recomendação relevante eu faço um insertion sort.

No dia a dia é tentar ler pelo menos um pouquinho diariamente pra criar o hábito e conseguir finalizar a leitura planejada.

Pode considerar ler How to Read a Book.

P.S. Uso stick notes pra não estragar o livro.

How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler. Classic guide to intelligent reading with a great reading list in the appendix.

>How to Read a Book

Hello Achilles - could you provide the Author or the ISBN to the book you reference above?

I found this and would like to make sure it's the right book, since this was released in 72 not 40.

Here's some possible support:

> Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of "knowing what we know" arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms, that, like love or anger, function independently of reason. (On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not, xi)

I found that in John Loftus 2013 The Outsider Test for Faith.

You apparently don't read well.

https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Classic-Intelligent/dp/0671212095/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?crid=WUKI1JWLRPUC&keywords=how+to+read+a+book&qid=1660572722&sprefix=how+to+read+a+book%2Caps%2C111&sr=8-2

I read this book years ago. I was like 16 and I found it boring and pretentious because I found everything boring and pretentious at 16, but there’s a chapter on sex scenes that I found inspiring. The TLDR is that they don’t actually have to include sex to be sensual and intimate. If you can find a pdf, it might be worth checking out.

> So with that explanation I would expect to find out you're a fundamentalist, would that be true?

That's a very imprecise term, and by some measures it might be possible to apply it towards me, but I think it doesn't fit what either of us typically think of as that term.

> And if not, the question remains how you picked which parts to not be fundamentalist about. I think that's what the original question was getting at

Yes, I think so, too, and I think I find fault with the question's assumptions for that. How does anyone decide what to understand of any text? We ... read it, and we think about it. We look at internal and external context, try to understand the language, and just like ... we apply our capacity for understanding things to it. If OP thinks that there is some simple formula for understanding any text, that seems rather overly simplistic.

Perhaps it would make sense if OP had been a former fundamentalist, because that seems like an overly simplistic approach to understanding a text.

For either of you, if you're curious about how to approach understanding a text, this might be a good place to start. For more insight into Bible understanding as a whole, you would be exploring a topic called Biblical Hermeneutics, and there are many books on the topic. But if you already know the fundamentals of "How to read a book" (which despite it's dumb / patronizing sounding name, is a rich starter resource for that type of thing), then you already understand most of what comes into play in Biblical hermeneutics.

> I'll be brutally honest and please don't kick me out of the sub for sounding like a theist, but I had a couple of interesting experiences as well.

Why on Earth would a theist be kicked out a sub dedicated to debating atheists? The whole point is for theists to challenge atheists. There wouldn't be much content here if theists were banned, lol.

As to your actual point about experiences, however, how do you know what you experienced was actually caused by your beliefs? Even if we reject physical explanations, how do you know what you experienced isn't evidence of Christianity or Islam or Buddhism instead?

After all, it's certainly true that Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists have religious experiences and claim that those experiences are evidence for their own religion. It seems rather convenient that the experiences which appear to confirm your religious views also happen to correspond with the religious views you were taught as a child, especially when people of other religions (also taught the same as child for their religion) claim the exact same thing.

While I'm not denying that you had experiences, it may be worth asking yourself why you don't find a Christian's experience of God convincing evidence for the truth of Christianity. And if you are wondering how an atheist views your own claims about religious experience, well, it's probably very similar to how you would view the Christian's experience...interesting, but it probably wasn't actually an experience of something supernatural that conforms to their belief system, because it's more likely another truth explains the experience.

Something to think about. This logic is based loosely on Loftus' Outsider Test for Faith, which may be worth checking out if you are curious about the deeper philosophical argument behind it.

A French professor wrote a very interesting book about talking about books you haven't read. I just flipped through it, though: https://www.amazon.com/Talk-About-Books-Havent-Read/dp/1596915439?ref_=d6k_applink_bb_dls&dplnkId=14c6f1af-3062-4036-951c-5482dbf80b9a

The answer is it depends on how you define a finger.

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It's clear you aren't good at reading comprehension. Further, exceptions certainly DO invalidate rules. What else would? You are talking generalities, which I've made pains to explicitly explain that I'm not. I'm talking about abnormalities and how, scientifically speaking, there are outliers and they exist.

It's a waste of time to communicate further with you when you don't even follow what I'm saying. No snark, but you would do well to read this.

Have a good day, I'm not going to waste time trying to re-explain the wheel to you.

How to Read a Book is an excellent guide on analytical book reading. One of the steps is to read the book as fast as you can once, and then go back to the parts you didn't understand, then determine their meaning from the surrounding context you do understand.

Depends if I'm reading for retention or pleasure. For retention I usually re-read the paragraph a few times until I completely understand it, then move on. Reading for fun, I skim much faster. Also this is a good read, seriously: https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Classic-Intelligent/dp/0671212095