Working with a book

Recently i started to change my approach to book reading. From now on, for every book i try to do these steps:

1. Inspect the face and the backface of the book, get a feel of what the book is about.
2. Read annotations to the book, either by author or publisher - these annotations contain short description of the book. At this moment i approximately define purpose for reading the book - what i seek to find here.
3. Read table of contents, highlight chapters of interest. Here i decide which exact parts of the book are worth reading, and what can be skipped.
4. Read intro, using skimming. Let author prepare you for the book.
5. Read the target chapters with skimming, use highlighting and index marks to emphasize skimmed annotations.

There are two reading strategies i want to point out:

• Skimming
• Thoughtful reading

Skimming

Process of filtering information: highlight essential, throw non-essential. There are many skimming techniques, but my choice is to:

• Take a section of interest.
• Read paragraph by paragraph. In each paragraph:
  • Read/Highlight first 1-2 sentences.
  • Read/Highlight last 1-2 sentences.
  • If you still have questions that might find elaboration in the middle of the paragraph, read the middle. Often questions arise because of deep connection between first and last sentences. Sometimes described ideas are so dense and resonating, so you might want to resort to reading the whole paragraph (see Thoughtful reading below).

Skimming prove useful for books with low-medium density of ideas, where paragraphs are usually consists of one point, and middle of the paragraph is often low-idea story or connection. A thoughtful reading is applied upon gathered by skimming annotations.

Thoughtful reading

Process of thorough reading of a book/section. This involves deep analysis. Can be very time-consuming, but will prove beneficial for the good book with high density of useful and resonating ideas.

For skimmed annotations, thoughtful reading is used to continue investigation upon these filtered parts - here we activate our deeper thought to uncover interesting to us topic. We may even return to the context of the annotation to grab additional info. Here the deep serious research may begin, or may end either with a big question mark, ellipsis, or period.

Every book is worth to be read 3 times

• First time we made initial highlights, and move them to our note system. Here the skimming works the best to filter out essential information.
• Second time we read our annotations. This is thoughtful reading. During this stage we title the annotations, make notes, link them (for Zettelkasten systems).
• Third time we read our thoughts in form of emerged notes, annotation titles and comments. The third time is most hot and everlasting - notes and comments are modified most often, while annotations may remain the same. These annotations were the catalization of research.