Reading slowly

For a long time I treated reading as a throughput problem. The goal was to finish more books, and the measure of a good month was the height of the finished stack. It took a while to notice that I could remember almost nothing from the books I had rushed through.

The habit that changed this was simple: keep a notebook within arm's reach. Not a reading journal with summaries and ratings, just a place to copy a sentence, write a question, or note the page where an argument turned. The notebook made the pace slower, and the slower pace made the book stick.

Re-reading is the other half of the practice. A second pass is not a failure to finish. It is a way to let the structure of a book become visible, the way a building looks different when you walk around it a second time. I now keep a small shelf of books that are meant to be read more than once, and I try to leave a year between passes.

None of this is efficient. That is the point. A book is not a queue item, and the interesting parts are rarely the parts you can summarize in a bullet list. The notebook is there to catch the things that would otherwise pass by.