 Statistics reference books can be super useful, but I hate having to slog through pages of obtuse gambling metaphors just to get the one formula I need. Talk about renum and wheat. When I research an idea for an episode, I often find myself in, way over my head, trying to answer a burning question in a subject I know practically nothing about. I can sometimes pester smart friends to help me find my feet, but just as often, I'm flailing helplessly in a vast sea of academic papers and dense books. Just for a sense of what I'm talking about, my last episode had nine papers, three articles, and three books in the citations, but I had to chew on about twice that many just to figure out what I was looking for in a useful vein of established work. That is a daunting pile of stuff to absorb and understand. Obviously, I skim wherever I can and bail if I realize I'm wasting my time, but even then it can be a real slog to simply parse enough text to decide that someone's life's work, although fascinating, is not going to get me closer to an answer. Recently, Mike Rugnetta of YouTube and Podcasting fame pointed me at a short practical guide written by University of Michigan professor Paul and Edwards, titled How to Read a Book. Edwards studies information and knowledge infrastructures, so you can imagine that when he talks about the method he uses to read books, he's not just going to tell you to set aside 30 minutes before bedtime and get a decent bookmark. His approach to nonfiction reading is laser focused on extracting the greatest informational content from a text while expending the least amount of time and effort, juicing a book from maximum insight wherever it's most plump. The experience is different than how I usually read, but I have to admit it's been incredibly effective for getting a lot of stuff into my head, contextualizing it, and getting to a place where I can synthesize it with other stuff, all much much faster than if I were to take my usual approach of simply reading everything from cover to cover as fast as I can. Efficiency isn't the be all and all of reading nonfiction, but if you're like me, you often engage with books, articles, and papers for a particular purpose, to answer a question, to inform a decision, to better understand and act on the world. While it can certainly be entertaining and enriching to simply read a nonfiction book however the author decided to lay it out, it's nice to have the option of surgically extracting the information you need in whatever sequence works best for your brain and your goals, and uploading it all into your memory like you're Neo. I highly recommend reading The Guide Yourself, but I'll sketch a brief summary of how to read a book here, an outline of Edward's strategy to think about and maybe try on your own. He breaks his method into a few simple techniques, any of which can be used in isolation, but the central technique is simply this. Decide how long you want to spend on the text, then read the thing three times in that timeframe. A brief 20,000 foot overview, jumping around to scout out which parts are likely to be helpful, a slow methodical crawl through those sections to answer questions, uncover meaning, and really wrap your head around the main points, then one final run to summarize and memorize whatever you've uncovered. The repetition really helps to cement things in your memory, but it's also helpful to dedicate your entire cognitive capacity to the tasks of discovery, analysis, and synthesis on their own, instead of constantly shifting gears, trying to do all three at the same time. In order to make the most of that technique, Edward's encourages jumping around in the text and focusing on the most information-dense sections, which are often arranged in a sort of fractal hourglass pattern. At every level of organization, text tends to wind its way from very general ideas at the beginning, through bitty details and piecemeal development, to broad summaries in the conclusion. Exploiting this shape can be useful to locate the meaty bits of a book, working from the outside of the hourglass inward. The front and back covers and inner jacket flaps convey an awful lot of general information about a book. The title, the subtitle, the author, more on that later, a summary, and maybe what sorts of people or organizations have endorsed it, can give you a remarkably good feel for what you're likely to find if you delve deeper, if it's likely to be useful for your goals, or if you should just pull the ripcord and read something else. Moving further in from the ends of the hourglass, we find the table contents, which give you an idea of the contents and how they're organized, a decent map detailing which sections might be worth examining further, and the index. Before I encountered Edward's guide, I thought of indices as lookup tools, something you flip to only when you're trying to find something specific. But he suggests that the breakdown of topics and subtopics there will tell you a lot about what the author thinks is important. Other 50 page references under the mean dynasty entry? Probably pretty central to the story. The same goes for the bibliography at the end of an academic paper. What sorts of journals and citations do the authors think are useful for understanding their work? Sections or subsections of the book also tend to have their own mini hourglass shapes. Focusing more on chapter titles and summaries, introductions and conclusions, can tell you a lot more than if you were to pick a random paragraph out of the middle. The idea is that the wide parts of the hourglass are denser with information than the details the author uses to navigate between them, so focusing your efforts there will probably be most efficacious. The same thing goes for information dense structures like figures, which can tell a story all on their own. If a picture is worth a thousand words, it might be a better use of your time than five minutes of reading. Of course, there's more information available in the text than the literal meaning of whatever's on the page. Every textual work is published into a context, from some history, by some person, with their own perspective and goals. Who that author is, where they're coming from, what academic tradition they're publishing into, what ideas they're responding to, what organizations they're representing, who's paying them to write, who stands to benefit from their work, who endorsed it, what sorts of expertise or blind spots they might bring to this topic. Weighing these sorts of factors can grant exponentially more insight than trying to read a book as though it's sprung into existence in the vacuum. Maintaining awareness of a book's context can also help with critical active reading, which is essential for really ringing it for everything it's worth. Considering that context naturally raises questions and encourages theorizing about the work as you process it, which can be helpful for your final memorization pass if you write your thoughts down. Possibly, embrace yourself for this, in the book. This was a big change for me. I normally treat books with kid gloves, as if they were sacred objects, rather than tools to wield in whatever way improves my understanding most effectively. Obviously, I can't do this with every book I pick up, but Edward's recommendation to write on the actual pages has been an incredibly effective way to remember what bits stuck out to me and how they relate to my goals. I've also found it helps to keep me active in thinking critically about what I'm reading. Penciling a little question mark next to an especially vague paragraph or summarizing a page in my own words on the page gives me a sense of agency and interactivity. It makes reading feel more like an engaged dialogue with the author and their ideas. Edward's recommends doing this with restraint. Two or three short marks per page at most, with the aim of distilling the text into a compact shape that makes the most sense to you. It might have taken the author 20 pages to describe some phenomenon clearly enough for any random reader to get it, but if I can just write the word Darmock at the top of this chapter, now I can rapidly recall exactly what those 20 pages are about when I do my final pass, or if I ever need to crack it open again in the future. Now, if you're like me, this take-no-prisoners approach to absorbing nonfiction may seem as though it erodes some of the value of a book. You're plundering the thing, rampaging over its carefully drawn boundaries and structure, relentlessly pursuing the information you find most useful rather than patiently following the author on whatever path they've laid out for you. But Edward's notes that even if we were to read everything linearly in its totality, from cover to cover, we're only going to remember a fraction of what's there. Even if we had all day to read everything we want in excruciating detail, our time and cognitive energy is ultimately finite. By strategically seeking out and excavating the bits that are most relevant to our interests for everything they're worth, we have a better shot at making sure the fraction we remember is actually useful for our purposes, and that the effort we exert results in the greatest and longest-lasting informational gains. Printed text is remarkably well suited to this approach, allowing you to easily access any part of the material in any order that works best for you. YouTube videos, on the other hand, three-time hourglass index. Not so much. Do you think Edward's approach to reading nonfiction might facilitate rapid comprehension? Do you have a really good eraser so you don't feel so anxious about writing an emergence? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to follow up on subscribe, blog, share, and don't stop thunking.