last updated: Jan 11, 2024
People are usually surprised when they learn about my reading habits, especially my notes. What catches them most off guard is that I’ll often spend as long on my notes as I do reading the book itself. But I’ve also found this method to be the most effective for the accumulation, growth, and pruning of new ideas.
Compiling my book notes
I mostly (but not exclusively) read on my iPad, so that I can easily highlight as I go. Once I am finished with the book, I will aggregate all highlights onto a document.
I take all highlights and organize and reorganize until I find an ordering that suits me, and does not necessarily match the outline of the book itself. The Google Doc outline feature is invaluable here. Meanwhile, I also paraphrase and cut words until I have as dense a version as possible of every thought and point.
When I am done, I take my polished “BookNote” document and print it out. Others have bookshelves for their books, I’ll have them for my notes.
For most books I read, I spend at least two hours (or more, sometimes even longer than spent reading the book itself) turning my highlights into concise notes. My longer BookNotes trend upwards of 10,000 words for the books that were most idea-rich to me.
A note on what I highlight, and my intended purpose with the BookNotes:
I am highlighting ideas - the roots, the trunks, the leaves - that are both new and powerful to me. By powerful, I mean not that I always agree with them, but that I see the downstream effects they might have. As such, when I read through all my highlights to compile my Booknotes, I am compiling the bits and pieces of the ideas that are otherwise spread out across pages. In my Booknotes one can thus trace the lineage of ideas as they have affected me. Thus, BookNotes are not meant to be a summary, nor a commentary. They are an outline of powerful ideas, and rereading them triggers the broader memories of what I learned within that book.
There are also the occasional freestanding tidbits, which are of sensationalist interest but orphaned of any mother idea.
brief analysis of reading in past 5 years
I like to read over lunch, at night before bed, or, since moving to NYC, on the subway.
I read an average of 4,500 pages a year, somewhere around 10-15 books. I read roughly the same number of fiction and non-fiction books, although the page count skews heavily towards fiction.
Since 2019, I have read 15 “old” books (>25 years old), and 50 new books. So roughly 1 in 4 books, and 1 in 5 pages, is more than 25 years old.
I maintain a list of all books I have read, am reading, or have abandoned.
My goal in 2024 is to read 2x my typical page count, and have 1 in 2 books and pages be old.