My particular weakness when it comes to reading is that I can end up skimming lots of books without deeply absorbing new insights or triggering new actions. I get practically all of my books from the library. I check their lists of new acquisitions (updated on the 15th of every month) and request all the titles that look interesting. Having gone through a huge number of books, I find myself less patient with books that don't teach me something new, or at least say things in a more memorable way.

When do I get the most value from the books I read? How do I shift my reading to more of that?

2014-08-29 Becoming a better reader

E-books might  expand more of my reading time to the subway, displacing gaming time. If I read by topic instead of getting most things through new releases, then I'll be reading more intentionally. What am I curious about these days? Skills, mostly, along with the occasional bit of personal finance and small business management. Those topics lend themselves easily to application and experimentation, so then I'll learn even more from experience. I also enjoy coming across the context of familiar quotes and concepts, so that's part of the reason why philosophy books are interesting for me.

I've got lots of notes that I haven't turned into blog posts, experiments, and follow-up posts. I like how I'm starting to get a hang of the connections between books. Reviewing will help me connect those dots.

Maybe I should get back to sketchnoting some of the books I read – perhaps my favourites, as a way of sharing really good ideas…