📚 How I Read 3 Books a Day
- Start with the conclusion
- Skip the backgrounds and references
- Then read the intro
- Then read the conclusion again
- Read just what you like and move on to the next book
- 22 pages should suffice to know
Unread books are far more valuable than read books
Consider a library not just a place to keep books one has already read but primarily a deposit for books to be read at some future date.
And then the day eventually comes when, in order to learn something about a certain topic, you decide finally to open one of the many unread books, only to realize that you already know it. What has happened? There is the mystical-biological explanation, whereby with the passing of time, and by dint of moving books, dusting them, then putting them back, by contact with our fingertips the essence of the book has gradually penetrated our mind.
There is also the casual but continual scanning explanation: as time goes by, and you take up and then reorder various volumes, it is not the case that the book has never been glanced at; even by merely moving it you glanced at a few pages, one today, another the next month, and so on until you end up by reading most of it, if not in the usual linear way. But the true explanation is that between the moment when the book first came to us and the moment when we opened it, we have read other books in which there was something that was said by that first book, and so, at the end of this long intertextual journey, you realize that even that book you had not read was still part of your mental heritage and perhaps had influenced you profoundly.
— Umberto Eco
