How to talk about books you haven't read

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🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

One of the best books about reading. But it’s not, strictly speaking, about books. It is about how not to read books. Presents several useful techniques how to avoid embarrassment in front of anyone, when you are asked about facts from the book. You’ve read.

🎨 Impressions

How I Discovered It

Who Should Read It?

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

How my life / behaviour / thoughts / ideas have changed as a result of reading the book.

✍️ My Top 3 Quotes

📒 Ideas

The great idea behind the book: Don’t be embarrassed about the fact that you’ve missed something from the book, or didn’t understand. It’s impossible to understand everything.

Before we start. What is understanding in the context of reading a book?

• How often I asked myself in the past, have I understood it correctly? Yes, it’s an important question, no doubt about it. There is a catch, the question itself is from the past.
  • School desk teaches us to read thoroughly, word after word, sentence after sentence. Teachers ask significant questions, we answer them, thinking that if we get mark five, we understood or at least would remember something.
  • But it’s all wrong. In real life, understanding serves another purpose – implementation of the knowledge. Enriching life experience, and changing attitude, shifting behavioural models.
  • So real understanding of the text, is not how well you remember and can recite it, but the ability to use the knowledge from the book in another context.

School hypocrisy and reading potential

• School cripples the potential to read books and obtain new knowledge. We have an oppressive obligation system to read books from syllabus from cover to cover.
  • The thing is, if you ask any school teacher how many books he has read in the past year outside curricular, you will often hear 0.
  • How a person who reads the same books year after year can teach a real life knowledge or what’s more interesting, not the knowledge but sharing experience.
    • He can’t, and the only think this leads to is the same boring lessons, without a spark of imagination.
  • Instead of answering the question, what is reading, we just dive in and read, with low to non-existent comprehension of the material, that doesn’t even touch our view on certain situations as a consequence, we stay the same, as teachers. Cast in time, with the same irrelevant problems.

Before talking about how to talk, we have to define what is reading

• Take this note into account

• As Povarnin Искусство Спора - Сергей Поварнин famously says in his book, before we can talk on the topic, the topic itself must be defined and set up.

  • So, what is reading?
  • Under this definition hides several practices, some are counterintuitive, but effective.
    • Not reading is one of the most arguable practices, but also the most effective.
    • Even the avid readers practice this non-reading. The act of picking the book and opening is the counteract of not picking other books.
      • The involuntary act of not reading many numerous other books in the universe.
      • Non-reading is not an absence of reading is an activity. Heroic stand against information overdose. Otherwise we would drown.

If there is a motto for reading books, it will be “Become a Librarian”

• As it said above, the best way to read is not to read, but what instead?
  • It is of the utmost importance not to learn how to read, but how to play with ideas.
  • Design approaches that help create new original ideas, such as TRIZ, I don’t have it in my PKM, but soon will add here.
  • The ideas must be manipulated and played, mixed and combined. The reading is the process of playing with ideas.
• The main thesis of a librarian is this:

A reader who buries his nose into a book is abandoning true cultivation of knowledge, and perhaps even reading.

• The number of books is daunting, and the amount of information as a whole on the Internet is depressing.
  • In this case, the helicopter view is more efficient. You spend less time reading the whole book, but instead get the bigger picture with fewer details.
    • If you need to explore some details closer, you can always zoom in.
    • The reading is a time-consuming and effortful process.
  • To cultivate the real knowledge, one must abandon reading page by page, and adapt instead a different reading routine. The reader has to head toward the exhaustiveness rather than the accumulation of isolated bits of knowledge. The one book is only one view on a problem or phenomenon, several books are a multilayered mix of ideas.
    • The desire to understand the maximum and view the phenomenon gives us opportunity to see underlying assumptions that stay hidden if we zoom in too close.
    • The farther we are, the more relations we can discern and understand, the librarian moves away from the individuality of a single book and grasps the constellation of books and enjoys the connection they have together.
    • The connection between books and ideas inside those books are more important than the books and ideas themselves.

Finding your bearing around the book is much more important than knowing the book by heart

• The cultivated and culturally rich people understand more than anything the landscape of the book.
  • Can orient themselves inside the book and find any required information.
  • The book is a system and information is arranged in particular formation.
  • Each element and idea has its place and relates to each other in a special manner.
    • Yesterday I had a discussion about GTD, there was an opinion that GTD is nothing more than rules of thumbs, collected and described by Allen, I opposed this idea because I see the book not as a phenomenon itself, but as the system of intertwined elements: tasks, time management, arranging and organization of information, reviewing system.
      • The only element that this system lacks is the note-taking and reflection. But it’s not because of the oversight, but because the note-taking and reflection lies outside the scope of GTD, though they are important.
    • My opponent hadn’t seen the GTD book as a system, for him, it was about habits and tricks, whenever it’s a system with tightly weaved elements. That cannot work by themselves. I have to say the notion of his thought are not known to me, it’s just the feeling that I had.
• I can say more, GTD alone is not enough, there are many critical books for understanding GTD to work with.
  • How to read books.
  • How to take notes.
  • Just no name the few.
  • And the exterior is as important as the interior. Understanding of the role and place of the book among other works. That is, want counts.
  • Books alongside the explored book provide enough context, to understand the book that is being read, on a thoroughly different level.
• Any words said about a particular book are not words about this book, but about the bigger number of titles. No matter what we say, we speak about more than one book when we describe ideas and concepts derived from it. ^4c392b
  • We heavily rely on books that our culture and memory reminds us.
  • This is called the collective library, and this is what really matters when we work with notes and play with ideas from it.

Less is more on steroids

• Cultural literacy, doesn’t mean that you are educated, not only this at least.
  • Literacy is perceiving the structure of the book at a glance. And not needing to read and all entirety.
  • The greater the ability to work with the structure of the book, the less you need to read it in full.
  • Reading is the process of constant predicting and rebuilding of ideas of the author.
• At the core, of the work with the book is the process of searching for what ideas can improve an activity that I am busy with, like teaching, or impede it.
  • Ideas are the tools, but implementation is the process of creative application. Playing and toying with concepts, combination and reassembling of existing processes.

«This excessive reading, he implies, stripped France of originality» – The same idea is stated by Aurelius

Work with the book ends the moment the wisdom is transferred

• Reading is not only skimming and analyzing with synthesizing new knowledge.
  • New skills and changes in worldview are also reading, but most and foremost, reading is the process of forgetting.
  • No need to retain anything, the true reason of reading is to update your beliefs.
  • Books are nothing more than a means of delivery of wisdom, as soon as the knowledge has been acquired we can get rid of a book.
    • The way we do this in План урока - Перефразирование, when we finish this part of the course, usually the original author disappears from the note, and the map.

With Every Book Read, We Add a New Chapter to the Inner Book

• Everyone who reads a lot has a written book which they keep to themselves.
  • It could be called a set of representations from the book that the reader understands from their vantage point.
  • Typically, it’s not similar to the writers’.
  • And every further reading reshapes their beliefs accordingly, without them realizing it.
  • This inner book determines the reader’s ability to understand the text.
    • Which elements of a new book will be retained and how they will be interpreted and later reshaped to fit the inner book’s structure are crucial aspects.
    • The reader is highly selective and picks elements for cultivation which their inner book dictates.
  • Hence, the author’s dissatisfaction with their work.
    • They have a perfect inner book inside themselves; other books are available to them, and nothing quite meets the quality demands of their inner book, even their own work.
    • An author tries to accomplish this unreachable goal, to write a book that matches their inner book, but always fails to deliver.
  • The inner book is the reason we tend to discuss books we hear about in conversations.
    • But what we consider the book that we are discussing at the moment is, in fact, not the book but an anomalous accumulation of fragments of the text. Bits and pieces of knowledge that our consciousness clings to, and our imagination reshapes this inner book every time we pick up a new book or start a conversation about some other book.
    • Our understanding doesn’t have anything in common with the book we are holding and reading. It is what we think it is, not what the author had thought when they wrote the book.

Writing and Thinking Over the Inner Book

• Any sane person understands that to know what you know, you have to stop and think.
  • The same is crucial for understanding the inner book. We have to stop at every sentence we think in our heads, examine its origins and the value it holds for us.
  • In order to successfully transfer meaning, the value and the origin must be connected with the life and background of the people to whom we wish to pass our inner view.
• Only such artificial halting and stopping the flow of time allows us to reproduce the text and the meaning we hold in the inner book. Otherwise, understanding is caught in the endless rat race of life that keeps the inner book a tangle of jumbled words and sentences, which at first glance do not have any connection to one another.
  • All conversations that we have with others are based on fragments reworked by private fantasies that significantly differ from the author’s intention.
  • In short, we have to write our thoughts, externalize them.

The Collection of Inner Books

• What if we had not one but several inner books, each dedicated to a different topic?
  • In my case, it could be: the science of reading, logical thinking tools, pedagogy in the broad sense of the word.
  • We already know that a collective library is important for understanding a book.
    • It works in the same way; a word takes its meaning in relation to other words used in the sentence.
  • We never deal with separate bits of knowledge, but with a set of books common to a particular situation and culture.
    • An individual book lacks that level of depth and consistency.
• The collection of inner books is at the core of the virtual library, the realm where I hold conversations about books and discuss knowledge from the books.
  • The place where different inner libraries from different people collide; the moment the discussion over books starts is the moment inner libraries of different people meet one another within the virtual library.

Inner Libraries Develop with Every Discussion

• Books do not care about what is happening around them, but they may change; our understanding of them may change in the span of one conversation.
  • The mobility of the text is one of the greatest features of the inner library.
  • It’s impossible to describe the mechanics of how the inner library works, but every interaction with someone about what we know about a book and the ideas from it changes our understanding.
    • Sometimes it becomes deeper; at other times, we learn that all this time we have played in shallow waters.
  • We often think that others know more than we do, and this impedes genuine creativity.
    • Actually, all types of readers, avid and non-readers, are stuck in an endless “vicious” circle of inventing new books. Even if they don’t like it, they do it nonetheless.
    • The problem with most readers is that they want to stop this process when they should crank up the speed and range, increase the dynamism, and allow the imagination to do its work.

The most important thought and idea in the book is lying outside the boundaries of the book

• It’s a refreshing thought, that the book itself is not important, but the tool to scratch one’s thoughts and ideas, as Yura from the course How to read books course by Rustam and Max famously said once.
  • The book is the pretext, that helps generate further ideas and manipulate concepts.
  • The book in the conversation is less the book we talk about, but a spring we use to propel the discussion.
  • Every shift in the discussion, that brings a new book into the light adds another twist to the spring, charging it even more, building the potential.

Strange psychology of reading

• As we know already, the state of unreadiness could be different: skimming, table of contents reading, inner book assembling.
  • What is common for each of the condition is a bracketing of conscious, rational thinking.
  • We have to suspend rationality and allow imagination free roll over the discussion.
  • Every so often it can border with stupidity, but in my opinion, only in this state, real ingenuity is born.
• What is interesting is the discussion, in various complex situations, in which we can find ourselves talking about books, we will be wise not to speak about books, but speak about ourselves.
  • The same is true for writing, we are not telling some random facts and not gluing multiple ideas to present a coherent standpoint. What we really should do, is to tell our story.
  • Pour the inner book onto the listener, and by doing this we perceive the situation under unusual light. We can change our understanding upside down. And this is a great thing to happen.
    • Listen to yourself, not the book. Of course, the book provides the momentum for further thinking, but we have to listen to ourselves.
    • The same is, as said before, true for writing. A good writing is always personal and intimate, that what is interesting to read.
  • Hence, if by some chance we confused the facts about the book, that’s not a big deal, but if we lied about ourselves, if we weren’t true about what we feel and really think, then we betrayed ourselves.
• Books are a personal shrink, whose only function is to lift a constraint his patient has.
  • Allowing by doing it the expansion of mentee’s creativeness.
  • It’s hard because we are taught out of the creativity. Ken Robinson had been right all along.

📚 Related Books and notes

• 2000 words. The best way to read is not to read