What’s the opportunity cost? Almost always, I suspect I am better off reading books I haven’t read than books I have.
Reading books without memorizing them is silly unless your aims in reading do not require long-term retention of the books’ contents.
Hmm. I’m very good at daisy-chaining along ideas- that is, if someone mentions an idea from a book I read a decade ago, I probably remember it (even though it might need a bit of dusting off). It’s not clear to me rereading idea books like that would be helpful for me.
There are two classes of books that I have reread frequently. The first is fiction I cherish; I read Watership Down so many times that when rereading it I would flip to a random page in the book and go from there, knowing I would instantly remember where it was in relation to everything else. The second are skill books for skills I’m actively developing; I read How To Win Friends and Influence People every year (it’s short) because I expect that as my social skills develop I’ll engage with the book on a different level. (Many of the more studious Christians I know will read the Bible through every year over the course of that year, and there are many daily devotional plans that accomplish that goal.)
The main thing I’m noticing is that this only makes sense for high-value passages. I own ~30 feet of books; if I wanted to reread everything I owned over the next year, that would take me about 6 hours of reading a day. Boiling each book down to a few pages might work better- so perhaps this would work with taking notes on books you read, and putting the notes into spaced repetition so you reread those. But it’s not clear that would actually help with long-term recall of facts contained within those books, rather than just making you a better librarian.
In the second case, skill books, I could expect great benefit of throwing those into SRS. Reading a self-help book and constantly forgetting to apply the principles is probably one of the reasons why people fail at self-help. Priming oneself to notice opportunities using SRS seems sound.
What’s the opportunity cost? Almost always, I suspect I am better off reading books I haven’t read than books I have.
Hmm. I’m very good at daisy-chaining along ideas- that is, if someone mentions an idea from a book I read a decade ago, I probably remember it (even though it might need a bit of dusting off). It’s not clear to me rereading idea books like that would be helpful for me.
There are two classes of books that I have reread frequently. The first is fiction I cherish; I read Watership Down so many times that when rereading it I would flip to a random page in the book and go from there, knowing I would instantly remember where it was in relation to everything else. The second are skill books for skills I’m actively developing; I read How To Win Friends and Influence People every year (it’s short) because I expect that as my social skills develop I’ll engage with the book on a different level. (Many of the more studious Christians I know will read the Bible through every year over the course of that year, and there are many daily devotional plans that accomplish that goal.)
The main thing I’m noticing is that this only makes sense for high-value passages. I own ~30 feet of books; if I wanted to reread everything I owned over the next year, that would take me about 6 hours of reading a day. Boiling each book down to a few pages might work better- so perhaps this would work with taking notes on books you read, and putting the notes into spaced repetition so you reread those. But it’s not clear that would actually help with long-term recall of facts contained within those books, rather than just making you a better librarian.
In the second case, skill books, I could expect great benefit of throwing those into SRS. Reading a self-help book and constantly forgetting to apply the principles is probably one of the reasons why people fail at self-help. Priming oneself to notice opportunities using SRS seems sound.