[1-2-Read] Stop Wasting Money On Books You Won't Read

Learn how to skim a book before you buy it (non-fiction)

This is another repost of the 1-2-Read newsletter for paid subscribers. Leave me any feedback below, and I’ll decide on the next issue’s topic based on your suggestions. Thank you for your support, and we’ll be back next Friday for our regular columns.

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(1) The Idea: How To Skim a Book Systematically

Books.

We know what they are, what they look like and how smug we look when we read them in public. Yet, sometimes even those who claim to be book lovers don’t really know what to do with a book when they pick it up.

Should we crack open the book to a random page? Should we look at the table of contents first? Read the preface? These are questions most beginner readers ignore, and as a result, they’re stuck with their default habits, which usually sends them down the wrong path of reading from page i of the preface to the last period of the epilogue.

However, as you’ll learn after reading this issue, reading every book from cover to cover might be the dumbest thing that only adds to a vanity metric. Because more often than not, determining whether or not a book is worth your time is more than half of the battle. Today, we’ll address a skill that’ll help you sort out the quarks from the quacks: Inspectional Reading.

Objection, Your Honour. Aren’t You Just Complicating Reading?

My comment sections are full of people who accuse me of complicating something simple. “Just open to a page and read! There’s nothing complicated about it,” seems to be the common consensus. But in my experience, all these claims that reading should be intuitive are either from people who already know how to do it or from (In Alexander Pope’s words) “bookful blockheads” who have “ignorantly read” a lot of books without taking anything in.

I’m going to kindly ignore the latter group with “loads of learned lumber” in their heads and address those who were fortunate enough to have learned how to read already. Realise that already knowing how to read is a massive privilege, and note that sometimes what seems intuitive is a result of practising reading a bunch in high school and university. For most people, unfortunately, this whole reading a book business isn’t common sense yet. It requires some drills and guidance before it becomes second nature.

Also, just because you picked up a trick or two from university, don’t assume that you have it all figured out. As a former thesis-writing, library-lurking book sniffer, I can tell you that I’m still unlearning a bunch of bad habits I picked up from my education. I continue to rummage through those boring Reference sections of bookshops because this skill called reading needs to be recalibrated from time to time.

So for this week’s post, I’m going to walk through all the components of Inspectional Reading in details that might seem unnecessary, but the trick here is to practice them until they become second nature; until you can also boast to someone new to reading: “Just crack to a page and read, man!”

0: Inspecting, In a Nutshell

Inspectional reading is exactly what it says on the tin: inspecting a book before you dive in. This achieves two things: 1. Getting a general overview of the book before you read it in depth, and 2. Determining whether or not the book is worth your time.

Now, being general here is the whole point. We’ve tackled this in our weekly column here, but the gist is that sometimes you don’t need to understand everything right off the bat. An inspection should give you just enough so you can either shelf the book or decide to read it in depth a second time.

Assuming that you’ve read this week’s column, here’s a finer distinction: there are two types of inspectional reading.

Type 1 is Superficial Reading. Again, this is quite a simple practice to adopt, and we’ve already addressed it here.

But type 2 is usually ignored, and it’s called Systematic Skimming. I stole this straight from Dr. Adler, and it is a wonderful guideline for selecting the right books, or for people who pick up a book and have no idea what to do with it. Let’s start with something simple:

1: A book is a book is a book is a book