The Art of Selective Reading

Strategies for Choosing and Consuming Books That Matter

A cozy, lamp lit reading chair surrounded by books.

Your intentions when starting a book are often wrong or completely misaligned with your goals.

To remedy this we need to walk through three easy steps.

First, you need to answer a couple questions:

1. What are you interested in right now?
2. What do you want to get out of a specific book?

If we don’t know how a book relates to our interests or what we want to get out of it, we are wasting an enormous amount of time.

Answering the above questions leads you to three very important facts:

1. You need to align your reading to your goals
2. You might not want to start a book at the start
3. You may need to give up on a book

Let’s go through these each and especially highlight the huge pitfall people make with setting reading intentions.

You need to align your reading to your goals

This is where metacognition comes in.

Metacognition is the awareness of one’s own understanding. Typically you read to fill some perceived gap in our knowledge.

You therefore need to know (a) what that gap is and (b) identify which books can help us bridge it.

Once you know what you need to understand, dig deep on finding the best books that could help you understand a specific topic. Read Reddit discussions, Good Reads recommendations, and whatever you can find until you see common books come up.

Look at what the recommended books cite as sources. Do whatever it takes to find the best materials on the subject.

Do one final spot check — are these the books that are going to help me achieve my goals?

Once you find the right books, keep in mind that not all book sections are going to answer your questions.

You might not want to start at the start

Maybe you want a general overview on a topic.

If that’s the case, starting at the start makes sense (assuming the book you’ve selected cover this topic mostly).

More than likely you’ll want to understand something buried deep in the book. To know where the information you’re looking for is, you need to read the following sections:

• Table of Contents — This will likely give you all the info you need on whether what you’re looking for is in the book
• Intro — Voice is important. If you find an author’s voice annoying or the language too clunky (or beyond your current skillset), you’ll never finish it.
• First Chapter — This is where the core themes of the book is introduced. Reading this gives you a good foundation and also the greatest understanding of what a book’s about. It’ll also help if you start jumping around in the book after.

The above takes 20 minutes tops. Read through each of these sections for a different book each day.

Write down what the book could be helpful with and if it’s helpful for anything right now. If not, file it away.

You may need to give up on the book

Most of us think we have an intention when we start a book.

The most common intention is universal and wrong. It is to complete a book.

This dangerous pitfall has a number of downsides:

1. The book might be horrid
2. The book might not meet the goal
3. The book might include a bunch of junk that distracts from what we want to get from it.

Continually check every book against your goals and what you’re trying to get out of it. If it ever starts failing to deliver, ditch it.