Here’s What I Learned from Reading 5,000 pages in 8 weeks (and Getting Paid for It, too!)
It might be hard to believe, but following is the actual internship ad to which I responded in May:
Want to be paid to read fascinating nonfiction books? Join us at Blinkist!
For 8-12 weeks, you’ll read bestselling nonfiction books and take detailed notes. In addition to getting to read all day, we’ll teach you the scientifically proven most effective way to structure knowledge.
If you feel baffled right now, don’t worry: I did, too. What company could possibly pay someone to sit around and read all day? I wondered. It wasn’t that it didn’t sound good — it actually sounded great. So great that it was probably too good to be true. But two months later, I’m here to tell you that I may have found a bookworm’s dream job.
Here’s the challenge Blinkist gave me when I started as their summer content intern: every week I had to read two nonfiction books, analyze them, and take detailed notes (more about that here). Two months later, I’ve gone through sixteen incredibly diverse books published between 1532 and 2014 and annoyed all of my friends with fun facts about cyborgs and smart investment decisions as we face the possible death of the dollar. I also read a total of about 5,000 pages.
Having studied liberal arts, I’m no stranger to a flood of disparate new information. I’d eat theories of justice for breakfast, labor market reforms for lunch, and finish the day with climate change. Nevertheless, doing 5,000 pages of intensive reading in such a short time was a challenge. What’s most surprising to me is that despite the onslaught of new information, I remember an astonishing amount of what I read. I think there’s a good reason for that.
So, in honor of those people who might find my experience useful: 16 books, 8 weeks, and 5,000 pages later, here’s what I learned about reading, what makes a nonfiction book great, and how to get the most out of what you read — and remember it as well.
1. When you’re reading for information, there IS a right way to do it — and you probably haven’t used it before.
Before I started my summer reading odyssey I looked at books as objects of mystery: every page had been handcrafted by the author and skimming somehow felt like a sacrilege. But now I know that reading for information is a little different. Out of necessity, you focus on the essential, and the truth is that a lot of nonfiction books have a great deal of “filler” that you can skip without actually missing any of the important messages. Of course, skimming means you’ll miss something here and there, but the 80/20 rule describes it well: I’d say I covered approximately 80% of the content in 20% of the time needed to read every single sentence.
In their internship ad, Blinkist had promised to teach me in exchange for my reading work the “scientifically proven most effective way to structure knowledge.” Here’s what they had me do: first, I checked the background of the book (you can do this by reading the wikipedia entry or a goodreads entry). Then, I skimmed the book and picked out the key messages. Next, I read the book again and fleshed out each key message with supporting arguments and memorable examples. The rationale is that if you have identified the structure of a book in advance, you’ll know already what to look out for while reading. This trick also helps you remember a lot more.
2. Structure is critical for creating meaning.
Many best-selling nonfiction authors would probably fail a course in structural writing. Jared Diamond’s Collapse was just such a case. Don’t get me wrong: the message of the book is great and should be heard by many. Yet misleading chapter introductions, examples that take you far away from the original argument, and logical gaps in the middle of the book reduce the clarity of his arguments. Because I read so much, I got really good at detecting just such bad apples. When reading simply for entertainment I would never really care to validate a book’s structure, but when analyzing Collapse, I trusted that what Diamond told me in his introduction would be backed up by the content of the chapters. To understand my frustration, have a look at the book yourself and try finding all the mentioned causes for Montana’s problems.
Interestingly, the book is probably so popular among readers for its tendency to turn arguments into little stories. They are great to read, but did not necessarily help my mind to follow the overarching themes of the book. If we stick to the example of Collapse, it is simply not that important to read about the author’s personal relationship with Montana for 20 pages if you need to focus on the state’s structural problems.
At the end of the day, Diamond broke my trust by not sticking to the structure he promised me, which made reading the book both unsettling and far more difficult than it needed to be. Structure is massively helpful for a reader, but…
3. Good storytelling that evokes emotion actually helps you remember better
All the classics I read were clear in their structure and each page was content-heavy, but I had to look carefully to find examples and storytelling elements. I found that straightforward but dry books are hard to read quickly. Thus, analyzing 80 pages of The Prince ended up taking as long as going through the 400 pages of Matt Taibbi’s The Divide.
Reading for two months like it was my job (because it was), I was happy to encounter books rich in examples. If writers managed to build some suspense into their arguments, all the better — just so long as it was relevant for the point they were trying to make. The young sociologist Alice Goffman mastered the clarity/persuasion balancing act in her first publication On the Run. She based the arguments in her description of criminalized black youth in Philadelphia on the lives of real-life characters. I couldn’t put Goffman’s book down and felt devastated when finding out about the death of my favorite character (keep in mind, this is non-fiction!). What’s more, the book really stood out in my memory and I found myself mulling over a lot of the tough questions she tackled even when I wasn’t at work.
Memories
Which brings me to the fact that, even now, I remember way more than I ever would have guessed. Binge-drinking tends to lead to a blank memory the next morning, so I figured it might be similar for binge-reading. Not so. Without checking the books (pinky-swear) I can tell you that an ounce of gold should cost $17,500 to re-establish the gold standard and that Riverside County pays $100 to welfare-fraud whistleblowers.
And I’d like to point out that this is not normal for me. I usually immediately forget details of what I read. I’ve read many captivating novels in the past few years, but still suck at literary smalltalk, as I often cannot recall much more than the broad storyline. However, I’m pretty sure I could give a nice, on-the-spot verbal summary of all sixteen books to anyone interested. I know it sounds like I’ve drunk the Kool Aid, but I’m pretty convinced that my sudden memory improvement is, at least in part, thanks to that mythical “best way to structure knowledge” technique I used as I read.
Summer’s End
This summer, I’ve had a reader’s dream job. Overall, I’ve learned a lot. And it’s not just the information I got from the books that I’ll take away with me from this summer, but most of all, how to read them so I actually remember them in the future.
What my reading actually became with the help of Blinkist’s editorial team is blinks packs (they’re Blinkist’s mobile-phone summarized versions of nonfiction books). Here’s one I helped create. And if you want to read all day and be Blinkist’s next summer intern, say hi — they’re pretty friendly (and they have good snacks!).
