Purpose
- Enjoyment
- Learn ideas and skills.
Choosing what to read
Whatever the purpose, some works are more suitable than others. Recommendations of connoiseurs are paramount.
General knowledge
News is described elsewhere.
Course-notes posted on the websites of university instructors and encyclopedias like the wikipedia are very useful in getting some good knowledge.
Research papers
Theses are often more detailed and friendly than journal papers. Journal papers are often better written than conference papers. Single author papers are usually more carefully written. So, reading them in great depth is a good way to enter a field.
Focii
Focus on ideas
In general, one must read books/ passages with the intention of mining it for problems, ideas and knowledge, and for training the brain in solution strategies, not to read it from cover to cover. So, ignore unimportant information.
Given a research paper, one must get to the interesting information as rapidly as possible.
Focus on word-smithery
Sentence level focus is sensible in rare cases: eg: relishing exquisite word-smithery.
Focii in reading fiction
One may focus on various ways of being (character, intellect, desires, behavior), uncommon circumstances (physical laws) and socio-economic-political conditions. One may compare these characters and conditions with those observed in actual life.
Parsing and understanding
History
Comprehending passages reached a peak while preparing for the GRE general test. There reading comprehension questions tested ability to determine the general purpose of a given passage, find answer to specific questions using information presented, make (and critique) inferences (verbal reasoning).
Write while reading!
Read with writing material. Make notes. Copy (after OCR-ing) the article into your notes and start annotating it. This has become a favored technique since the advent of note taking on internet/ computer.
Seeking ideas
Grossness and separation
To seek ideas efficiently and effectively, one needs to view the material at various levels of grossness. For this reason, it is important to maintain some distance from the text.
Getting an overview
Some portions of the text offer a more high level view than others. These ought to be read first.
Eg: The abstract and concluding paragraphs of an article, the first and last sentences of a paragraph. Sentences marked by structure indicators/ transition words like ’although’ and ’but’.
Determine structure from titles first. Glance at figures and captions.
Repeated summarization
Summarize to yourself repeatedly to understand and remember what the passage is trying to say. Don’t just verify correctness, ask “Why?”. Guess the author’s motives whilst reading. (Eg: Why did he choose that value for the interval?)
Understand the author
The author’s viewpoint, which may be different from the ideas you identify, is often important and informative.
To understand this viewpoint, observe where the author spends much of his time, how the text builds up support for a certain bunch of ideas.
One flaw is to be fooled by red-herrings - ideas which are not central to the author’s thesis.
Iterative Progress
Reading someone’s deep work can be overwhelming. It is important to not let this happen. Find one small idea to conquer and digest at a time, and conquer it. Then repeat.
To ensure steady progress, keep track of your current position in the book/ article, so that you may continue from that point at a later date: One can recollect forgotten knowledge using one’s notes.
Considering ideas
Interestingness
Pick one of the ideas the author is trying to communicate, see if you are interested in it. Repeat this until you find an interesting idea.
Understandability
Check if the interesting idea is something you can understand by attempting to understand it. If you cannot understand the idea, determine what prerequisites you must satisfy to be able to understand it. If you are so inclined, satisfy the prerequisites and repeat this step with that idea.
Grok significance of ideas
Read examples/ counterexamples or find your own. Simulate operations in toy models to understand general relationships.
Consider relationships with previous knowledge. Besides being very natural and enjoyable, such exercises and associations ensure that the brain does better at retaining important information.
Dealing with dense passages
Read with writing material. Complicated passages may require diagrams and external symbol manipulation to understand. Also, while reading mathematics, writing the important parts and leaving out the fluff helps immensely. Also, tracing mathematical formulae, which are dense in information, ensures that all essential information is noticed.
Considering the ideas presented themselves is described elsewhere.
Graphical process
In each sentence/ paragraph, scan for important entities (nouns which are objects, subjects, actors) and actions(verbs).
Understand the relationship amongst these entities by visualizing them as a graph. This can be a slow process.
Signs of understanding, retention
Writing short summaries and doing exercises for the purpose of retention are described elsewhere. This can be interleaved with the process of parsing.