Surgical Reading: How to Read 12 Books at Once

Author: Brian Tobal (Superorganizers, ed. Dan Shipper) URL: https://superorganizers.substack.com/p/surgical-reading-how-to-read-12-books One-line: Non-fiction reading reframed as extraction — “map” a book in ~15 minutes via cover, index, TOC, and preface, pull out the knowledge nuggets you actually need, and let curiosity (not a to-do list) drive what you finish.

Highlights #Reading #Books

• It’s always a little awkward when people ask what I’m reading, because usually it’s about a dozen books at once.
• It’s a process I’ve developed called Surgical Reading and it means that when I’m reading a non-fiction book, I focus on locating and removing the most valuable pieces of information from it quickly as possible. This allows me to read many different books across a single topic at once, so I can look at it from multiple perspectives. My goal is to quickly locate valuable knowledge and use the information I acquire in the real world to solve problems. #Reading
• Reading shouldn’t be about checking titles off of a todo list, it should be an exploration of what fascinates you.
• Finally, it transforms books into something more active and less passive. My library has gone from a storage space to something that’s alive, something that I’m constantly interacting with.
• I don’t build a Knowledge base just to have knowledge. I build it to use it. Typically as soon as I can.
• Here’s a breakdown of how I go about reading a book:
  • Approach a book
  • Judge a book by its cover
  • The index is everything
  • Use the TOC as the skeleton
  • Preview with the preface
• The point of this process is to gain the ability to “map out” any book in ~ 15 minutes. You want to walk away with a sense of where the valuable knowledge is located, what interests you, and how much time you want to devote to reading it.
• Again, I’m typically not interested in reading the book start to finish, and so if I’m going to remove the information I need, I need to locate it first. What I want is a map (either mentally or written out) of what the book is about. You can use your built in brain memory, a notecard, a Google Doc, or some fancy-pants note-taking system as the capture mechanism—you make you happy here.
• The Index is Everything
• Look through the index, notice what topics are covered, and more importantly, at what depth. If an author is spending a good deal of pages on something, make a note of that topic.
• Any time something in the index interests me, I’ll write it down. I do this on a physical notecard or in a document. So, by the end of reading the index I’ll have all of the most interesting and relevant pieces of information in one place.
• Do this for a few minutes. Build a rough map in your mind of the book. It’s sort of like connecting the dots between the chapter titles in the TOC and the topics and page numbers listed in the index.
• All of the above takes 5-15 minutes and is really a simplified version of “inspectional reading,” popularized by Adler and van Doren, which is just a more methodological skimming or “pre-reading” process.
• Once we’ve answered the question of what the book is about, the remaining question—and indeed the main question—remains. Do you care? If not, throw the notecard in the front pages somewhere (for future reference) and toss the book back on the shelf. Maybe, if you are interested in knowing more, spend an hour or two reading some of the sections that interest you. For instance, with Homo Deus, I’m likely to read a few index points and the final chapter on Dataism.
• But, before I do any of that, I always skim the preface.
• Maybe the author makes a point you never thought of, and you become more interested. Follow that instinct.
• Skimming is my friend—I don’t need to memorize or meditate too deeply on it. It’s mostly just to make sure my mental map is on the money.
• There are a lot of books out there, and I don’t have the time to get through them all. So when I’m investing time in reading, I want to keep curiosity in the driver’s seat and not let it slip out the back door
• Forcing myself to trudge through a boring book can put my reading habit at risk. #Quitting a book
• However, I typically pick up a book because I need to solve a problem, or I’m already interested in the topic. So, since there will be some useful knowledge nuggets within the chapters that I need, my goal now is to pull them out.
• If I’m not interested enough to read it from cover to cover, I’ll export the “knowledge nuggets” that I did find useful, throw the note card into the book, and put it on the shelf until interest or necessity brings me back. Having a system like this helps me know which books to bring back, and having this notecard map as a bookmark helps me find my way through the book again.
• The basic process is read, review, read, review. I do this to prime my memory with what I’ve learned in the past (maybe even just the day before) and I’ve found that it really helps me “knit” the book together in my mind.
• To start reading multiple books, I recommend using this technique across all of them, letting the indexes guide you. Feel free to stay in one for a while if you want to. Write notes, highlight words, or draw tiny cats everywhere…I mean the options are pretty limitless here.
• Regardless of how I’m reading—whether I’m reading one book from front to back, or reading multiple books across a topic— this process has changed my relationship to my library. It’s gone from something that I use to store books to something that I continually interact with and use in my day to day life to solve problems or push my thinking forward.

Connections

• Surgical Reading — the extraction-over-completion reading method this piece names.
• Quitting a book — the permission to abandon a boring book to protect the reading habit.
• Reading — curiosity-driven, problem-driven reading rather than to-do-list reading.
• Forget Forgetting. Build a Zettelkasten. / How to Never Lose Another Memory Again — the other Superorganizers reading/memory pieces from the same day.