My way of reading books

After my latest article about the reading more books fallacy. It was clear that I don’t try to read lot of books in short periods of time. Or maximize the number of books I read in a given time. I read books slowly. And try to get the maximum info from them.

I’ll present you how I do it. But keep in mind this this only works for non-fiction books.


I’ll summarize my way in a sentence:

I read each chapter in the book twice. The first time to discover it. The second to take notes.

Ahmed EL AZZABI

I read a book chapter by chapter. Like everyone. The difference is, I read each chapter a second time, to take notes.

I don’t want to take notes in the first read, because I feel I’m discovering things. If I want to highlight ideas, I’ll probably highlight everything. The second time I feel I have a bigger understanding of the whole chapter. And more likely to highlight the best parts.

Speaking about highlighting. I don’t take notes using a marker. I want to keep my books clean. And if I give them to someone, I don’t want my ideas to bias their understanding. I use a flags index tabs (I never knew their name until I was writing this).

Finally, it’s probably clear now that I only read printed books. I tried PDFs and digital ones. I didn’t like them. So I’m sticking to printed books for now.

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Responses to “My way of reading books”

  1. Gina

    That’s a great idea. I’ll do that cheaper by chapter too!

  2. Paperback books – Ahmed

    […] highlighting, up until a few weeks ago, I was using flags index tabs. I even talked about them in my prior post about my way of reading books. But I’m using them rarely […]

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