How to Read a Book

What Hacker News says

1. oldsklgdfthOct 2026
   Add to that how to do so through reading[0]. If you get through this book and skim through the reading list at the end you’ll end up with a good chunk of a liberal arts education.

   [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book

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2. helterskelterAug 2026
   There are two books people ITT may be interested in: How to Read a Book (a classic that everyone should read), and Make It Stick. The latter goes over the current state of learning research and it's helped me out, but both of them complement each other pretty well. As far as our current understanding of learning goes, the following is about the most effective way to approach it:

   - Engage with what you're reading. Ask yourself what the key ideas are, which ideas are new to you, how you would define them, and how they relate to other ideas you already understand.

   - Test yourself. Do the excercises at the end of a textbook chapter. Create your own questions and answer them. Quiz yourself at least once a week (on both new and old material). Check your answers and correct yourself (if you were wrong, how, and why?). Use flashcards with a spaced repetition regime (like Anki)

   - Focus on your retrieval. Avoid looking things up unless you really have to. Each time you recall something you've learned, you reinforce it.

   - Your first encounter with new information may need a small interval of just a few minutes or hours, but you should gradually increase the interval periods between quizzes/flashcards on something. The longer you go between recalling something the more it gets reinforced because you have to work harder for it. Build up gradually.

   - Use what you got wrong in quizzes or flashcards to identify what needs work.

   - Focus on the material you get wrong, but don't totally neglect things you feel comfortable with.

   - Basically, use Anki/spaced repetition.

   - Take some time between study sessions and quizzing. (I think of studying like kneading dough, you need to let your brain relax some before you work it some more).

   - When studying a subject, interleave different but related topics.

   - Topics should be complementary and reinforce one another so that insights from one lead to insights in the other. Examples: calculus and rocketry. Spherical trig and astronomy or celestial navigation. German idealism and eastern philosophy. Etc.

   - Once you have a rudimentary grasp of a new type of problem, move onto something new, but make sure to return to this type of problem periodically. (Basically, add this type of problem to your flashcard deck). Don't worry about mastering one type of problem so you can do it your sleep before moving to the next thing.

   Some other key things:

   - Elaboration: Relate material to what you already know. Explain it in your own words. Visualize it. Imagine it in different contexts (if you're learning calculus, imagine your speed and acceleration while biking in hilly terrain in terms of derivatives, etc).

   - Generation: Attempt to answer a problem before you know the solution. This excercises your creativity and gets you looking for similarities to other types of problems you already understand. Before reading new material, make a quick summary of what you expect to learn and how it will relate to your prior knowledge.

   - Reflection: take a few minutes to reflect on what you've learned that day. What went well? What could have gone better? What other knowledge or experience does this remind you of? What do you need to work on? Etc.

   - Calibration: you need an objective measure of what you do and do not understand. Humans are pretty bad at gauging this for themselves without some sort of external measure. This gets back to flashcards.

   - Consider using some mnemonic devices. They can be very effective.

   - When reading a textbook, don't bother with crazy highlighter schemes. Research shows it doesn't really help. Neither does reading textbook material more than maybe twice unless you have a particular point you're confused about. What does help is spaced repetition and summarizing the material in your own words.

   This all sounds like a lot of effort, but one of the key things to remember is that learning is effort. Struggle is basically necessary for your brain to optimize and form new connections, or even to reinforce old ones, and if you aren't struggling you're probably just doing what your brain is already optimized for, which means you probably aren't learning much.

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3. treetalkerAug 2026
   > I'm probably not in the position of educating teenagers as my life has not been a success.

   Not true! The OP should learn not only about (and from) models but also anti-models!

   Addressing OP:

   On anti-models, read NN Taleb's books (the Incerto) and Charlie Munger (his speech on inversion / thinking about what you would do, and how you would do it, in order to ensure a miserable life — and then not doing those things). Read statements from the elderly / terminally ill about what they regret having done or not done in their lifetimes.

   A lesson I wish I had learned at your age: for most things in life, B– quality or "80% of the perfect performance/solution" is almost always more than enough, and can be accomplished quickly. (E.g., it's easy and fast to sweep the floor so that it's mostly clean / 80% of optimal cleanliness. You feel better about your surroundings, you clear your head, and fewer future problems arise.) This is the 80/20 principle at work. Get to 80% on everything fast, and then only spend time polishing/perfecting what really matters. (I was raised in a perfectionist family/environment/culture — to my detriment, in many ways.) Similarly, it's OK (and probably beneficial) to do most of your workout sessions (~80%!) at 80% effort. You don't need to go HAM / 6th gear all the time.

   Learn that questions are often more important than answers. And learn to ask better questions.

   Learn basic probability and expected value, and apply those principles to your own daily life. It's easy to do several times a day in normal situations.

   Learn to take (and avoid) repeated, small actions in order to put yourself in a slightly better position with regard to your future. (Increase your optionality; take repeated beneficial actions.) Pick up that dirty cup on your way to the kitchen. Don't drink two beers every day. Don't smoke.

   Ask yourself: "If I do (or avoid doing) this same thing 1,000 times (or days) in a row, where will I end up?" (That helps you develop consistency and the habit of repeated actions/practice, and it magnifies the effects of your daily choices.)

   Remind yourself: "What I do today, I do every day. What I do now, I choose to do every time I have the choice."

   Read real books, not Internet stuff. Read particularly from (long) before 2022 (avoid LLM-generated text). Read as much as you can and develop a maintainable note-taking system.

   Learn other languages and read the greatest books from other countries, cultures, and eras.

   Taleb's general rule is not to read anything written in the last 10 years. Take that with a grain of salt.

   On reading (and not reading) books in general, and in a meta-reading sense, I strongly urge you to read How to Read a Book (by Adler & Doren) and How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (by Pierre Bayard).

   You'll also find no shortage of suggested reading and lists of books of all sorts here on HN.

   Daily exercise, good eating, sleep, hygiene, and overall mental health and self-care are table stakes. Personally, I've found that my optimal amount of physical activity is much higher than one would think: 2–3 hours per day, 5–6 days per week. (That's my experience, not a prescription for you.) Taking care of myself has required life- and work-organization choices and sacrifices to make it happen. Everything is about trade-offs.

   The most important thing is that it's better to consistently practice implementing a single piece of advice than to collect or merely think about or imagine implementing lists of advice. You'll find lots of great advice everywhere. But EXECUTION IS EVERYTHING.

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4. dredmorbiusJul 2026
   I'd split this question into a set of parts:

   - Why to read?

   - How to read (from a literary / skills perspective)?

   - What to read: authors, topics, books, etc?

   - How to read (practice / technology)?

   Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book addresses most of the first three questions, and ... would be a good book to read itself. For an overview of it:

   <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book> (Wikipedia)

   <https://archive.org/details/howtoreadabook1940edition/page/n...> (Fully online copy, 1940 edition).

   Adler starts of with the whys: entertainment, information, understanding, and syntopical (mastery). I'd add to his list reading for reading, whether that's to build the habit itself, or to increase your own skills in your first or additional languages. To which I'd only add: understand why you want to read, or are reading, and if you wish to remain with that motivation or seek others.

   In how he discusses the different types and levels of reading, from skimming to deep analysis. These both suit different goals (whys), and demand very different levels of intention and attention.

   For both these sections I'd strongly recommend you read Adler's own discussion, though there's a good overview in a Farnham Street blog post on the book: <https://fs.blog/how-to-read-a-book/> (itself discussed briefly at HN <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26450303>).

   As to what to read, beyond the extent to which that's addressed in the "why" and "how" discussion, Adler includes a list of 300 or so significant works which would make a good starting ground for general background.

   For myself, I've used various sets of recommendations, including literary awards and recommendations at websites, as well as starting with a question, looking for books on those topics, and then heavily mining bibliographies and citations (the former: works cited by what I'm reading, the latter citations of the work I've read) for further exploration. Past a point, finding material worth reading actually does become a challenge, despite the tremendous volume of published works (hundreds of thousands to a million or more books through much of the 20th century and beyond).

   On how to read: I'm fond of physical books, but a bookreader (e-ink if possible) is an excellent way to carry a large (thousands or more volumes) of books, and audiobooks are quite accessible. I've had mixed experiences with Onyx BOOX --- the displays are wonderful, but as with most e-book readers on device organisation of a large library is ... poorly supported. Physical device reliability and support through the vendor have been more recent frustrations. And I'm increasingly not a fan of Android in any form (the BOOX devices run a de-Googled Android). I'm not aware of anything markedly better, unfortunately. I would recommend the largest device you can comfortably carry, with 8--10" probably being the sweet spot. Smaller devices are more portable, but really don't support written material particularly well.

   For audiobooks, Librivox (https://librivox.org/), public library apps such as Libby and Hoopla, and government-supported programmes such as the US Library of Congress National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled (NLS/BARD: <https://www.loc.gov/nls/> and <https://www.loc.gov/nls/services-and-resources/catalog-and-b...>) are all excellent options. The NLS/BARD service is free to qualified individuals, and includes not only over 300,000 audiobook titles (plus Braille), but free apps (iOS, Android) and physical e-book readers. If you or someone you know has visual or reading disabilities, and you live in the US or a territory, do check it out. A medical professional (doctor, optometrist, nurse, or other) can provide an eligibility statement. See <https://www.loc.gov/nls/services-and-resources/catalog-and-b...>.

   Upshot: figure out why you want to read and what. Adler's a good source on the how (there are other guides, including similarly titled ones). Books are all over, in meatspace, libraries, online, etc. Figure out how you prefer to (or need to) read. And then just get into it.

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5. loughnaneJul 2026
   > I hit my reading peak when I was eleven or twelve.

   This has long been the way. Mortimer Adler pointed out in the 70s (at the latest) that reading instruction (ie how to extract meaning from marks on a page) doesn’t really advance after 6th grade. After that we still give kids harder things to read, but scarcely provide them with strategies.

   His How to read a book was an attempt at filling in the gap. It’s one of my favorite books.

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6. colechristensenJul 2026
   My favorite part of How to Read a Book is how it classifies books into books worth skimming over, books worth reading each word exactly once, and books worith studying and actively engaging with in depth.

   How to Read a Book is definitely worth skimming, but it is quite repetitive and filled with unnecessary volume. It would get the job done at 1/10th the length.

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