Goals of reading for me

I have three goals when reading:

  1. effecient referencing
  2. effective retention and sharing of knowledge
  3. enjoyment

My process prioritizes effeciency of “re-reads” or referring to where I learned something and less about reading most efficiently. I don’t tend to skim too often, but I’m definitely not afraid to skim through parts in non-fiction books if I feel something is there mostly for “fluff”.

Reading for me is a balance of these three things and they do compete with each other. The most effecient way for me to read and take notes is reading on the Kindle App on my iPad and exporting my raw highlights to my notes, but this isn’t as enjoyable for me as a physical book. I love sniffing physical books!!!

850 books in a lifetime

I first started thinking about how many books I’ll be able to read in my lifetime after reading a friend’s post. After doing a bit of rough math, I calculated that I’ll probably be able to read something like 850 books in my lifetime if I continue reading at roughly the same pace that I do today. Here’s the equation I used.

I assumed that I would stop reading age 70 (don’t ask why). 70 felt like an age where reading maybe would be less about gaining knowledge and more for pure enjoyment and I’d probably stop keeping track of what I read, who knows.

yearlyConsumptionRate_1: my current, non-retired, consumption rate which is about 15 books.

yearlyConsumptionRate_2: an estimated retirement reading rate. I assumed a book a week, so 52 books.

((retirementAge - currentAge) * yearlyConsumptionRate_1) + ((70 - retirementAge) * yearlyConsumptionRate_2)

((65-26)*15))+((70-65)*52)=845

My process

This process is mostly for non-fiction reading. Fictional reading focuses more on enjoyment and extrapolating themes and lessons.

1. Highlight

While reading a book, I will highlight things. Non-fiction books now often have quite a bit of “fluff” to meet publisher requirements. I view highlighting as stripping away what I consider fluff. I want to be able to re-read a book by reading my highlights and referring back to a part of the book only if I want more context.

In physical books, if there is a particular highlight that I don’t want to miss when writing a post for this site, I will fold the corner of the page.

2. Handwrite Notes

Notes for me can either be summarizations of a particular thing I’ve read, a verbatim text or a thought or question that popped in my head after reading something.

I started reading non-fiction for enjoyment when I was in Detroit — so roughly 2017. This is where I developed my process for handwritten notes. Taking physical notes while reading books was what really helped me fall in love with reading because I could refer to my takeaways really easy in future conversations with people. I started by exlusively taking notes in a physical notebook with fountain pens. This didn’t change much until I purchased an iPad Air 4th generation in November of 2020. This physical notetaking process was a very enjoyable process as I love writing with and using fountain pens. It forces me to slow done just a bit more as I appreciate the shading of the ink.

The iPad changed my reading process in many ways. From how I read, take and sync notes and write these posts. The iPad is either used for highlighting in digital books or for writing personal notes in digital form on GoodNotes 5 for physical books. Since I mentioned GoodNotes, I’ll explain why I chose that over Notability at the time as well as other key apps for my workflow.

iPad Apps

Readwise, Readwise, READWISE

Readwise has been a huge gamechanger and positive improvement in my reading process. I use it for syncing Kindle and browser highlights to my “personal database” which was Notion, but is now Obsidian (thanks Jon F.!). I mention Notion only to highlight Readwise’s support for exporting or syncing with Notion.

To be more specific, this is the process I use to sync my Kindle highlights with Readwise. I don’t refer to these synced notes until after I’ve finished a book.

It’s great because there is an official Readwise-Obsidian sync plugin and it allows you to format the markdown for highlights which makes it super efficient to then copy to a static site generator that uses markdown like Hugo (what I use).

Oreilly’s Safari Books Online

I use the Safari Books Online app for reading tech books. It has good support for highlighting and exporting highlights. I make all of my highlights public so that I can refer people to my highlights without having to export them and upload them to my site. I don’t want to rely on just making my highlights public because they “own” my highlight data and if I decide to stop paying for a subscription, “whoosh”, highlights gone.

The process for exporting highlights isn’t great. It’s manual, but I haven’t spent much time focused on improving it yet. I mostly follow this process for syncing to Readwise after finishing a book. I wrote a little bash script that paginates the Oreilly highlights and downloads them to a file. However, there isn’t and official importer or sync mechanism with Readwise, so I have to email them to add@readwise.io.

GoodNotes 5

I chose GoodNotes because I knew I was primarily going to use it for handwritten notetaking from physical books. At the time of making the decision, GoodNotes 5 was praised for its ability to index and therefore search handwritten text.

In addition to using GoodNotes for handwritten notes, I use it for reading and annotating PDFs. I even export Google Docs as PDFs and annotate them sometimes.

Obsidian

I use Obsidian for all of my personal typed note taking which I do entirely in markdown. I could write an entire post on why I chose Obsidian. I bought pretty deep into Notion for a while, but abadoned it mostly because I wanted to “own” my data and due to Notion’s not-quite Markdown nature. I also tried, Bear, Drafts, iAwriter, SimpleNotes, StandardNotes and probably a few that I’m forgetting.

Blink.sh

I’m not going to go into too much detail in this post because I’ll probably write an entirely separate post on the topic of using my iPad for programming. In short, it’s similar to Fatih Arslan’s setup that he documents here. That’s definitely where I got the inspiration for my setup.

3. Post to mccurdyc.dev/books

I use Hugo as my static site generator. I try to cut as much as possible from my highlights to get to my key takeaways from a book so that others can quickly skim and get the gist of a book if they want.

If there is a book that I either didn’t enjoy that much (usually I’ll stop reading it) or didn’t have the time to invest in reducing my highlights, I’ll post my highlights verbatim.

Why don’t I just publish Obsidian pages?

What about audiobooks? Or podcasts?

To be honest, I’ve only briefly tried audiobooks. Because while they are super effecient to get through a book, it’s much harder to take notes because you often aren’t focused on reading when you are listening to an audiobook or podcast, you are trying to multi-task — whether it be while mowing, running, vacuuming, etc. — and as soon as I identify something I want to note down and I am trying to keep it summarized in my head to write down, I don’t focus on the rest of the content and I get mad when I try to fumble around to write it down quickly while mowing, etc. It just doesn’t work for me right now.

For a short bit for podcasts I used Airr because there is a means to sync with Readwise. I don’t remember why I stopped using it other than I haven’t been listening to podcasts as much lately and because I pay for Spotify.