Comment by dredmorbius

4 days ago

There are strategies you can employ for this. Many are spelled out in an HN fave, How to Read a Book (1940), by Mortimer J. Adler (<https://archive.org/details/howtoreadabook1940edition>, Wikipedia: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book>). It describes both types of books (fiction, instructive, and others), levels of reading, and specific reading strategies.

You can also pre-digest many such books in audio form (increasingly using what are now fairly powerful and tolerable text-to-speech tools), and dive in to read specific passages of note.

Because there's a formula to the book structure, you'll often find theory/overview / solutions presented in the introductory and concluding chapters or sections, with the mid-bulk section largely consisting of illustrations. There's an exceptionally ill-conceived notion that 1) one must finish all books one begins and 2) one must read all of a book. Neither of these are true, and I find books most usefully engaged as conversations with an author (books are conversations over time, telecoms are communications over space), and to read with a view to addressing specific goals: understanding of specific topics / problems / solutions, etc. This can cut your overall interaction with tedious works.

There's also of course a huge marketing dynamic to book publishing on which one of the best treatments is Arthur Schopenhauer's "On Authorship": (trans. 1897)

... Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen, as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curse; for every author degenerates as soon as he begins to put pen to paper in any way for the sake of gain. The best works of the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write for nothing or for very little. And here, too, that Spanish proverb holds good, which declares that honor and money are not to be found in the same purse—honora y provecho no caben en un saco. The reason why Literature is in such a bad plight nowadays is simply and solely that people write books to make money. A man who is in want sits down and writes a book, and the public is stupid enough to buy it. The secondary effect of this is the ruin of language. ...