Do You Consume Non-Fiction Books for Quality or Quantity?

00:00:05.000 | Our next question comes from JJ, who asks, "When reading nonfiction books, do you suggest reading for quality or quantity?"

00:00:17.000 | Well, both, depending on the book.

00:00:21.000 | That's the typical way I do it. Depending on what the book is and what I'm trying to get out of it

00:00:26.000 | will dictate how carefully I go through it. It will dictate whether I am marking it up with my annotation

00:00:32.000 | so I can come back later to extract insight, and if I am marking it, it will dictate to what level of detail

00:00:38.000 | I am making those marks. So, for example, earlier in this particular show, I talked about the books I had read this month.

00:00:46.000 | So one of the books I read in there was a relatively academic tome called "Moralizing Technology."

00:00:52.000 | This was a book on digital ethics where I really wanted to understand this somewhat complex philosophy.

00:00:57.000 | I read that slow, and it was very carefully annotated. I'm marking off passages, I'm numbering things,

00:01:03.000 | I was adding notes to the margin. That same month, I also read a book called "Why We Get Sick."

00:01:10.000 | On a whim, I'd heard the author interviewed. It was a book about insulin resistance and healthy eating.

00:01:15.000 | I didn't annotate it at all. I just said, "This would be interesting," and I read that pretty quickly.

00:01:19.000 | I read a lot, and I got some tidbits out of it, and it was a good thing to read, but it really was something

00:01:24.000 | that I was moving quickly through. So I would say the book itself and the purpose that it's going to play

00:01:31.000 | in your life should dictate how slowly you read it, how carefully you take notes, how seriously you take

00:01:37.000 | that experience, and with that in mind, you should have a real mix. Moving back and forth between really hard books

00:01:43.000 | and more breezy, pragmatic nonfiction books, though in a novel here and there, I think that diversity

00:01:48.000 | of reading types is going to support a much larger throughput of actual reading.