For those of you who claim to start and finish a book in a weekend, are you spending literally the entire weekend doing nothing by reading? Do you take breaks? Do you speed read? Do you take notes? What's your strategy?
For me, some books are much easier than others and that plays a big role in how fast I finish reading.
> are you spending literally the entire weekend doing nothing by reading?
For the most part, yes.
> Do you take breaks?
Yes.
> Do you speed read?
No.
> Do you take notes?
Usually I take notes on things that jump out at me while I read. I don't take a lot of notes. Maybe one note every ten pages or so.
> What's your strategy?
Stay off of reddit and hacker news. Instead of spending time on the internet in the mornings or if I feel board, I reach for the book I am trying to finish and I keep my phone somewhere it can't distract me. Very tempting to get distracted and start looking at your phone. Before you know it you're five pages deep on reddit and half an hour is gone.
Another thing I do pretty frequently is flip to the next chapter and tell my self, only x pages to until I get to that chapter. It helps me stay focused and motivated.
In general, the more you read, the better your read.
For me, fiction books are easy when getting into it. It's like watching a movie unfold inside the head. It's simply difficult to put a good fiction book down.
Non-fiction in general is not as fast to process. But, sometimes books have a lot of redundancy, explaining things already explained, repeating the same thing over and over, and repeating the same thing over and over, and explaining things already explained, and so on. I just skip that without remorse.
I speed read when it makes sense (for example, when finding some information fast in a mass of unknown text). I take notes in different ways, sometimes use a mindmap and use different techniques to analyze and remember.
I take some breaks, too, but they are not scheduled nor regular. The ideal break is a short walk outside, but this is often not practical.
Doing 350 pages of non-fiction in a normal weekend is hard, unless I'm alone without family, eat takeaway and have some background knowledge of the subject and can skip some parts since I already know it. For something completely new, maybe 3-4 days is more accurate an estimate.
Doing 350 pages of fiction is very fast, specially if it's in my native language. Other languages are a bit slower to process.
Last but not least, if it turns out that the author is stupid and/or the content is rubbish, then reading the book becomes hard work. Therefore, I think one has to have some form of interest in the book as well to motivate reading the book at all and to be open to consuming the book effectively. For me, this interest is actually one of the key things for consuming a book. For example, once I had to stop reading one of George Friedman's books for the aforementioned reasons; thinking "this is such bullshit" after every few pages is not a good signal.
One way to build up this interest towards a book is to create, beforehand, some questions which the book should somehow answer.
If I really push I can do a 350 page book in one day of about eight hours.
I do take breaks if I have a need such as eating, or the rest room.
I do not speed read. My strategy is to sit down, read, and get done at some point.
Non fiction is a bit different, and depends wildly on the topic, how familiar I am with the topic, and how dry the book is.
I also enjoy nonfiction podcasts, and talks which I play at 1.5x speed while doing things like bike riding, or cleaning.
I don't think there's a particular reason to read a book in one weekend. For me the outside world kinda just fades away as I do it like it does when you binge a lot of things. But if you don't have the time or that ability, shorter chunks, even a chapter a night or splitting it over multiple weekends seems like a good idea to me.
I've recently taken to listening to almost everything spoken at 1.5-1.75x speeds. Content creators on YouTube have taken to speaking v e r y slowly, adding a lot of useless fluff / filler, or both. I see it in almost every video that I watch today. It seems like everyone is chasing that magic 10 minute mark with videos containing 2 minutes of actual content.
The side effect being that I am able to track things much better now at that speed and I can bang through podcasts much easier now that I've acclimated to the faster speeds. Really recommend this to anyone who also listens to a lot of podcasts or audio books, it's a good hack to get more content in.
I used to be able to do 200 pages in 4-6 hours (albeit not highly complicated books - Narnia books near the 4 hour limit ), but am out of practice reading for such extended periods due to having a family. Still I doubt that it could be over 8 hours for the simpler books.
Huckelberry Finn, which is a pretty complicated book given all the dialect and the ideas it presents, used to take me about 8-9 hours. I recently read it over a period of 2 days in ebook reader during pauses in a pretty heavy schedule of taking care of kids, cleaning house etc.
Depends what you mean by “finish”. Especially for reference books, I may get everything I need out of it without deeply reading from cover to cover. For a reference work I usually skim it first, just to get a very high level overview before I decide how far to really dig in (I find it _much_ easier to do this with paper books than with ebooks).
I am single. I have no kids. I am not allowed to go outside because of the lockdown. I have 32 hours in a weekend. I can spend 8 hours for reading and I think it is enough to finish a 150-pages book. I am reading books with my kindle, underlining important parts, and putting them into Goodreads at the end.
