How do you guys read books that you don’t feel like reading?
I consider myself a decent reader. If I’m very interested in a book, I’m able to stay up all night, reading it as much as I can until I feel like if I read anymore I’ll get fired for sleeping on the job. I love to read fantasy books, but usually most interesting fiction books are able to keep my attention.
The trouble I’ve got is with non-fiction books. Books that are talked about as “must reads”. Books like Sapiens, The Selfish Gene, Pale Blue Dot, or any textbook/technical documentation. I’ve tried again and again to read non-fiction books. Breaking it up into smaller chunks, listening to them as audiobooks, or just slogging through it page by page. But nothing seems to stick in my head if I grind through them.
Now, before you go “Hey naznsan, just don’t! Life is too short to read books you don’t want to read!”, the thing is, I want to read these books. Some of them explain things I’m decently interested in. Some of them I have to read for work/education. I just seem to have trouble either focusing, staying motivated, or retaining any information in such books.
So does anyone have any tips or suggestions on how I could read such non-fiction books like I read my fiction? Or am I doomed to just slog through page by page, relying on my notes to do all the remembering?
If you’re not interested, your brain will come up with thousands of excuses to avoid something you don’t enjoy and you won’t be able to fight back. I mean, if Sapiens can’t keep you entertained, then I don’t know what can. You can find other mediums to expand your knowledge: documentaries, YouTube, podcasts, articles or audio books. You can read fiction and learn about this world some other way, it’s fine.
Focus on why you want to (want to) read them - what about it interests you? If you can try to boil that interest down to a few questions, that’ll give you something to be on the lookout for, which might help you stay alert.
Be “mindful”: if you feel your attention slipping, just sort of “notice” that it’s happened, without emotion or judgment, acknowledge what distracted you and then go back to it.
Try to make a specific effort to “do something” with the text you’re reading - read out loud, visualize or sketch, rephrase/summarize when writing notes, mindmap… whatever works and might engage some different parts of the brain.
Honestly, you’re likely to just slog unless you start finding the book or info interesting at least. I can read non-fiction and devour it like fiction, if the content is interesting. A
recent example was Algorithms to Live By. I got my degree in computer science and already knew most of the algorithms mentioned - but the way they explained them was far better than my professors, and they related them to uses in your actual life, not just technical uses. It was a super cool and interesting book to me and I read it super quickly - then again a few weeks later to take notes for fun.
On the flip side, I’ve had more books than I can mention that are just unbearable to read. Not sure if the topic just wasn’t as interesting to me even though I thought it would be, sometimes the writing is just bland, or hundreds of other reasons. Those books I’ll skim to see if it gets better at some point, sometimes it does and just the intro was very background heavy, other times not. If skimming it doesn’t turn anything up or arouse any interest in me, then I just leave it.
The biggest thing is interest though. If it’s a topic or event you know you’re interested in then that makes it far easier to read the book, but even then sometimes the author is just bland or has a writing style you don’t like. In that case, I would recommend finding a similar book by a different author, sometimes reviews will be able to help. If you’re reading for your own pleasure or interests though, don’t be afraid to put down a book that just isn’t speaking to you even if other people call it great.
This is why I like having ebooks. I have them on my phone and I find that I might be more able to read something heavy on a lunch break at work than before I go to bed at night.
Generally though I’ve been having the opposite problem - I can’t get into fiction at the moment, nothings grabbing my attention although I did read Yellowface which was excellent
I put them in the toilet and I really take their “shit book” nature seriously. Somehow, it works.
But this is my shitposting time on lemmy.
