Any of you read books?

I love to read and always have at least one book on the go, I always take one out with me and the last thing I do before sleeping is to Read. I manage to read about 30 books a year of varying length. Reading is a pleasure, I have a kindle which I love but still like the feel of turning real pages.

Can you actually read and retain knowledge that fast? Let's say you have a 300 page book, if you figure 8 hours of reading time you'll need about 38 pages/hour. That's 1.5 minutes to read a page, understand it, and be able to take away everything it's trying to tell you.

Some people have that kind of brain, but I think most people would be hard pressed to do that all in 90 seconds, especially doing it non-stop for 8 hours straight.

For me personally to fully understand a page, I usually have to read it a few times, especially books that are trying to teach something. And even then, it takes a while for it to sink in.

Sounds like a good way to improve retention.

I read a mix of marketing/business, psychology and history. The marketing/business books are really fast to get through once you figure out how they are structured.

Each chapter usually has one big idea and a lot of supporting/background stuff that can be skimmed. The average 250 page marketing book could easily be condensed into a ten page report.

I read a lot of books, something I've always really enjoyed and a habit that cemented itself during university. Typically, I'll have one book of fiction and one non-fiction on the go at any one time and I'll get through a book a week most weeks. Buying from Amazon is quite addictive - I take a new delivery most weeks. Just started reading Andy Maslen's "Write To Sell" to teach myself some copywriting (stayed up reading the first 60 (of 186) pages last night - great book so far).

Fiction books are great for escapism and a quick-read (then I just throw them) whereas a text-book, being quite "dense" or "heavy reading" I take my time going through front to back. Then I'll keep it and use it as a reference at my side when trying to put the content into action.

As far as retention goes, the more active you are in the process, the more detail and knowledge you will retain. So for fiction which you'll mainly consume fairly passively for entertainment, 90%+ will be forgotten pretty quickly, and mostly you'll just remember the outline of what the book was about and whether you enjoyed it. I'm guessing that's the same for most people since sub-consciously your mind knows that you don't need to remember much. A good non-fiction book like a text-book, training manual etc. I might hang on to for a few years or more until I feel I've squeezed all the value out of it.

Reading before going to sleep is a great way to wind down.

I read at least 4 books a week - usually more. These are not the IM variety or self improvement - but fiction, mysteries, humor, some place/travel books (love Bryson's accounts),etc. It's a habit of a lifetime to read for several hours a night - and sometimes through the night.

IM ebooks, etc are read during the day and oddly I often find them hard to read as my mind starts wandering to other things. I think I see "fact" books the same as textbooks from school.:p

kay

I've probably read parts of, or all of 100-140 books on different subjects.

-Take notes! Read a book cover to cover and see what jumps out at you.

-Look for themes! There's a lot of similarities between successes. And you only find that, by reading a lot.

For example, Jay Abraham, a marketing author. And Jim Rogers, a financial/economics author. A corollary to those 2, would be Claude Hopkins.

All three of them started from nothing. They learned from the school of hard knocks. Basically, out on the street. Not in an ivory tower. They do relatively "simple" things. A great quote in Charlie Munger's book, Poor Charlie's Almanack. "Take a simple idea and take it seriously". Jay Abraham had a video set, titled My life in Marketing. Claude Hopkins wrote an autobiography, My life in advertising. People are influenced by similar things. Things today, are *not that different* than 50 or 70 years ago. The more you see that, the more successful you'll be.

In highschool and college, you may be taught that success is "hard" or abstract. Or hard to quantify, mystical. No one knows how they do it, etc. Just read! If I had stayed in my highschool mentality, I don't think I would have read anything.

A good reading list is in Charlie's Mungers, Poor Charlies Almanack. Cialdini's Influence. Some books by Jared Diamond. Some biographies. More historical and scientific than self help.

There's a reason classes are set for 40 minutes. That's about the length of time an average person can stay focused in one sitting. So you'd have to calculate how much you can read in 40 minutes, plus 10 minute breaks.

I think many people take about 4 minutes to read a page, but it depends on the subject matter, how difficult the writing, and how complicated the subject.

For me, fiction reads faster, so I can go through a 250-page novel in about 3 hours or less. A serious study book, as an internet marketing book, would take longer, but again it depends on how much learning is necessary. Since I have read a lot about IM, most of what I read now I can grasp quickly.

So you'll have to determine what you know before you start reading, how fast you can read a page and how efficient you are at absorbing what you read.

Read one page of an IM book (preferably a random one in the middle) and see how long it takes you. Multiply that by the number of pages and you can get a pretty good idea how long the entire book will take to read.

I like to read the Index first, select those chapters that discuss topics I don't know much about, and scan those first. Then, I go back to the beginning and read the entire book if necessary.

In some cases, I only need to read a few chapters because I already know the rest. Still, I'll read the rest anyway to see if I can learn something new.

I should add, however, that if you try to cram too much knowledge at once, you won't remember it. That's what happened to me in the past while "cramming" to learn as much as possible in a short space of time. It doesn't work very well. You learn something, but miss a lot.

In the end, it's a question of whether you just want to read the books quickly, or whether you want to learn and absorb all that they offer. Schedule accordingly.

Sylvia

Am I the only one that likes to read old books? Say, before 1970 or 60..

A. There's less fluff, buzzwords, soundbites, etc. Less flash, much more substance. The authors back then (in the pre information age) really had to know something.

On a Jay Abraham tape, he mentions that Claude Hopkins worked for 30 years, 18 hours day, and didn't take weekend off. The equivilant of 70 or 80 years the way we work. There's a reason why people still recommend his stuff, a century later. How many current IM gurus are going to be read 50 or 100 years from now? Very few.

B. I've been reading a book from 1948 about creativity. From the founder of "brainstorming". Old books give you more references.

Has anyone read Rudolph Flesch? One of his books, How to read, write and think more effectively was recommend by Jay. There's so much stuff out there that not 1 in a 100 people on the street have heard of.

Also, I want to look into more books about logic.

It really depends on what kind of books you read. Personally, I can read fiction books in about two days. But for IM or any books on similar genre, I think it's best to read it slowly so you could digest the message.