/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.20567901]

How helpful is this book really?

[Anonymous No.20567911]

You really need to have the time energy and patience to actually do the shit he says, though to be fair he admits most books are not worth reading in the depth he prescribes. There's a lot of books in the world though so even if you say a teeny tiny minority that's still like hundreds of books

[Anonymous No.20567919]

It's a good read but honestly I don't follow all the steps that are shown.

[Anonymous No.20567922]

>>20567901
Only from around pages 70-110, which are still full of filler. Just skim those pages and summarize the main points. Also read the final chapter, which is really inspiring.

[Anonymous No.20567935]

>>20567901
It's not helpful but it's a fun book. Harold Bloom made an entire career ripping off Adler.

[Anonymous No.20567942]

i actually just finished it. there are some really good segments in there with advice that will increase your ability to read in a more engaging way. however the vast majority of it is filler or simply not applicable. not only that but if you really did apply their steps you wouldn't be doing anything else. you'd maybe read 4 books a year but would have an academic understanding of them. that's not always a good thing.

[Anonymous No.20567970]

>>20567942
Did you miss the entire first part of the book where he tells you you're supposed to read different books at different speeds and most books don't require more than a quick skim-through? What about where he says that only very few books actually require the full amount of effort that he describes? Remember the part where he talks about how the rules may seem difficult and needlessly detailed but every rule describes the ideal performance and that in most cases an approximation of the rule is acceptable? Fucking retard did you even read the book?

[Anonymous No.20567993]

>>20567970
did you miss the part of the book where they hammer it into your head the trope of "the stupidest people i knew read the most books, the smartest read the least"?

[Anonymous No.20569291]

>>20567901
Try reading it.

[Anonymous No.20569677]

>>20567942
The Beast of Berskshire

[Anonymous No.20569708]

>>20567993
>trope
How the fuck do tropes apply to non-fiction? Regardless, no, that's not the point they were making:
>Montaigne speaks of “an abecedarian ignorance that precedes knowledge, and a doctoral ignorance that comes after it.” The first is the ignorance of those who, not knowing their ABC’s, cannot read at all. The second is the ignorance of those who have misread many books. They are, as Alexander Pope rightly calls them, bookful blockheads, ignorantly read. There have always been literate ignoramuses who have read too widely and not well. The Greeks had a name for such a mixture of learning and folly which might be applied to the bookish but poorly read of all ages. They are all sophomores.
Yes, reading tons of books *poorly* is bad, but reading tons of books properly (by utilizing the system they're talking about, which includes skimming and pre-reading) is not. You could argue that they're saying "It's better to read a few books well than tons of books poorly" but they are also saying that these things are not mutually exclusive. Retard.

[Anonymous No.20570655]

It's great for non fiction.

[Anonymous No.20570701]

>>20567901
It indirectly teaches the unity of art and philosophy through their predilection to intense multi-layered organization. Skip the section on how to read individual kinds of books. The whole idea of reading different books at different intensities is the most important idea of the book (which >>20567942 misses as >>20567970 said), which is expanded upon, teaching systematic skimming, the deep reading of one book, and comparative reading of many books.

[Anonymous No.20570715]

>>20567901
Just take a literature course

[Anonymous No.20570733]

>>20567901
Surely this book can be summarized in one page of bullet points. What's the tl;dr?

[Anonymous No.20570749]

>>20567901
No, if you want to learn information from a book, then you should use spaced repetition. The book basically lays out a primitive version of it, and unless you're some scholar, the book list will take years to get through. Just skim the Wikipedia pages of the books that fancy your interest.

[Anonymous No.20570767]

>>20570749
No, that is not what the book says or does at all. Is this a troll post?

[Anonymous No.20570783]

>>20570767
Then why don't you enlighten us and explain what the book says buddy :)

[Anonymous No.20570806]

>>20570783
The book first and foremost prizes higher-order thinking (which is independent of spaced repetition and active recall), which is learning about the overarching organization of elements of the book. It doesn't go over the maintenance of knowledge you gain from the book, which is where memory techniques would come in like spaced repetition, and comes after the fact of having already understood the material and organized it in your mind.

[Anonymous No.20570841]

>>20570806
>The book first and foremost prizes higher-order thinking (which is independent of spaced repetition and active recall), which is learning about the overarching organization of elements of the book.
You mean, like, skimming over the Wikipedia page? ;)

[Anonymous No.20571540]

>>20570841
A wikipedia page usually gives you a summary of a few popular details about a book, and not an overarching skeleton of the book. Though perhaps with some books wikipedia would work, though it would be pretty much pointless since you could just gleam the information from the book itself in the same amount of time instead of risking reading something that is irrelivant or trivial to it's structure.