I believe as humans, continuous learning is essential to challenge our minds and get better every day. Based on this, although I’ve read hundreds of books now, I was looking for how to read effectively to retain better.
I chanced upon these two Youtube videos that gave me distinct strategies to improve my reading skills. And I’ve started to work on them. So I must share these useful videos with my readers.
For those who find the written word more appealing than visual content, I have noted all the important points mentioned in each video.

Christopher Pierznik of The Art of Improvement channel tells us to be an Active Reader.

He compares active reading to active listening. 

Active Listening

It is similar to active listening, where instead of waiting for your chance to speak, you engage without words. It requires

  • Concentration
  • Understanding
  • Recollection skills

Active Reading

Similarly, to be an active reader, you must

  • Interact with the book
  • Underline
  • Highlight
  • Fold page corners or tab important pages
  • Argue with the text by asking questions in the margins

Example – Stanley Kubrick’s notes inside The Shining.
Marginalia – writing in the margins. The illustrator prefers physical books to e-books because he has fat fingers, and they make eBook pages challenging to navigate and highlight. He employs this strategy in all non-fiction books and some novels and short stories.
He sometimes also uses a notebook to take important notes or has a folder to add quotes to his collection.
It makes his book recommendations far more credible.
If you loathe writing on books or are a collector, he recommends having two copies of the same book; One a swanky new one, another a used copy through thrift stores to make notes in and highlight.
After all, a book is meant for reading rather than decorating.
Agreed! I loved the illustrations in this video; they are so pretty and so engaging. Do you agree?
How do you take notes? Check the next video to know how far away you are from organizing your notes.

The next level of Note Taking

In this next video by Ali Abdaal, I loved that he has created seven levels of readers based on Harry Potter books to help me retain and learn from books he read.

First off, I loved that Ali emphasizes that reading is absolutely essential to live a productive life.

The Muggle

  1. Just reading, no engagement. Passive reading. This might work for fiction books.

The Squib

  1. Read with highlights using a marker or on your Kindle with Kindle highlights. Ali recommends a Kindle for reading; if you want to know more about a Kindle, its benefits, its costs, how you can read books on your phone or laptop, and so on, please read my detailed post on this here.
  2. But highlighting alone does not help with anything, so we come to level 3.

The Hufflepuff

  1. A systematic system for reviewing your highlights.
  2. Readwise – a service that reviews your reading highlights. (I signed up)
  3. They send an email every day with five random highlights you’ve made from books you’ve read. But what next.

Ravenclaw

  1. Notion App: Pull your highlights into a central note-taking App.
  2. So you made 50 highlights in your favorite book. They are all available in Notion, you can revisit them at a later time when you’re in a mindset to revisit the book. But again, Ali believes this is again a passive approach.

Dumbledore’s Army

  1. Engage by taking notes on the stuff you’ve read using Notion.
  2. You can create categories – fiction, non-fiction, and other sub categories.
  3. Add genres, enter dates when you read.

You can create templates like for Non-Fiction Ali Created

  1. The Book in 3 sentences
  2. Impressions
  3. How I discovered it
  4. Who should read it?
  5. How the book changed me?
  6. Top 3 quotes from the book.

This approach ensures that you’ve understood the book you read. 

And for fiction, his template includes

  1. What’s it about
  2. How I discovered it
  3. General thoughts
  4. Who would like it

The Order of The Phoenix

  1. The only difference between the previous level and this one is adding a section of Summary + Notes in our template.
  2. Ali only does this for 5-star books or books that have changed his life or books that surprise him. Like the book, the E-myth Revisited.
  3. He also recommends reading the book How to Take Smart Notes – his Notion tells him he took notes of 6000+ words from this single book.
  4. Tip: don’t quote from the book; rephrase in your words what is being conveyed to improve your understanding of the book.
  5. Check out Derek Sivers Blog and Nate’ Blog  for an excellent example of this approach. 

Dumbledore

  1. Ali used this approach only on a handful of books; after taking the notes, we make them evergreen notes. Organizing your notes into categories or slips, so a single note is self-sufficiently connected to many other notes. Base them on topics you’re interested in. Tweet them, blog them, or podcast them.
  2. Ali honestly says that he is yet to get sold on this level's idea and is yet to see the power of this and is as yet moving slowly towards realizing it.

Here’s a link to sign up for Notion and Readwise. Get started.
As a book reviewer, I think Ali’s wisdom will enormously help me. But I’m still a newbie and learning things myself. So there you go. I’m still level three – The Hufflepuff. What level are you?
Happy reading!!

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