Today in a debate I came across this opinion:
You have to pick up a book and read it, attentively ! Not this thing where it’s 10 little pages today, some more a week later, and so on...
I completely agree with the statements: “you have to pick up a book and read it” and “read attentively.” How many pages you should read in one sitting is a purely individual question. And then this week Ludwig Bystronovsky writes:
Rain or heat, a light dusting of snow or awful weather, read fifty pages anyway.
Another interesting little point about how you don’t fish more than a dozen ideas out of a book that fit into your picture of the world. Six months later you need to reread it, so that on top of the dozen that settled in, the next one opens up.
I completely agree with Ludwig that you can’t get through a book in one go, but that’s only a good thing — you know for sure that rereading it will bring new revelations. It would be cool, of course, to dump all the books into your head at once, but then the lazy person would be no different from the hardworking one. A book is a passive source of knowledge; to get that knowledge you have to put in energy. At the very least, open it and read a couple of pages.
I read Eric Evans’s “Domain-Driven Design” in two passes. The first time — quickly, precisely in search of those first ten ideas. The second time — thoughtfully. Rereading some pages several times (those who’ve read it will understand). When you’re reading thoughtfully, it’s not just that you can’t handle 50 pages a day; even ten already counts as a major achievement.
Though Evans’s book is a pleasure. You open the book, read a couple of paragraphs, get hit with an electric shock, close the book, and spend the whole day walking around wide-eyed. Recommended.