30-Day Writing Challenge: 12/30
Extracting knowledge efficiently from non-fiction books is a skill.
Books have a few core ideas and rest might be fluff meant to cushion the concepts and add bulk.
There might be people who read non-fiction books from cover to cover. I used to do the same. It’s very inefficient.
Here’s how to extract knowledge:
Establish the objective of reading the book. What do you wanna achieve?
Use the skill of skimming (think skimmed milk), i.e., scanning quickly to identify the core concepts.
Go through title, subtitle(?), index, summary, etc.
Once you identify where the meat(!) is, go to those parts directly.
Highlight, make notes, review notes, watch/read summaries.
In case of fiction books, the approach would generally be different, as the objective is to savour the writing. But, some of the previously mentioned techniques could be used, say, to identify and skip through belaboured parts of the book.