Books and Me

By Jonathan A. Levi (2019) One minor quibble I have about "The Only Skill That Matters" is that the title only accurately describes the contents if you take it as meaning, "How to Learn Efficiently", even though this overarching skill is subsequently broken down into quite a few distinct sub-skills that need to be acquired in different ways.   Having said that, all of what the author says makes a huge amount of sense, even if you will have seen most of it somewhere else already.  He rehashes the inspirational work of Harry Lorayne  on how to use visual mnemonics, discusses the various applications of the Pareto Principle, (that 80% of the benefits accrue for 20% of the input), about how to manage motivation, speed reading, pre-reading, the inter-related nature of knowledge, aka cross-pollination, the benefits of the brute force approach, self-quizzing and teaching, all of which we have come across before elsewhere but it is all condensed very neatly and a...

by John Connelly (2014) This was indeed a speed read. Took about ten minutes in fact.  That might have had something to do with the fact that I had just read another book on exactly the same subject, and knew what was coming next, but it is also very short, succinct and to the point.  As with "Essential Speed Reading", we are told how to overcome word fixation and subvocalisation and there are suggestions about margin restriction and prohibitions against rereading.  Some things in the first book are omitted here but, on the other hand, it also contained a few ideas the other didn't, so all in all, it was ten minutes well spent.   The latter section of the book is all about study skills, which was a bit of a surprise, as it isn't announced on the cover and I had no idea that was coming, quite frankly, but hey ho. Most of these suggestions seemed sensible too.  The only real gripe is that writer and his editor were clearly reading too quickly to no...

By Katya Seberson (2019) Well, the proof is in the pudding.  I started reading this book at my usual pace, and ended up reading at nearly twice the speed.   Unlike a lot of speed reading apps which flash the word at you one at a time in a completely unrealistic fashion, this explains how to read proper lumps of text as quickly as is humanly possible.   There's talk of saccades, fixations and parafoveal vision, along with physical exercises and practice tests. All in all, if my faster reading speeds are anything to go by, the science behind it must be sound. Rating 6/10