Audiovisual reading

How should we read in the 21st century? This post introduces modern methods for reading and discusses the philosophy of speed-reading.

The value of a good book

We are overwhelmed with information at every corner. Books have to compete with YouTube videos, newsletters, blog posts, podcasts, documentaries, and now ChatGPT. In this environment, what is the value of books?

Good books present a concept and explore it deeply and convincingly. With empirical investigations when available and without when not. A good book would diminish in information value if shortened. It is written at the length necessary to divulge the topic at hand.

Oftentimes, books are able to uncover the unknown unknowns of our knowledge, revealing the questions that we do not even know to ask, and the perspectives that need the depth of an author devoting a year to 300 pages of text. Please do not read books “just to read books”.

In the modern age, good books present one of the unique opportunities to deepen our relationship with our environment and our world. The question is, how should we solve the problem of 1) finding good books and 2) integrating them into an information stream fit for busy lives?

Philosophy of speed reading

One of my big issues with speed reading is how “hacky” it feels; both during and after the experience. An example of the thinking that leads to traditional speed reading is the concept of apps like Blinkist and Shortform that promise to give you the core concepts in a book within a 5 minute summary.

For bad books (the ones that should be blog posts), these apps are fine. When you see summaries of books that clearly have a reason to be book length, they come short. Their summaries become too long to be useful or they are significantly lacking compared to the full text.

Many techniques seem to arise from this spirit of “saving time”. To me, true speed reading should arise from two axioms:

Very, very few books are worth the time a book usually takes
We wish to find the 1% of the 1% of books that are filled to the brim with either life-changing ideas or deeply interesting information and retain it

It is an absolute privilege to read books that are worth their time commitment; books like Expert Political Judgment, The Brain from Inside Out, Running Lean, The Stranger, 道德经, Maus, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, The Fifth Science, Making Ideas Happen, and Rethinking Statistics.

However, these are rare, and you are highly dependent on your network to find good books (one of the reasons why I enjoy Goodreads so much). There are multiple heuristics you can employ to raise the quality of the books you pick up:

The 10-year rule: Select books that are at least 10 years old. These have survived the test of time. The same applies to reading the classics. They often have a reason to have survived (sometimes) thousands of years.
Read books recommended by people with great taste: And remember, many great specialized thinkers have bad taste in books. An example of good taste includes this list of 66 books recommended by Nassim Taleb or your friend who reads a very niché collection of books.
Do not get fooled by reviews: The best books are rarely the ones with the best reviews. Always think about who the audience of a book is. The fifth in a fantasy book series might have really good reviews because it is only read by people who enjoy fantasy and have read until the fifth book while a textbook might have 4 reviews that give it 3.5 stars, despite it being a world-changing piece of text. However, Goodreads ratings are usually very dependable, though they become harder to rely on, the more esoteric your reading list.
Get recommendations from people who read many books: Sometimes, I receive a book recommendation from someone who read one book in 2021. These can usually be disregarded because even if this book was very good, you have to trust them to decide that based on no comparison. Meanwhile, receiving a recommendation from someone who read 30 books in 2021 is significantly more rewarding.

It is a continuous journey to make sure that you will find good books and as your personal taste gets better, you have a much higher ability to curate your personal reading list.

Reading effectively

Now that we have consistently good books in our collection, how should we approach reading? There are multiple problems we wish to solve:

Since most of our books contain highly valuable information, we do not want to miss out on the important points. This is in the information-theoretic sense of the word and includes deep emotional experiences with the texts that might update our understanding of the world significantly or bring about a unique experience.
We need to optimize our information intake to read as many of these books as possible while. Consistently reading high quality books can be a tough challenge, despite the joy of engaging with their ideas.
We wish to retain, review, and deploy the learnings we receive from the books. We can update as much as we want, but if we forget the update a month later or never change our lives to reflect these updates, then what does it matter?

For me, starting these problems out with the fact that we have fantastic books available makes utilitarian methods like reading summaries, step-wise depth reading, and skimming useless.

A method for true reading

With these challenges, we need a comprehensive and complex method, right? No. We need one, simple practice.

Read the text while listening to the audiobook.

The nuances of this method enable multiple impressive advantages:

Consistent reading speed: One of the major problems of reading is that you can easily speed read for about 10 minutes until you get tired or lose attention. By having the book read aloud at the same time, you pace yourself in a sustainable manner. I personally listen to Audible audiobooks on the maximum speed of 3.5x and apps like VoiceAloudReader (my favorite when the audiobook doesn’t exist), I put to 6x.
Reading for hours: It can often get boring to simply read a book. By having a simultaneous auditory component, it is like watching a movie. You enter flow state much easier and can read for hours at a time. If you target reading for hours, I also recommend reading in the morning and water-fast or utilizing similar methods to avoid variance in your environment and bodily state.
Information intake: Books were designed before technology existed to read them aloud and since we are now able to make their information multimodal, it seems crazy not to make a unimodal information intake multimodal. There is plenty of evidence that humans learn more in interactive and multimodal environments (see e.g. dual coding theory) [1, 2, 3].
Better note-taking: Often when you read a passage that is very interesting, you want to take notes, disrupting your reading flow. When you have the audiobook running at the same time, you can write notes while listening. Re-entering flow is then much easier and you can jump back if you feel like you missed important information while scribbling your thoughts. Note-taking strategies are beyond the scope of this post but here are some great thoughts from Nielsen, Oxford Learning, and Matuschak.

In summary, you can read books at 100 pages per hour while having 10 pages of valuable notes and retaining more information once you are done with the book. Of course, following up your reading is equally important:

Write study questions: When you are done reading the book, write 3-5 questions that force you to engage with the core learnings from the book. You should go back to your notes a month after finishing the book to review your questions and if you are not able to answer them; read through your notes.
Make plans to implement your learnings: Ensure that you implement the mental changes you have experienced in your behavior. Your brain is a black box and it is your behaviour that shows to others. Note down 2-4 actions you want to take as a result of the book.

A case study

To understand how you can practically integrate this method into your life, let us look at a few case studies.

Silence on the Wire

I am currently reading Silence on the Wire. I prefer listening to a professional voiceover through Audible. However, Silence on the Wire is not available here. Therefore, I buy an e-book version of the book and send it to my iPhone, where I have the VoiceAloudReader app to read aloud any book using the text-to-speech on the phone.

This app was selected after a review of over 10 apps and has the benefit of allowing speeds above 3x and being private, simple, and cheap. I then listen to Silence on the Wire at 6x (the TTS voice is slower than a human voice) while having a split screen on my computer between the note-taking app Obsidian and a PDF reader. While listening, I of course follow the voice through the text.

The Stranger

This is a short fictional story by Albert Camus. In this case, I preferred reading it without any voice due to its emotional and philosophical nature. It was so engaging that I read it in one sitting and this is where we want to balance our preference for speed and engagement with deep thoughts within the text.

The Hacker and the State

Unlike Silence on the Wire, The Hacker and the State is available on Audible. I also buy a PDF version to have it on my computer so I can take notes while reading. On Audible, I listen to it at 3.5x speed (the maximum) and though this might sound like a lot, you will be surprised how fast you can follow along within a few hours.

The Republic

For classic like The Republic, it is important to note that there are many different translations and versions of the texts. I bought the audiobook for The Republic on Audible and found out that it was a different version to the e-book I had bought. I ended up listening to this book while taking extensive visual notes in my Remarkable, another good tool for note-taking and reading, while skipping back and forth to ensure I retain the information that I was not able to read.

Reading 20 books in 20 days

I have previously completed a few Gauntlets, a challenge to read 20 books in 20 days, and I highly recommend you do the same. I was originally challenged by Emerson Spartz who gave me 36 books from which I chose 20 and read them in 20 days using the method above.

It is an amazing feeling to finish the challenge and a major achievement for anyone. I highly recommend you try it out. This is a tough challenge and there are five ways you can help yourself actually complete the challenge:

Use The Method: It will allow you to finish a book within 4 hours and still understand and retain the information. It is paramount to be able to complete such a challenge
Have public accountability: Post publicly that you are going to do it and update that post with reviews of each book you read. For me, this level of accountability was perfect and if you miss a day, you can provide an update on why you missed that day.
Be prepared: You want to buy all the books, have them downloaded, and have a note-taking template ready for each of them. When you read a book a day, you don’t want the first 20-30 minutes to disappear because you were on bad internet or couldn’t find the right version.
Pick the right books: Pick books adequate for such a challenge. My second Gauntlet had 900-page sci-fi and textbooks in genetic engineering. It was still a massive learning experience but I ended up being awake until 4 AM many nights to finish the reading, and I missed 4 days.
Be positive: Remember, this is a hard challenge! Shaming yourself for missing a day will never work! You are completing something immensely difficult and you should be proud.

There are various lists of books that can be an inspiration here. If I sent you this post, I am probably willing to design a Gauntlet for you specifically. I have designed multiple such Gauntlets for specific purposes and people. If you are building your own, I recommend designing it with a purpose in mind, e.g. changing your mind about religion, developing new ideas of economic ideologies, or understanding the core philosophies of the East.

Conclusion

The audiovisual reading method can completely change how you learn, improving your reading speed and deepening your engagement with the fascinating ideas presented in the world’s greatest books. As you embrace this novel approach, always remember…

In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you. ― Mortimer J. Adler

Should you decide to give this method a try, I’d be very interested to hear about your experiences and insights. And good luck, fellow explorer! I look forward to hearing about your adventures within the world of books.