Reflecting on Reading and Optimizing
I’m trying to read more again.
Isn’t everyone always?
I get a bit neurotic about reading - trying to maximize knowledge output for time and effort put in. I think I have to stop treating everything in life like a speed run and take in what I can from each experience as it comes. Don’t get me wrong - there are certainly somethings that can be optimized - or at least made more efficient. But I end up in this circle of focusing purely on optimizing doing the thing, so much so that I don’t really do the thing.
In fact, in practice, for reading in particular - I find that the less effort I put in up front, the more I gain from the text.
To be more specific - as a student I often tried to figure out the best way of annotating a book or text before even cracking the spine. What concepts and ideas was I looking to highlight, how will I note questions or definitions, ect.. In reality, trying to research should be much more a process of curiosity. Sometimes you do know what you are looking for going into a text, but I think if you open yourself to pure curiosity of what it could be saying - with no assumptions on its position or ideology - you will gain more personally and for your research.
To more seasoned scholars this probably seems obvious, but I believe it was a major pitfall for me in my undergraduate research. I had a strong idea of what I wanted to say and what I wanted the text to say before I even gave it a chance to speak for itself. Leading to shallow analysis in my writing, and usually a misunderstanding of the text overall. Or at least - very disconnected from the research.
I struggle with the time it takes me to read things, and the tedious practices I know I need to do in order to commit it to memory. My methods for nonfiction reading/research these days is to read with curiosity, underline what calls to me, write down notes as they come to me, and to spend a few minutes after an article or chapter just writing down my thoughts. I have realized it is not about the quality of content of my notes and annotations, but just being mindful of both the text and what my mind was naturally bringing up while reading.
I have felt very burned out from research, from writing and reading and creating content for other people - so it is taking me going about a very slow process to reignite my own spark and understanding of these things for myself, and not for an external responsibility.