My New New Way of Reading Books (I Abandoned AI)

Last year, I had a rather popular video up on my Youtube channel describing some shortcuts I was using to get the most out of what I was reading. It worked, and I’d still recommend it. However, thanks to working on the Stockpile Method, I’ve switched up this strategy slightly in a way that works more in line with this new method I’ve been applying to my todo list. Here I’ll explain what the old method was (in case you missed it), the new method, and how you might even be able to combine both into a cohesive flow.

I’ve since taken down my video on my AI method, more so because I decided not to go down the route of being a Youtube influencer and instead stick with writing, which I’m honestly much better at. Unfortunately, that now means there’s no official record of what my “AI-Assisted reading method” is. So let me explain it again, in brief terms:

First, find books to read. I recommended using aggregate sites like Most Recommended Books, or community charts.

Second, “obtain” said books. I leave this up to you.

Up until now, the strategy is the same for both methods. Here’s where things get interesting:

For the AI-assisted formula, you’ll want to grab a book — any book. One chapter at a time, scan the chapter into your LLM of choice — GPT, Llama, Gemini, etc. Ask it for a) the most important lessons learned if its a nonfiction book, or b) excerpts of “particularly good prose or narrative strategy” if its a fiction book [1]. Repeat process for rest of the book.

Okay, so we’ve now cut the reading time from two weeks to two hours. Wonderful! I will say that technically you can get the same experience if you just go on a website like Blinkist or a similar book summarizer, and you easily can — just take in mind that my process is free and theirs is not. AFAIK there is no equivalent service for fiction books, except maybe TVTropes or quotation books.

Anyway, you have these bullet points, but you still need to digest them. So start going down the list. If it’s boring or some sort of AI hallucinatory drivel, then cut it. If it actually speaks to you, then keep it in your permanent notes [2]. Make sure to have a recall on these notes so that you actually remember what you read.

And that’s it. Now you can read — as I originally advertised — about 300 books a year.

I think the AI assisted method works for a few reasons. The first is that this is a relatively low bar to clear for any LLM — all you are asking of it is to gather bullet points of information from a piece of writing, which is more or less what a LLM is designed to do anyway. It could honestly just give you random chunks of information across the entire chapter and still do a pretty good job. So while I stay skeptical at AI’s ability to do “higher-level” tasks, this it should be able to do without too many problems.

The second reason I think this works really well is probably the reason you don’t think it works at all. If you’ve read this blog before, you know I follow the rather deadly mantra of “move fast and break things”. Every blog post I write, I do in a single draft (unless I turn it into a book, in which case I do a single editing passthrough). I release new content every single week on multiple different streams, some I later find to be so bad that I just remove them off the internet. I am a person who favors a shotgun approach over what I believe to be a nightmare scenario of sitting in a room and working on something until it is perfect, 6+ months later. I am a believer in the early access, “build in public” mode of creation.

I am also have, perhaps unsurprisingly, a minor case of ADHD.

What does this all have to do with reading? Well, to be honest — if you give me a chapter to read, there’s a good chance I won’t remember a single damn thing about it even two minutes later. It’s not that I don’t understand, its that I get easily bored and my patience is about as thin as a sheet of A2 paper. It all just goes in one ear and out the other. So having the robot just give me the bullet points on what makes a chapter important usually gives me more information on a chapter than actually reading it myself.

If you are of the other breed — a person who spends 6 months to make a work of art, who can focus on a given task for hours, who can read a book and actually stop sentence by sentence to make sure you’re understanding something (an experience I equate to waterboarding torture) then you probably think this method is silly. And honestly, you’re right! I don’t think you need this! In fact, I don’t think you need my new method either! I think you can go on with your life, happily reading all the books you come across, and never take my advice ever again.

But for the people who are just like me, let me tell you about my new method.

I recently crushed my ADHD using my new todo list management system called the Stockpile. I recommend reading the entire article if you’re curious (linked at the beginning), but essentially it just keeps giving me random todo items across a variety of types, subjects, and priorities to always keep me on my toes and make sure I never get bored. The result was that a lot more of my todos were actually getting done, rather than staying in the anxiety corner of “stuff I really do but honestly I don’t even want to look at”.

Then, I realized… why couldn’t this just work for reading?

Imagine this: you have a list of books, articles, video transcripts, etc. You pick one at random from the list, read it a bit until you feel like you’re zoning out, then move to the next one. You keep up the momentum and never lose focus, unlike if you just kept to one book at a time [3].

So I tried it, thanks to Readwise Reader’s excellent “random” feature (I’m beginning to give tools a full letter grade up if they have some sort of randomization tool). And, by God, it does work! I’m able to pay attention to reading for much longer than I used to, and while I still do tap out generally after an hour or so it’s better than the ten minutes it used to be. Combine that with walking exercise while reading and I don’t fall asleep either!

Like I said at the beginning of this article, the “Random Recall” method and the “AI-Assisted” method are not mutually exclusive. You can randomly recall books or articles, then make a decision in the moment whether it sounds interesting enough to read or if you’d rather the AI just take care of it. You can also choose to pick books at random and summarize only a chapter at a time rather than the whole book at once, so you get 10 random chapters summarized and then get to distill a whole charcuterie of information to your notes.

Finally, in case you’re wondering — I still refuse to listen audiobooks. But that’s a topic for another time, as my time with this article has ended. ‘Til next time.

[1] – This fiction step really only works if you’re a writer, like me, and you mostly read fiction books to get good ideas for your own books. If you just read fiction books because you like reading, well… just read them. You don’t need my help in that case.

[2] – Notetaking is outside the scope of this article, though if you want to know more about good notetaking practices I recommend Thomas Frank or Tiago Forte.

[3] – Once again, this doesn’t work if you are reading fiction and want to take in the full story rather than broad prose, character, or narrative strokes. I recommend you just read those books like a normal person.

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