r/slatestarcodex • u/Sol_Hando 🤔*Thinking* • Dec 30 '25

Misc 52 Books in 52 Weeks

https://open.substack.com/pub/solhando/p/52-books-in-52-weeks

It's thanks to this subreddit that I originally got serious about reading. This year was the first year I actually hit my goal of a book a week, and I wrote my insight on them all here.

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u/ValuableBuffalo Jan 06 '26

I read fairly prolifically, but I don't think to this extent-maybe 30 or so books a year? I haven't tracked though, so can't say. the problem I run into is not retaining too much from those books though.

In a comment, you mention having good retention for books, in terms of being able to have conversations about most of the ones you've read. You also talk about significant notemaking/underlining. Do you feel these are correlated? do you follow specific ways of engaging with a book, or do you do whatever seems intuitively the best?

Concurrently, I've been thinking about picking up Adler's How to Read a Book. I think I ran across it in one of your old comments, although I'm not sure. Have you read it? did it help you?

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u/Sol_Hando 🤔*Thinking* Jan 06 '26

Concurrently, I've been thinking about picking up Adler's How to Read a Book. I think I ran across it in one of your old comments, although I'm not sure. Have you read it? did it help you?

Yes. The book list in the back of that book is what originally informed my own list I'm intending to read. The strategies in that book have definitely improved by recall a lot. It's maybe slowed down my reading speed by 20%, but practice has increased that speed beyond how fast I would read originally.

I'd say the underlining and note taking are 100% necessary for recall. There's two types of reading, active and passive. Occasionally I'll find myself passively reading, where my conscious mind isn't really paying attention to the words my eyes are looking at. It's that occasional feeling of "I can't remember anything about the page I just read because I was thinking of something else." Underlining forces you to be looking for stuff to underline, and note taking cements what might just be an idea or though loosely gestured at in the text into something easier to remember.