I’m a sucker for the ways that others interact with books and take notes on the things they’re reading. Simon’s post is very detailed, covering the four main steps in reading books.

  1. Sourcing
  2. Choosing
  3. Reading
  4. Processing

He even has some fancy scripts that send Amazon books to Airtable and then … that part got to be a bit much for even me. I have a Trello board and on that I organize the books I want to read. I just read the next one on the list. While I’m reading, if a book comes up that looks interesting, I add it to the bottom of the list.

The only change is when I’m working on a writing project and need to read a bunch of stuff in the same topic. Then I comb through the list and adjust it so that the books I need to read topically are at the top.

An interesting service he introduced me to is Readwise. I’ll take a big deeper dive into it later.

Instead of his index cards, I have my resources which I use regularly and contains more than just book highlights. It includes podcasts, academic papers, and interesting blog posts. Plus, you all can search them for content as well.

Do read the whole post Simon wrote on reading books.

Thanks to Rafael for pointing me to this.