<story><title>Bill Gates: Books I Read this Summer</title><url>http://www.thegatesnotes.com/GatesNotesV2/Personal/Books-I-Read-This-Summer</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jacques_chester</author><text>I&apos;m finding that writing reviews, even very surface-level reviews, of books I am reading is helping me to derive a lot more value from them.&lt;p&gt;Firstly, while reading, I find myself reflecting more on the book. After all -- I will be writing a review, I need to be an active participant.&lt;p&gt;Secondly, I find that books will often spark some thinking on a topic and the review will essentially morph into an essay. I wrote a 3000-word review of one book[1] that diverged into fuzzy logic, theories of jurisprudence and a few other areas in order to properly explain my reaction.  Right now I&apos;m writing a review of &lt;i&gt;Waltzing with Bears&lt;/i&gt; that will diverge into financial accounting and a pet theory of mine about how tools create paradigms that shape entire bodies of knowledge.&lt;p&gt;Third, books can often be connected to one another. I find that my reviews tend to link to each other. Not because I am trying to drive internal link traffic (I&apos;m basically a nobody in internet terms, it&apos;s not worth the bother). But book A will have tangentially touched on the topic of book B; or perhaps book C illuminates something only poorly discussed in book D. To the point where I refer to books from before I started reviewing with an &quot;unreviewed&quot; annotation.&lt;p&gt;Finally, some people find my reviews useful. My hobby is Olympic-style weightlifting and I do a lot of reading both on it directly and on allied subjects (eg, anatomy). Fellow strength nerds have found my reviews useful in helping them select books for their own libraries. It&apos;s nice when people give you positive feedback on something like that.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://chester.id.au/2012/04/09/review-drift-into-failure/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://chester.id.au/2012/04/09/review-drift-into-failure/&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Bill Gates: Books I Read this Summer</title><url>http://www.thegatesnotes.com/GatesNotesV2/Personal/Books-I-Read-This-Summer</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>BadassFractal</author><text>Any thoughts on that Moonwalking With Einstein book? I&apos;d love to improve information retention in my day to day life, especially in software. I&apos;m not so much interested in remembering the to-do list as retaining broader concepts for long periods of time. I&apos;m lucky enough to get to learn a ton of things every day, but my long term retention of them is terrible unless I spend considerable time applying these ideas in practice, which is often not practically possible. This leads to a lot of wasted time, it&apos;s as if I never even read the darn thing.&lt;p&gt;Often, and this is the sad part, I won&apos;t even bother reading something because I know I&apos;ll forget it almost immediately, unless I have a block of time available to dedicate to trying it out in practice.&lt;p&gt;For example, I&apos;m really fond of the underpinnings of programming language design and compilers, and it&apos;s thousands over thousands of pages of information (most of it very interesting and useful to me), but I fail to retain the vast majority of the great info and need to continuously go back to the texts whenever I&apos;m in doubt about something. There were a couple of valuable techniques recommended in Pragmatic Bookshelf&apos;s Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, such as &quot;now pretend you have to teach this concept to your former self who knows nothing about this&quot;, which supposedly helps with retention and internalization into the brain&apos;s &quot;web of known facts&quot;.&lt;p&gt;Is there anything like that in the book? Would it be of any help?</text></comment>