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William Petty said this about Robert Boyle’s well known reading habits (paraphrased): “the man reads 12 hours a day ... but I think one can learn more from their own thought than from tracing the cobwebs of others.”

Boyle was also a lot smarter and more successful than Petty, but Petty started his life as a fur hat salesman and his grandson became prime minister of England.

Read until you have to get up and think, think until you have to sit down and read. That’s what I say!! - BHK

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Some great thoughts in here. I'm on Goodreads too and follow some Booktubers (on Youtube) and some Booktok people (on tiktok) and there is often an emphasis on how many books one can read in a year and an emphasis on those types of challenges. I find it pretty lame because it's not what I think reading should be about but to each their own.

That book by Fermor sounds interesting. I have a few of his books on my TBR.

"But I still feel one owes a kind of debt to a book one thinks is good, even if it proves a slog." I really agree with this. There are so many fantastic books out there that are tough to get through and can be a bit of a slog but worth it.

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I mean look the fact that people finish books IS literacy. Not finishing books means you don't know what's in them.

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I'm somewhat haphazard in what I decide to read and I've applied most of the six methods you stated just not with any consistency. There is another method I've used that doesn't exactly fit in one of the categories you outlined, sometimes I simply follow the footnotes/bibliography. I do this usually when there's some unbelievable fact or statistic that I need to know more about. For example, in Lieven's "In the Shadow of the Gods" there's a passage in ch. 12 where he's discussing Middle Eastern Muslim empires and he mentions that the Safavids performed ritualized cannibalism as part of some ceremonies. This was completely shocking to me, while I know that ancient people's (and some more recent ones) practice human sacrifice and cannibalism I did not at all expect this is 16th century middle eastern empire. Anyways I had to know more and I followed Lieven's footnotes about this and started reading about the Safavid empire.

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