I’m afraid to stop reading a book, and I shouldn’t be.
Usually, my goal is to pick up a book and read it from cover to cover, and then mark it as finished on my (public) reading list. This helps me keep track of my progress and, over long periods of time, I can show exactly what books I’ve finished reading.
But that’s not the most efficient way to learn.
I’ve figured this out because of a book that I’m not interested in. I’m incentivized to read it all the way through, but when I try to do that, I get bored and end up not reading at all.
“The trick is to be bored with a specific book, rather than with the act of reading. So the number of pages absorbed could grow faster than otherwise. And you find gold, so to speak, effortlessly,” says Nassim Taleb in Antifragile.
That makes perfect sense. The challenge it poses me is to care less about the number of books I read and more about the amount of knowledge I gain.