One of the final sections of my qualifying examinations has got me thinking about how students can process a great amount of material in a relatively short amount of time. I have been given the task of reading nine books in areas I wasn’t taught and didn’t specifically study. I will sit in a room with professors from these disciplines and they will expect me to have some amount of knowledge about these nine books. How can one approach something like that? It seems to me that there are two basic options (and blending them would take more time and form a third).
The first basic option seems to be a sort of power-skimming of the texts. Most texts are layed out in a way that allow the reader to read an introduction and a conclusion in order to quickly figure out the main points, purpose, and thesis of the text. Each chapter may also contain mini versions of both of these ideas as well. An index allows for quick reference of the definitions the author uses (or created) for the purpose of making their points and proving their thesis. Even individual paragraphs are often written in a structured way: the first sentence often contains the major point of the entire paragraph. After dealing with a book in this manner the student may need only to know the table of contents in order to parrot knowledge memorized for short-term purposes.
The second basic option is to read the book as written for what it is. Read it in order from start to finish, suffer through the examples that may or may not be interesting, and after completing your reading of the entire book write a brief essay answering the question “what was this book about” without refering to the book itself (or only referring to its table of contents). While this option would lack specifics of the argument it should hit all of the high points and by reading all those examples the student would have a better working knowledge (in the form of stories) that may help them understand the major concepts and the general argument being made. Both options have positives and negatives. We might just get into that later.