How to read books

Start many, quit many, seek the most interesting parts

Books are tremendously important to your development and mind, despite the way they are frequently abused in school, and text is the fastest, most information-dense way to acquire new information, but, at the same time, most books aren't worth finishing. Those two facts don’t conflict... I mentioned this to Nightroller, who says that many people have told him books are important, but that almost no one says most books aren't worth finishing, and hardly anyone observes that these are reasonable views. Because this seems so obvious to me, I never thought about writing it down. 

As a kid, finishing a book feels like an achievement, and adults commonly praise the virtues of tenacity and finishing what kids start. “Quitters never prosper,” they’ll say, or shit like that. As an adult, of course you realize that that’s a load of bollocks and in fact quitters commonly prosper, with the trick being finding something really important and sticking with that, while quitting everything that isn’t important (most things). Most kids are by default whiny quitters, so telling them to suck it up and keep going is good advice for them, but bad advice for adults. In school, finishing a boring book for class receives praise, while quitting a boring book receives condemnation. 

Fortunately once you are out of the textbook loony bin you can have some more distance from the whole situation and come to realize that books are great, there is presently no substitute for the best books, and you will learn more, faster, from reading than you will from any other medium. It’s also easier to produce text than any other media... if you have a laptop with a functioning keyboard (can be $100 used) you can produce text. No camera needed. However, editing the sex tapes you make with women may require a faster processor and larger hard drive than the $100 laptop. The seduction arts knowledge base and community has been overwhelmingly propagated via text, starting with early seduction arts online communities, running through Neil Strauss’s The Game, and continuing from there into innumerable blogs (most now defunct) and self-published books. Knowledge of the seduction arts will likely continue to be passed on via text well into the future, especially the best information by normal guys: text allows anonymity in a way that’s impossible with video or audio, and as you should know by now, anyone who puts their true identity out there as a PUA, redpill, or Game type guy increases his chances of getting canceled or having other bad downstream effects in terms of his career and/or relationships

Most books aren’t worth finishing... most commonly they have a useful introduction and first chapter, and frequently a useful last chapter, and only some material in the middle is worth a damn. Prior to the advent of e-readers like Amazon Kindles, most books were published by New York publishing houses, and those publishing houses believe that a book has to be a certain number of words (like 85,000 - 100,000) and pages (like 325) to be long enough for readers to pay for. Anyone with a brain who reads the preceding sentence will spot the problem...what if the writer has 30,000 words of material, or 50,000 words of material, but still wants to write a “book?” 

The solution is padding, repetition, and other forms of bullshit. This is most severe in nonfiction but can also appear in fiction (many novels have an interesting setup but can’t stick the landing... as with flying, getting and staying airborne is easier than landing the thing satisfactorily). For the reader, the solution to padding and repetition is reading selectively and quitting routinely.  Start lots of books but read very few cover to cover. Reading an entire book is most useful when you're young / ignorant, but, the more you know, the less you'll want to read the entirety of most books.

Some books are worth reading to start to finish, like the ones I discuss in *The best books for learning game*. The majority however are not, and giving yourself not just permission but encouragement to quit means you’ll start more, potentially better ones. A man who has options with women behaves differently from a man who does not, and a man who realizes how many options he has with books behaves differently from one doesn’t realize how many options he has. I don’t think there are good rules for knowing when to quit a book, but when you know you know, and skipping ahead is virtuous. 

The smartest people start many books, and if you don’t know people who read then you aren’t hanging out with the smartest, most capable people, and you should think about who the closest people to you are. Learning the seduction arts means learning how to learn and learning how to be effective, which too few people learn when they’re young... late is better than never. When Elon Musk realized that the only way to get stuff into space is by building it himself, he started by reading textbooks on rocketry. That is not sufficient (lots of people have read and worked out the math of getting off earth and into orbit), but it was an important place to start. 

I have put out two books, one,  SEX CLUBS, NON-MONOGAMY, AND GAME, free, and the other one, THE GOOD GIRL, a small amount. Consider rating either or both on Amazon if you have started either or both. The sex-clubs book is illustrative of the benefits of writing online because I could make sure that I included only relevant material and nothing superfluous. The first version I published was like 35k words, and the latest version is 58k words. Because I'm not bound by out-of-date publishing traditions, I can make sure that the book contains only fresh, relevant, non-repetitive material. Like adding water to make a soup seem bigger, being forced to lengthen the book would make the end product worse. I can write to the right length then stop. A lot of online books are like this but many of them are poorly edited. 

Having written the books, I can also better gauge who is worth talking to... I talk more to the people who show that they’ve read the sex-club book and some of my other work cause that shows 1. engagement and 2. I don’t have to repeat myself, and we can move to the new, most interesting material without us having to hit the old stuff. The most interesting conversations happen among people who already understand the basics, especially among those unblocking each other.

Books are better for memory than audio or video. Unless you’re among the few people who write down whatever they remember from a specific podcast, the podcast is only entertainment. It’s much easier to highlight or use post it notes or simply "on page 78 XYZ" with a book than it is to mark in a podcast or video.

Don’t let your negative reading experiences in high school hold you back as an adult. Just as you have learned the virtues of spinach or broccoli despite the aversions you might have had when you were five, as an adult you can and should learn how to learn and most importantly, how to win at life. Proficiency at seducing women is one part of winning at life... a vital, important part, but not the only one. 

I asked ChatGPT how many books have been published in English and it refused to give me an answer. Google Books estimates 130 million books have been published since the time of Gutenberg. It’s worth trying many and quitting most in order to find the ones you love. What you love won’t be what I love.

Books have limits, something mentioned in Andy Matuschak’s Why books donʼt work, but the limits can be overcome by people who are aware of them. Now you are aware. Congratulations. A classic problem with a guy who becomes aware of the seduction arts is that he reads everything and does nothing, which is worthless. Reading is there to affect the real world. There is such a thing as too much reading, and the reading will only make sense if it’s combined with practice. Let me know what you do to overcome the limits of books. 

---

The best way for a beautiful woman to express approval of Red Quest is by spreading legs, but, for everyone else, there is becoming a paid subscriber. That’s how you most authentically signal that you’d like more Red Quest. It’s expensive and good for you. Second to that, consider liking and commenting.