【推荐1】If you’ve decided to read more, you’re not alone. However, one of the challenges with books is making time to read them all. In a classic guide How to Read a Book, Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren provide a solution; Don’t try to read all of them, because most of them aren’t worth it. You can get the best ideas from most books simply by skimming them. Skimming also prepares you to learn more when you actually read the book.

There are two levels of Adler and Van Doren‘’s method of skimming. One includes looking through contents (目录) and conclusions of each chapter and making notes of what you already know or whether this book has information you want to learn. The second is known as speed reading, which is basically reading through a book really fast, just to get a surface-level understanding of it.

In order to get knowledge quickly, people try their best to study and take use of skills, but the obsession with reading faster and learning more is not completely right. Reading two books doesn’t make a person twice as learned as a person who reads one book twice(or even once, carefully).

Here’s how you can really use skimming to your advantage.

Don’t feel bad for skimming instead of reading. If the book was any good, it's likely to realize how important it is for you to read the whole thing when you skim the book.

When you read for inspiration that you can use to your work, you need to read documents (文件) for your work, or to improve your skills. Then there’s no doubt that skimming will be quite useful.

When you do find a book you like, don’t try to rush through it to the end. Slow down and take notes. Reread certain parts you don’t understand in detail. Connect the book’s ideas with other ideas or experiences you have.

Skimming is simply a tool to support the overall reading experience. It helps you choose the right thing to read. Learning is not about how many books you read, or even how fast you read. It’s about what you get from each of those books.

【推荐3】Memory loss (遗忘) is very common as people get old. A 10-year-long study of the elders in China has found that a healthy lifestyle is connected to slower memory loss even when people carry a risky gene (高危基因) for Alzheimer’s (阿尔茨海默氏症). Researchers followed 29,000 people aged at least 60 years for 10 years. About 50 percent of the participants were women.

At the beginning of the study in 2009, the researchers tested the participants’ memory with the Auditory Verbal Learning Test (AVLT听觉词语学习测验). They were also tested for the most common gene connected with Alzheimer’s. Around 20 percent of the participants were carriers of the risky gene. The participants received tests in 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2019. In the follow-ups, six healthy lifestyle factors were analyzed: a healthy diet, regular physical exercise, active social contact, active cognitive activity, non-smoking and never drinking alcohol.

The results showed that the AVLT scores continuously decreased over the 10 years. But the highest test scores were in the group with good habits and the lowest in the group where people usually have an unhealthy lifestyle. In a word, the participants with healthier lifestyles, even when they were risky gene carriers, had a slower rate of memory loss than the participants with unhealthy lifestyles.

The researchers said that they studied the relevance (相关性) between lifestyle factors and their effects for an entire 10 years and offered important information to protect the elders against memory loss. The results about the risky gene carriers are still positive because healthy lifestyle risks are related to a slower rate of memory loss, even though there is genetic risk.