On Non-Linear Reading

It's a common assumption that a book must be read "in order" from beginning to end. This is called linear reading.

But this is not the only way we can read a book. When approaching a book, we can also start from the middle or the end, skip around, weave back and forth, etc. This is called non-linear reading.

I've come to believe that—for non-fiction books at least—most people would profit from doing much more non-linear reading.

From Robert Darnton's Extraordinary Commonplaces:

Time was when readers kept commonplace books. Whenever they came across a pithy passage, they copied it into a notebook under an appropriate heading, adding observations made in the course of daily life. Erasmus instructed them how to do it; and if they did not have access to his popular De Copia, they consulted printed models or the local schoolmaster. The practice spread everywhere in early modern England, among ordinary readers as well as famous writers like Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, John Milton, and John Locke. It involved a special way of taking in the printed word. Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.

If you are an experienced reader, you may already understand why this is the case.

When you read, not everything is of equal importance. Some things may be familiar arguments or lines of thinking (which you can skip). Other things will be too difficult for your current level of understanding. Still other things will be irrelevant for your current goals.

Indeed, if you look at how PhD candidates in history read books & papers, they rarely ever read from left to right. Rather, they (1) skim the contents, (2) look at the introduction and conclusion, and (3) dig deeper into the interesting parts.

As an analogy, here's a map of my neighborhood in Japan:

For someone who doesn't know anything about Japan or where I am located, this is pretty useless.

We'd be much better off starting with something like this:

Zoomed-in maps are important. But we want the big picture view first.

Linear reading is primitive?

You could even go as far as to say to read linearly is primitive, in the sense that, before we invented the book, writing/reading was done on papyrus scrolls and the like, which limit our ability to read non-linearly (Hillesund 2010):

Non-linear reading and memory

Vivian, one of our readers, has pointed out that non-linear reading is valuable for another reason—it promotes retention. Unfinished books can stay in our mind longer by way of what psychologists call the Zeigarnik effect.

Vivian writes:

"...the Zeigarnik effect states that humans remember information better when we are interrupted or a task is incomplete. Your proposal to do nonlinear reading not only helps people get to the content they are most interested in faster, but as a side effect may help them remember better by leaving the rest of the text incomplete."