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I picked up this exercise of reading a large textbook with a red cover and giant boar on its front page, I promised myself that I would publish notes on every chapter I read as content on my blog. Some months into this exercise I found that the pressure of publishing notes and making them meticulous was stopping me from reading and soon I started dreading the idea of sitting to read. It sucked the joy away from reading. In this despair, I came across a book by Oliver Burkeman, that talks about a problem fellow readers often face.

The author's advice was not to stockpile knowledge but to resist the urge to hoard it like a squirrel around nuts. In that spirit, I accepted my failure and the advice. The cynic in me saw this as a self-serving act. But I hope, it will help me be a more free-spirited reader.

I have come across conflicting advice on this topic. A nonfiction book isn't read well until the reader takes notes. This advice also made sense to my impressionable mind. It is what led me to take on this exercise. But since it became a hindrance in reading itself, I have consciously decided to put away that advice.

Maybe the note-taking does not need to happen for each page. However, the central point of this post is to reinforce the importance of conceding the failure of a strategy and avoiding the sunk cost fallacy. Is the act of note-taking more important than reading itself? No. So in that spirit, I have decided to do what I call a more freewheeling reading. I will choose what to note and what to forget. I refuse the tyranny of note-taking.

The book I had originally planned on reading is called Designing Data-Intensive Applications. The inspiration to read it came from a book club hosted in a community run by the author and practitioner Alex Petrov. I am halfway through the book and will finish it along with book club but without taking on the pressure of noting important bullet points. Because let's face it, I was not going to read them anyway. They were more of a posturing device, a thing of vanity, anyway.