I have finally discovered how to successfully read a complete classic novel in 30 minutes.
An Oxford University English professor showed me the workflow. Here is exactly what he does.
He does not open Moby Dick and start reading from page one. That, he explains, is the most inefficient way to read a book ever invented - a method devised pre-AI - before its power to help us think had really developed.
He uploads the entire book into NotebookLM first. Then he runs one prompt before touching a single page.
PROMPT 1: 'What is the single central argument Moby Dick is making? What does Melville believe that most people don't? What are the 5 most important ideas I need to understand before everything else makes sense?'
That prompt does something remarkable. It tells your brain what Moby Dick means before you experience any of it. You already know the book is about obsession, hubris, and humanity's futile struggle against an indifferent universe.
Every page you then do not read is confirming something you already hold in your head. That is a completely different cognitive experience. It is called not reading the book.
You may be surprised to learn that the whale itself does not actually appear for quite some time. Several hundred pages, in fact. Much of the early novel concerns a sailor named Ishmael and his friend Queequeg (a harpooner with tattoos). It is, if I am honest, a bit slow, and won't be remade like The Meg anytime soon.
The second prompt is the one that saves the most time.
PROMPT 2: 'Which chapters contain the core ideas? Which are examples, repetition, or — and I cannot stress this enough — lengthy digressions about the taxonomy of whales?'
Most classic novels are sixty to seventy percent unnecessary. Not because Melville was dishonest. Because publishers in 1851 wanted a substantial book, and Melville had a great deal to say about whale marginalia. The actual story is perhaps four or five chapters long. The rest is, essentially, a dated nature documentary with fancy phrases and endless sentences.
The third prompt is what separates a successful reader from a poor sop who takes hours and days reading the book.
PROMPT 3: 'What questions does Moby Dick not answer? What would a hostile critic say is wrong with the pursuit of the white whale?'
This is the move most people never make. They read over days, return to passages, grapple with ambiguity, building something that might eventually be called understanding, as they. Instead, he stress-tests the same book in forty seconds using a trained AI model. The difference is saved time and reading success.
I read four books last month this way.
I retained more from each one than I have from any book I read cover to cover in the last two years.
The average person reads a 300-page book in six hours and forgets most of it within a week. He reads the same book in 30 minutes and can still explain its central thesis six months later.
The book didn't change. The interface did.*
*The above post is AI slop based on a viral X thread. Probably don't waste your time reading the original here.
The short paragraphs, glib pronouncements, fake appeals to academic authority (Oxford, or Harvard in the original), and other usual AI moves feature.
The thread explains about reading with understanding, but actually misunderstands how you should actually read.
AI might be useful in various ways for learning, but prompting students to not actually read, in the name of 'reading for understanding', is not one of them. It is terrible advice. The type of terrible advice that students are fed daily on their social media feeds.
One positive from all this: I reckon actual teachers actually teaching the actual reading of complex texts — and particularly how to read for meaning and for accuracy and for fakery — may just prove more important than ever in our bright new age.
Comments