With almost every book that I read, I read with the intention of digging in deep and then blog posts just happen to come out of it. A good example of that was Adam Grant’s “Think Again“, where I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book, and it just happened to generate a number of great ideas for posts.
That was flipped when I recently read “Tribe of Mentors” by Tim Ferriss. Once I understood how the book was laid out, I read it specifically to put together a long series of posts about questions from the book.
So which way is better? I really don’t know.
I tend to think that both are valuable, just in slightly different ways. In either case I’m still digging in to learn and understand what they’re trying to say, so I don’t think there’s a downside to either technique.
Going forward I’ll still likely treat most books as I did with “Think Again”, largely because I don’t know what blog posts might even exist in them until I get there. I enjoy digging in and finding surprises along the way, and that’s what I’ll continue to do for most everything I read.
Sort of funny, I’m getting ready to start co-reading a book and was thinking about my book reading process (which is always changing). https://tonydye.com/2024/03/how-i-read-a-book/. I don’t think I read for the purpose of writing posts, but would like to get better at, as a bare minimum, putting together a paragraph or two summary of what I read.
Good timing with that post! I still generally don’t read for the purpose of writing posts, but it’s certainly entwined in there.
I know that for a good book I’ll write some blog posts, host a podcast episode about it, and then use it in a book club or two. The plan to touch the same book many times to hopefully get lessons from it, so don’t necessarily need to plan on it from the outset.