Swashbooking is a process of quickly skimming books, looking for anything important. My brother and I invented it as a way to supercharge our learning.
In our first experiments, we set a recurring alarm at six minutes, and switched to a new book every time the chime sounded. At the end of one hour, we each gave book reports. Since we read the same books, we were able to compare what each of us had absorbed. We discovered that for most books– even really thick ones– we were able to discover powerful ideas in only six minutes.
Then we hit upon a new idea: Let’s take a stack of books (115 that we had never read) and set a timer for eight hours. During that time (stopping the clock for meals and a few breaks) we would read for the purpose of preparing an oration that would refer to as many of the books as possible.
By the time it was over, Jon had covered 47 books and I covered 46.