A classmate in the history seminar mentioned something small on Tuesday that I keep thinking about. She reads the last paragraph of a chapter before she reads the chapter itself, just so she knows what she’s supposed to be looking for along the way.
I tried it on last night’s reading, something about postwar housing policy, dense in parts (the kind of writing that makes you reread the same sentence twice). Normally I’d plow straight through, flagging anything that looked important and sorting it out after. This time I read the ending first, then went back to the start.
It changed how I read the middle. Less flagging, less doubling back, because I already knew where the argument was headed. I still took notes, just fewer of them, and shorter ones too.
What mattered most to me was that I finished before the cutoff I set for myself a while back. Lamp off, lotion on, into bed without rushing the last pages. Small thing to pass along, but it held up on a chapter that would normally eat half my evening.