That is a good point, I've only just begun to look into it, so I don't have any general recommendations. It just seemed like as I was coming up with a reading list on reading, some books seemed to pop up in Amazon's "people also bought" section. I think part of it is because the guy who wrote "How to Read a Book" was heavily influenced by Thomas Aquinas. I also looked up hermeneutics afterwards and it seemed appropriate for what I was trying to do. One key takeaway seems to be looking at reading as work...
One book that I was looking at was "Inductive Bible Study: A Comprehensive Guide to the Practice of Hermeneutics" by Traina, as the table of contents looked interesting (survey of books as wholes, survey of parts as wholes, selecting questions and formulating premises, drawing inferences, evaluating and appropriating, correlation,...). Haven't got to it yet though.
I'm looking to build up a “tool-box” of strategies/techniques/habits for reading non-fiction effectively and efficiently. I'm looking for methods to help me retain concepts, locate main ideas, make connections, etc.
If anyone has posted about this topic previously, please link to the post.
Please point to relevant resources that have worked for you; additionally please describe skills/systems that you've developed personally.
An example of a useful comment I got posting in an open thread, from Jayson_Virissimo
“As I read textbooks, I summarize the most important concepts (along with doing the exercises, if there are any) and write them in a notebook and then later (less than a week) enter the notes into Anki as cloze-delete flashcards. I don't have an objective measure of retention, but I believe that it has vastly improved relative to when I would simply read the book.”
Here is an example of an existing resource that I found useful:http://violentmetaphors.com/2013/08/25/how-to-read-and-understand-a-scientific-paper-2/
Here are some questions/prompts that may spur your thinking:
Describe the setting where you read.
Do you schedule reading time? How?
How do you decide what to read next?
Do you write notes by hand, on a computer?
Do you wear noise-canceling headphones?
Do you skim texts?
Do you reread texts?
How often do you reread “foundational” texts, or texts that shifted your paradigm?
How often do you decide not to finish a book?
I may do a series of posts on this in discussion, and if other users find it interesting/useful I may eventually make it into a post for the main page.