reading-habits on S Anand

I count AI summarized books as "Read"

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 02:54:41 +0000

I have this nagging feeling (maybe you do too?) that it’s cheating and I’m not really learning if it’s so easy. The same voice makes me feel guilty when using coding agents to code or ChatGPT in meetings.

I’m telling that voice to relax.

I upload books to Claude and ask it to “Comprehensively and engagingly summarize and fact-check, writing in Malcolm Gladwell’s style, the book …”. I can read it in an hour instead of twelve. Four bullet points instead of forty. With (this surprised me) roughly the same number of insights I actually do something with.

I read books for pleasure, learning, and implementing.

That last bit is key, but the bottleneck isn’t the book. It’s me: how much I can absorb, retain, and act on. From what I can tell, between reading 300 pages vs 10, there’s not much difference.

The pleasure is intact

I worried I’d lose the emotional jolt – those mind-blown moments that make reading feel worth it. For science and self-help books, I haven’t.

For example, take this summary excerpt of How Minds Change

The irony is almost too perfect. To change someone’s mind, you have to stop trying to change their mind. You have to start by trying to understand it.
And when you do that—really do that—something unexpected happens. Sometimes their mind changes. And sometimes, if you’re honest with yourself, yours does too.

That blew my mind for a good 10 minutes.

Or, from Ants:

Think of a leafcutter ant colony as a high-tech Fungus Farm. There are four main players in this system: two are partners, one is a bodyguard, and one is a villain.

I loved the villain part!

There’s a learning bonus: fact-checking

When I ask Claude to fact-check the book while summarizing, I learn beyond the book. For example, I learnt that, among these longevity books:

Lifespan is largely rubbish.
The Telomere Effect has a decent core but builds fancy castles on shaky foundations.
Outlive is more careful with its claims, though less ambitious.

I learned this during the reading, not months later when some podcast corrected me.

You can also just… ask questions.

While reading Ants, “OK, aren’t most species superorganisms then? If yes, what’s the big deal?”
While reading The Cancer Code, “Why are free radicals produced? Give me examples. Are they always oxygen molecules that lack electrons? ELI15.”

The book doesn’t do that. The summary can. (I’m loving the ELI15 responses, BTW.)

I can read inaccessible books

I can now read Kamba Ramayanam in Tamil (a script I read quite slowly). Or Gitanjali, The Iliad, Dream of the Red Chamber, or more.

It’s not just language. I can read boring or intimidating books. On Growth and Form. The Road to Reality. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Brilliant but unapproachable.

Heck, I managed to read Ants after 30 years!

Sometimes the very first line of a summary hooks me so hard I can’t stop reading. That’s a strange thing to admit about a summary. But there it is.

I haven’t figured it out fully

I would read Brandon Sanderson or Jeffrey Archer this way yet. The point is the experience itself: the slow unfolding, the surprise, the voice in your ear. They write in a style I like. Why summarize that?

Biographies are trickier. The Choice’s summary made me cry. So, I do want to read The Choice in original - and the summary helped me prioritize it.

Histories? I’m not sure. Manga? No way.

I’m logging these on Goodreads as “read”. I don’t know if that’s kosher. The voice in my head has opinions. But I’m learning things I wouldn’t have learned otherwise, from books I wouldn’t have finished or started, with the same pleasure and actionability.

Maybe that’s cheating. But maybe the rules of our game have changed, and I haven’t learned them yet.

Update: 31 Dec 2025. Here are the books I read this year via AI summaries, along with links to the Claude summaries.

Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan, Cacilda Jethá Claude
The Molecule of More by Daniel Z. Lieberman and Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke Claude
Noise by Daniel Kahnemann Claude
How to Change by Katy Milkman Claude
Lifespan by David Sinclair and The Telomere EFfect by Elizabeth Blackburn and Outlive by Peter Attia. Claude
How Minds Change by David McRaney Claude
The Obesity Code by Jason Fung Claude
The Diabetes Code by Jason Fung Claude
The Cancer Code by Jason Fung Claude
The Ants by Bert Hölldobler, Edward O. Wilson Claude
Price of the Modi Years by Aakar Patel Claude
Behave by Robert Sapolsky Claude
The Choice by Edith Eva Eger Claude
How Not To Die by Michael Greger Claude
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker Claude
The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson Claude
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes Claude
Immune: A Journey Into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive by Philipp Dettmer Claude Gemini
The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee Claude
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory by Stephen Jay Gould Claude
The Extended Phenotype by Richard Dawkins Claude
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk Claude
The Culture Map by Erin Meyer Claude
Outcomes over Output by Josh Seiden Claude
The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human by Siddhartha Mukherjee Claude
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee Claude
Reality is Not What it Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli Claude
The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt Claude
Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality by Venki Ramakrishnan Claude
Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes by Morgan Housel Claude
Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell Claude
Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine by Robert H. Lustig Claude
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker Claude
How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker Claude
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker Claude
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker Claude
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan Claude
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures Claude
Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by V.S. Ramachandran Claude
Small Wins Every Day: 100 Powerful Ways to Transform Your Life and Health by Luke Coutinho Claude
The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human by V.S. Ramachandran Claude

Update: 11 Apr 2026. I started adding this follow-up prompt:

Based on what you know of me, what are the things I should learn from these books? What might I do differently? Why? How?

Based on past conversations, AI knows me. For example, here were Claude’s thoughts:

Anand wants personalized life lessons from these books, filtered through what I know about him. Let me think about what I know:

Chief Innovation Officer at Straive, AI strategy, enterprise consulting

Faculty at IIT Madras, teaching Tools in Data Science to large cohort

Based in Singapore, Indian origins

Blogs daily at s-anand.net about AI experiments

Interests: data visualization, behavioral science, cross-domain pattern recognition, design

IIM Bangalore alumnus

Regular speaker at conferences

Core intellectual commitments: judgment and taste as scarce resource; verifiable/auditable AI outputs; Jevons Paradox applied to knowledge work; production costs collapsing shifts bottleneck to curation

Thinks in systems, economic, and forecasting frameworks with superforecaster-style probabilistic reasoning

Identifies as “LLM Psychologist”

Teaching an AI workshop for senior IAS officers at LBSNAA

That leads to high quality ideas. For example, it told me:

… you’re surrounded by people optimizing for the marathon — the visible, bounded deliverable. But Pheidippides’ actual run — the slow, unglamorous, unsexy one that actually won the war — was the one nobody watched.

What’s the Spartathlon version of your work? Probably: the long, patient work of changing how a client organization thinks, not just what tools it uses.

… make sure you’re spending some deliberate effort on it, even when there’s no one watching and no milestone presentation scheduled.

That led me to review transcripts for AI adoption impact. Answer: workshops help AI adoption most. I’m keeping an AI experiments list handy for impromptu workshops.

That’s real impact. In less time than I’d have taken to read a book.

Sure, I didn’t get what the books had to offer. I didn’t struggle. But I did get personalized value.

Books in 2024

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 09:32:58 +0000

I read 51 new books in 2024 (about the same as in 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020.) But slightly differently.

I only read Manga this year.

Fullmetal Alchemist (Vol 12 - 27). What started off as a childishly illustrated children’s book evolved into a complex, gripping plot.
Attack on Titan (Vol 1 - 34). I read it while I watched the TV Series (reading first, then watching). It started explosively and the pace never let up. I had to take breaks just to breathe and calm my nerves. The sheer imagination and subtlety is brilliant.

It’s hard to decide which is better—the manga (book) or the anime (TV). The TV series translates the book faithfully in plot and in spirit. It helped that I read each chapter first, allowing me to imagine it, and then watch it, which told me what all I missed in the book. I absolutely would not have understood the manga without watching the anime.

This apart, I only read Brandon Sanderson’s books. Or rather, re-read. All of them, actually 🙂.

Though I enjoyed manga thoroughly, it may not be for everyone because:

Firstly, books are not for everyone. Comics even more so. A lot of people feel they’re … childish. That takes some effort to overcome.
Manga can be gut wrenching. Nerve racking. Mind bending. You can’t treat them as light reading, like Sanderson, Archer, or Asimov. Read if you have the stomach for To Kill a Mockingbird, A Clockwork Orange, or Catch-22.

We visited Japan this summer and it beautifully complemented this reading experience. I could visualize every scene against the backdrops. I finished Attack on Titan on 4 Jun, just as we reached Japan. I planned to read nothing more for the rest of the year. Nothing could beat the experience.

But in Dec 2024, Wind and Truth was released. I am now half-way through perhaps the only book that can match my manga experience this year.

Comments

My Year in 2024 - S Anand 31 Dec 2024 3:08 pm (pingback): […] Reading only Manga […]
Saransh Saini 17 Feb 2025 12:30 pm: Hi sir, just another AoT fan here. This was my very first anime and unfortunately, it set my bar so high that I couldn’t enjoy other genres for a long time 😂. Since you are an LLM Psychologist, what better way to have fun than training two LLM models, one on the Psychology of Eren and another on Reiner/Armin, and letting them debate the ending of AoT and its future consequences? Honestly, I wasn’t satisfied with the ending and I assume this debate would drive out a better conclusion than the original one. Moreover, I would love to work with you on this project.

How to read when time is short

Sat, 12 Nov 2005 12:00:00 +0000

How to read when time is short. Read the “How To Find The Essential 20%” section carefully. Another interesting post from Bert on How to Learn More With No Extra Effort uses the principle in the post below to suggest we take a lot of breaks while learning.

i cdnuolt blveiee taht i cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht i was rdanieg. the phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mind is amazanig. aoccdrnig to a rscheearch taem at cmabrigde uinervtisy, it deosnt mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. the rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. amazanig huh? yaeh and yuo awlyas thohgut slpeling was ipmorantt.

Comments

Dhar 14 Nov 2005 9:18 am: Check out Google Analytics
Jayant 14 Nov 2005 10:00 am: And just hope the client does not know the remaining 80% or isn
Raj 15 Nov 2005 8:16 pm: what is the run?
Anonymous 16 Nov 2005 5:14 pm: i am confused with your email id is it s-anand@yahoo.com or s_anand@yahoo.com ?
S Anand 16 Nov 2005 6:50 pm: root underscore node at yahoo dot com, actually.
leke 17 Nov 2005 11:43 am: why can
S Anand 17 Nov 2005 3:34 pm: Sorry, apostrophes were causing problems in the comments. I’ve fixed them.
Sri 13 Dec 2005 11:00 am: This is interesting: http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/Cmabrigde/

Libraries

Fri, 17 Jun 2005 12:00:00 +0000

I’m fairly stingy. When it comes to books, I’ve always taken it to extremes.

For example, I’ve read several Asimov novels at Landmark (Chennai). I’d walk into the stoor, pick up an Asimov, just stand there (no seats) and read for 4 hours. After the neck-ache becomes unbearable, I’d leave and come back the next day.

I got pretty tech-savvy once I got a laptop and a mobile phone. I would walk over to bookshops, note down the names of interesting books on my mobile, and download books in digital format. I’ve a pretty large collection now.

Last week, I went over to Waterstone’s at Oxford Street. Armed with a cameraphone, I had the ability to even take pictures of books I wanted to read.

A few days ago, I discovered the Redbridge Council Libraries. Council libraries are free. Well-stocked. Well-spread. I casually walked in to one of them, and as I strolled through the aisles, I had more goose-bumps than I’ve ever had in a long time. The collection is excellent!

A few minutes ago, I’ve perfected the art of stingy book reading. Here’s my six-step process.

Comments

Jyoti 7 Jul 2006 7:44 pm: Your blog is a riot! :)

Against digitization

Thu, 21 Mar 2002 12:00:00 +0000

Powerful thoughts against digitization. And since these days I need an excuse to justify the amount of paper I’m using, this article helps ease my conscience.