How do you guys finish books that are long/dry? I tried reading deep work, loved it, but it was just too dense and dry. No storytelling and just plain facts. Left it at 40%. What strategies have worked for you?

The most useful reading technique I've picked up is to stop reading books that don't excite me. It's not college anymore. I do skim back and forth in the book to see if certain sections make better reading. You may try audible versions of the book if you want to plod ahead regardless, but I'd spend time on finding a summary of the book someplace and just getting the key points out of it.

Don't read books you don't enjoy.

If a particular chapter is dragging, I skip the chapter or skim through it. If something is not clicking even after two attempts I drop the book with no regret.

1. Show intentionality when reading a book i.e. you have a strong reason for it / the subject matter is really important NOW. If not try point 2. 2. For non-fiction, you can read the summaries of the book first and decide if its worth the time to read in full. Example here is an excellent actionable summary of Deep Work 3. If Summaries / Good Notes are not available you could try reading Preface, Intro, Index and Conclusion to get a sense of what the book has to offer and if it is the right fit 4. If 3 is not your style try this Rule of 50 5. Feel free to skip sub-topics, chapters and even the whole book. As they say ‘one can never too little of bad or too much of good books’

"Deep Work" was riveting for me. I read it start to end non-stop in the first go 😂

Deep work become a bit repetitive like a lot of self-help books. Don't sweat it. Disclaimer: YMMV

Most self-help books and books from related genres are inflated to meet the word count. These books are called potboilers. Most of them could be easily condensed into a long blog post. So you can read summaries written by folks who've already read the book because they cover the key ideas. Carl Newport is good but avoid pop psychology books like Mastery, How introverts rule the world, or whatever nonsense is being peddled in the name of making you more productive. Psychology as a science itself is going through a crises with daily news of research fraud and replication crises. And all the pop psychology authors point to the false garbage studies to peddle their books Productivity and self-help youtubers, authors are the modern snake oil salesmen. Sorry for the rant!

Something that's worked for me is to have 7-8 books in rotation. Some "dry" and some page-turners. I make it a point to read at least 2% (I read on the Kindle) of any of those books every day. So, on days that I'm feeling up for it, I read the denser books and other days I read something breezier. Most days I end up reading more than 2% so I'm usually averaging at least 1 book a month. My book completion rate has also gone up significantly since I started this. In fact, I can't think of a single book that I haven't eventually finished after building this habit.

I just stop reading them. Read a summary if you want or even skip that. Often, if you have read 40% of a self help book, you get the main idea. So you can safely stop reading it without FOMO.

I hardly read self-help books especially about being productive, but when I want to read on, I just look around for some reasonably long podcast interviews of the authors and that seems to be enough for me.

Reading summaries seems like a good idea. It can motivate me to get back into the book

Like @victorious-energy-56764, Deep Work was a riveting read for me too. So much to absorb and think about. Cal Newport has just added so much value to my life that a homage became necessary.

Burn them