I am about two hundred pages into Seeing Like a State and have been since February. This is deliberate, and it is the only way I have ever successfully read a book of this kind.
The method
Twenty pages a week, Sunday morning, at a table, with a pencil. No more than twenty even when it is going well. When the week is bad I read ten and do not count it as failure.
The cap is the important part. Left unconstrained I read a book like this in three long sittings, feel enormously satisfied, and retain approximately nothing — I have done exactly that with four books I could not now summarise.
Why it works
Because the week does the work. An argument encountered on Sunday gets six days of collision with everything else — an article, a conversation, the way a form is designed at the bank. Scott’s central idea about legibility, about the state needing to simplify what it governs in order to govern it, has been quietly rearranging how I read municipal notices for four months.
That does not happen in a weekend. Density needs elapsed time, not concentrated time.
The obvious objection
You lose the thread. You do, somewhat, and the fix is cheap: two minutes at the start of each session reading the previous week’s marginal notes before the new pages. That is the entire overhead.
At twenty pages a week a 450-page book takes about six months. I will finish this one around November, which is fine, because there is no prize and nobody is counting. See also: against the reading challenge.