The thing cornell west said was something about when you grow, when you give completely of yourself, something old in you dies. Something that you do not need anymore.
Maybe I should listen to his lectures and see what he has to say.
I download a lot of books. Anytime I see a good quote from one, or a person mentions a book as a good book, or a writer makes a great reference to one, I download it, or buy it, or get it from the library.
Books are worth every penny.
Even if they are expensive. They might enrich your life. After all, a good book is like the condensation of an entire lived experience for like $20.
However, when I read books, there are few that I read cover to cover. Fiction, obviously. And some biographies or narratives. But most of the non-fiction requires you to skip around to have it make sense.
Or at least to get to the good bits before you are completely bored with the whole thing.
So in reading non-fiction, the best approach is find an interesting part from the table of contents, and go there straightaway.
Read that. Find another part. Things may be referenced from other sections of the book, go find them there.
Thus, you can get through a book, usually skipping the anecdotes and the interesting filler. Get to the meat of the content, and you can decide if the book is worth reading.
There are a few books I have read from the middle, to the end, then from the middle to the beginning again, because they were so good.
Reading books this way helps you be efficient. Most books, after a while, you realize that they could have been a blog entry. You know or have read most of the stuff in there. But there are often one or two gems that make the read worth it.
Sometimes it is fun just to read. A person has such a great voice, or collection of characters and stories, that a non-fiction book can read like fiction. In that case, go ahead and read.