I am currently about halfway through I am a Strange Loop, by Douglas Hofstadter, enjoying it immensely, and hoping to post an entry on it when I'm finished. However, after reading some pages in the middle of the night, I found myself with an insight into reading interesting nonfiction that I'd like to share. As I went back to bed I thought about that reading session and realized that I had been reading the book rather the way I read a novel, assuming that I can track the main points of the plot without any special mental note-taking, and this was not the way I had read Damasio or Zunshine, whose books I read almost like math texts, trying to master the concepts before going on. And I think the way I am reading now is actually better, certainly more fun, but possibly more successful as well. I remembered way back to my undergrad course in literary criticism, when I was trying to completely understand and almost internalize the first essay in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, and failing. But philosophy isn't math, and even--or especially--the most profound ideas may leave room for disagreement, or mental dialog, even by a 20-year-old undergraduate. So getting the gist of an argument may be quite enough.