One of the biggest reasons I procrastinate required reading is because I don’t like mixing work and pleasure. I despise anything done for scholastic or academic purposes, but I have to. I’ve never been good at taking notes, and I don’t know how to go about fact checking. Do I fact check every single thing in the book? Do I write notes as a I go? Once the chapter is done? After the book? For instance, if I go reading the whole book and then find after that a lot of the stuff isn’t true, I just wasted my time.
I can accept that at least I now know the book is worthless, but I’d rather not have read it at all if it didn’t actually give me more info.
Fact-check when a claim seems questionable and when it’s something that you know the author is biased on.
It’s a lot easier if you’re reading about something you’re already familiar with. For example, I know a fair amount about the time period in which The Wager is set and so a bunch of anomalies jumped out at me.
Anytime you run into anachronism should set your radar off (The Wager, again…)
One thing you can do is look at the one-star ratings on Amazon. This may sound weird, but most of the time it’s just people who didn’t finish the book or have really dumb things to say (“it had a lot of pages” “I haven’t read it yet but I don’t like the cover”) but if the facts are wrong you’ll probably find somebody who cares and lists everything that the author got wrong.
Descendants of the victors fact checking the victors.