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.
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.