This is not a troll post for sure. Trolls dont read michael polanyi’s Personal Knowledge. I am a professor!! :)

This was a question for academic readers who dont read a book cover to cover, for good reasons (sometimes arguments are repititive and sometimes guessable). I wanted to know what readers of such books call “having read a book”.

Did you get hit in the head with a rock?

This is what happens when you are too eager to create a metaphor without realizing subtle differences that completely undermines the metaphor.

Reading a book is not like mowing your lawn. Its more like watching a movie. And there are some parts of the movie one can speed up or even skip without missing the whole of the movie. This is especially so for academic books, which was the explicit context. Of course I would not say I have read One Hundred Years of solitude if I have only read it till the half. But academic books do not follow a suspenseful plot. Most arguments are raised at the beginning and then there is a progressive explanation and detailing of particular views. My question was for people who read this style of book.