I read Alexander's care of the patient in surgery and passed. It's a massive book and clearly you can't read every word of it, but yes, you do need to gloss over every chapter and familiarise yourself with the basics. Learn patient positions, accompanying potential skin and nerve damage, commonly used OR drugs (there's a lot of overlap between subspecialities) what to do in an emergency, appropriate responses to anxious patients, instrumentation and infection control. You need to learn to 'skim' read so that you are flicking through the chapter without reading every single sentence, but retaining the core elements. Also, there's a cnor test question book you can download onto your
kindle, it's dirt cheap and the questions are similar to the real ones. It is do-able. Good luck