I decided to read a book a day this year. So far I'm ahead at 336 and here are my counter opinions.
"* It’s much better to read the best book on the topic 5 times, than to read 5 different books on the topic once."
Flat out no. Unless you're a freaking machine. Reading different books covering the same topic keeps me interested more. I don't mind the repetition then because I get the warm "I know that" feeling.
"* Eyes that pay read better than eyes that don’t. Eyes that pay more read better than eyes that pay less. In other words, when you pay for a book or a course, you’ll dedicate more to it, so you’ll get more value from it."
Total nonsense. I'm not paying my friends or the library to borrow their books. Next you'll be telling me hardback books transfer ideas better. Well, my e-reader has a hard case. And I paid 300 quid for it.
"* If you read ~1h (almost) every day, you’ll be able to read 60-80 books per year."
If you use all your idle time you can read a book a day. Cooking? You mean reading and cooking. Commuting? Reading. Sitting on the toilet? You get the idea. Waiting for the kettle? Seconds add up!
Thanks for your comment Paul!
Kudos for a book a day, just in my honest opinion, that's an overkill.
I think it's really important to have time to think and make notes about what you read. Even re-reading the same books can often give you different insights, depending on your inner state, life circumstances, etc.
I respect your opinion on your points, and I'll not argue those.
I shared my insights, based on my experience, and I wish I knew some of them before much earlier - it would save me a lot of time.
The problem complicating re-reading "the best" book is how do you know which one is the best? Reading a new one has a non-zero chance of reading a better one. A variation on the secretary problem where interviewing can have a negative cost.
As for a book a day being overkill - you're right, I'm not going to keep this up next year. Normally I read ~80 books but last year I was unemployed for several months and ended up reading >200 even though I was busy looking for work (which involves a lot travel and waiting around which is when I got religious about using my deadtime rather than "killing" time with HN) and I thought fuck it, I'll give it a go at which point I got hired within a month but wanted to see if I can keep going. It's getting really busy with deadlines but I'm confident I can catch up during christmas. For people wondering: yes, I have no family.
Open the page, sort by "best" and see how far up you have to go before you get to a book that doesn't get a negative review. As far as I can tell no one has this figured out yet and it's a no way of proving a program will stop without running it sort of a thing - all we need now is a name for this law relating to books.
Everything gets negative reviews - even if God Himself stepped down and put a poem on Amazon that was explicitly designed to trigger hidden backdoors in people's firmware to induce state of extreme pleasure, somebody would leave a negative review because they've only read second stanza while drunk, and decided it sucks. One has to get used to it, and learn not to flinch away from reading an occasional negative review to make sure whether it's just someone's very specific subjective opinion, or whether it can be a problem for many other readers too.
Unfortunately goodreads doesn't offer any kind of meaningful stats. I'm guessing it's 50/50 fact & fiction split but I could be wildly off. What goodreads does tell me is that 1/10 of them I rated 1 star. This is my biggest problem - I have not yet found any reliable way to find recommendations.
I don't know how much time I spend reading, it's almost never exclusive reading time - it's almost always multitasking with something else. I spent at least 4 hours today and it's only mid-afternoon here. Limiting my HN time seems to work and HN is the only social media I'm on. I always have at least two books on the go and one of them is an audiobook so I can keep reading when I'm cycling, doing laundry, etc.
I agree that it's really easy to find time for reading. For us in tech, just replace your HN/Reddit time with reading and you'll be surprised how much you can read!
I have a strategically placed book at the office. Every time I go to get tea and I'm waiting for it to brew or waiting for the meeting to start I read a few pages. It sounds ridiculous but I'm confident I'll finish that book within a year - purely by adding up the brewing/waiting time.
Personally, books are why I don't mind having ~40 minute commute one-way to work in the city. I use public transport and read books. Of course, I try to read some more at other times too, but at least I have a guaranteed minimum of 5-6 hours of reading time each week. I'd be utterly mad if I had to commute that long by a non-self-driving car though.
> " It’s much better to read the best book on the topic 5 times, than to read 5 different books on the topic once."*
I think the author has a point. Maybe re-reading a book 5 times is not better than 5 different books, but re-reading it at least once is still a good investment. First, it turns out one doesn't remember all that much from the book after the first read. Second - and more important - when you're re-reading the book, you benefit from having the overall big picture in your head already, so you can re-evaluate earlier parts of the book using your knowledge about the whole.
> "* It’s much better to read the best book on the topic 5 times, than to read 5 different books on the topic once."
I agree that it is expressed in a too strong way for me. I will probably say that it is better to read twice the best 5 books in a topic that to read 10 on that same topic. Variety helps, but repetition is also good for retaining ideas. And for me the "best" books are the ones that present that ideas more clearly. The value of re-reading probably depends on how good is your memory and varies for each individual. I like the combination of re-reading with reading more on the same topic to get knowledge.
True. I should have explained it better, and say that I didn't mean it literally.
As you said, repetition is good to retain ideas.
Also, I was able to get different ideas and insights from the same books, just based on my inner personal state, and my life circumstances at that point in time.
That sounds impossible to me. How can you possibly read one book every day, unless they're extremely short? I could imagine this being true if you dedicate something like 8-12 hours per day, but how do you have time for that?
That's what I thought too but no, it's totally doable (I am doing it after all) and the average page count according to goodreads is 357. I have no family, I work a 9-5 at a multinational and my only other hobby is bouldering. I use every spare moment to read. If you added up all your spare time every day you'd be surprised (clearly). It's not evenly distributed - I usually catch up over the weekend when I have loads of free time (2 days). Also it doesn't take 8 hours to read a book (at least not every one, fiction is pretty quick). Not even an audiobook (which are slower even when you speed them up x2.5)!
Even if it took 8 hours on average (which might be right, I never actually tried to measure this) you could still read 9 books a week with 72 hours:
- "The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books I-II"
- "The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, books III-IV"
- "The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, books V-VII"
Even though these are genuinely the best books I've read this year and genuinely world-view altering that might be not what you're after. Here are 3 good books I'm happy to recommend instead:
- "Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945"
by Tony Judt
- "A History of Future Cities"
by Daniel Brook
- "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space"
by Carl Sagan
(if you already read Pale Blue Dot which I appear to be late to the party on try "Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective" by Thomas Sowell)
And if you're after fiction instead:
- "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"
by Milan Kundera
- "The Cunning Man"
by Robertson Davies
- "East of Eden"
by John Steinbeck
That's a nice round 10 recommendations so let me have a bonus one for year 2015:
- "The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics"
Thanks, no. I'll start with "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" as it's the most controversial one (spread of reviews) and if I like it I'll keep going.
Then just skip that and start with the Pinker book, as that's very rewarding (very dense, so I consider myself a fast reader, but that took a few months), connects seemingly distant topics and concepts.
When I was student in french "classes preparatoires" (between 19 and 20yo), my binom was fond of books. He read between 2 and 3 books per day when most pupils had difficulties to cope with workload.
At only a book a week, you'll easily hit > 200 in 4 years. No need to complete one in a day. Except for technical text books, most books can be "got through" in well under 4 hours. For most people, if they simply read instead of zoning out in front of the TV, (or being obsessed with social media!), that will yield >20 hours/week!
> It’s much better to read the best book on the topic 5 times, than to read 5 different books on the topic once.
Rather than being an obvious truth, for me it is a grave mistake.
I rarely read a book a few times (but also: I am very slow (careful!) reader), and go back if I want to quote something verbatim, or lookup a number/reference. In book reading I prefer quality than quantity.
But what is crucial, rarely there is a single, obvious "best book". At the same time, reading only a single book leaves false impression that everything is known, there are no controversies, no different looks or approaches, etc.
For me, for a new field, I never know which is the "best" book. And whichever it is - it's not complete; there are additional nuggets to be found, maybe in the corner of a minor chapter, in many/most of them. I will read ~100 to just get a feel for the lay of the land. This is because I don't know what I don't know and certainly don't know enough to pick the best! And then go back and re-read (with more directedness) 10~20 of them, and then settle in and make 1~5 of them my touch stones for re-re-reading over time. This last bit is because I have a leaky brain, and I need to refresh it from time-to-time.
> For me, for a new field, I never know which is the "best" book.
Solution for that is pretty simple for very many fields:
Google:
- best books on <field X>
- best books on <field X> reddit
Read a few lists from sites, especially those frequented by people in that field. See which books tend to appear often in those lists. There, you have quite probably just identified the very best books for the <field X> the human race has to offer.
Well, sure. Those are the conclusions of people who have already formed their own mental structures. Somehow. That part is not shared. Or maybe they haven't read the books available themselves; there's a shocking number of humans willing to publish their conclusions based on ... sometimes nothing. ("You'll love this book! It's the best! Trust me!") I find that (for me) that the process of forming my own mental structures from the fire-hose to be useful. Partly because what a beginner needs and what an expert recommends often don't line up. Experts have forgotten what it's like to be a beginner.
I'd like to see some research on how much redundant and unnecessary information is in typical books. I have the feeling that the essence of most books can be simplified to the size of, say, an average blog post.
Can't we make reading a lot more efficient than it is right now?
Fortunately - and this is something I see many smart people around me not realizing - we live in the day and age where it's trivial to identify and get the very best books humanity has produced about any given topic. That is, as long as you can read English.
For most technical, scientific, and mathematic topics, it's usually very easy to find the next best book to read with a google search or two. Starting on or strengthening long-forgotten Calculus? Probably get Spivak. Et c. This might get tougher as you approach a field's state-of-the-art, but by then "what to read next" will often come from a journal, not a book.
Literature and verse? Harold Bloom's western canon list, whatever its faults, is pretty damn good and could keep one busy for a lifetime. If you want to mix in more works by e.g. women or more asian works or whatever, there are very good lists for that, too:
Want to learn science and math from classics? The list from How to Read a Book should help, and St. John's College's reading list is public: https://www.sjc.edu
For a given topic, there's often a subreddit with a decent reading list in the FAQ.
Not any topic in particular. Things in my own field I can judge myself and I don't really get to chose anyway but I'm talking about general reading.
Most lists just tell you which books are popular. I'd be reading nothing but Harry Potters if I followed those lists. I'm talking about choosing a book I will like. Not you, not the critic, not the public. Following these kinds of static lists doesn't really fair better than looking at the cover.
There needs to be some algorithm that can be applied to my books which is what I was hoping goodreads would do for me but their recommendations are a joke - they just recommend whatever goodreads author they're currently promoting regardless of what you like.
I didn't realize you're talking fiction. The "algorithm" I applied works best for nonfiction, because those you choose by objective criteria.
As for recommendation engines for fiction, I don't know any that don't have this conflict of interests you described with Goodreads. Personally, I tend to pick up books that are recommended by friends, writers I like reading and people on HN. There's way too much fiction to read all of it, but I try to aim for one (or both) of two separate types: insightful and genre-popular. Insightful, because I love to read new ideas, and genre-popular, because culture is pretty much defined by your ability to talk about it with other people.
If you feel like sharing, does the number 300 hundred hold a special meaning to you for any reason? Your handle, the title of the post, I see a patter, Watson :)
No special meaning at all. I recently realized I almost crossed this number, so I thought to share what I learned.
I'm not proud of the number of books I've read. Actually, I would prefer that I've read less books, but that I've read more times the best ones (in my opinion).
Exploration vs exploitation :). It's hard to judge well. Were you to read 30 books 10 times each, you'd probably wonder if you couldn't read more different books instead ;).
I wonder what the perfect number is. For non-fiction, I guess you'll hit diminishing returns with most books in something like 5 iterations. But then again, I want to take a following challenge: pick one good fiction book, and read it 100 times. I've read (in Adler's "How to Read a Book", I think) that the way you understand and feel about a piece of writing will change profoundly after so many read-throughs.
Somewhere around age 27 I wanted the same thing. I think the answer is no, for two reasons. First, we already have blogs and newspapers.
More importantly, the same material is interpretable in many ways. For example if you ask someone what is the main point of Orwell's 1984, you will usually hear something about surveillance. But to me, reading it as an adult, far more important is the idea that we need war as an outlet for our surpluses. That might be in the Cliffs Notes but it won't be in the first blog post on Google.
The war isn't primarily an outlet for economic surplus in 1984, it serves as a justification for repression, labelling dissent as sabotage, rationing (in a way that preserves the best for loyal party members), and the normalisation of violence. See also the "two minute hate".
There are a lot of takeaways from Orwell's book, basically on how "Stalinism with English characteristics" might look, extrapolating from Orwell's encounters with actual Stalinists in Spain. Orwell is pretty much required reading for anyone who wants to be on the sensible left. But a need for war is not one of them.
(Brave New World has leisure industry as an explicit sink for surplus, though).
I think you have reinforced my point. Whether my takeaways from 1984 are orthodox or not doesn't matter...not everyone sees the same thing in it. This reminds me how in software they say most users only use a fraction of an application's features...but every user takes a different slice. So in reply to my original parent: this is why we can't have concise things.
Lots of advice-like books are like this. I remember a co-worker who had suddenly become very taken with a certain financial management book series. He asked everybody around him to read them or listen to the audio book version. I finally relented to one of the audio books (I had a long commute so why not?). It was hour upon hour upon hour of clearly made up stories about made up people and chapter after chapter of what basically amounted to "to save money, spend less than you make".
Depends on what you mean by "typical." Do you think you could craft an average blog post to summarize the essence of something like Homer's "The Odyssey"?
I agree that many non-fiction titles could be shorter (although probably not the length of a blog post).
I confess I am an impatient reader, and many non-fiction titles I read feel padded out with unnecessary verbiage. I do wonder if the tools we use to write have some bearing on this. When using a computer to write, the ease of editing means it's much easier to just write and write and write.
Imagine if you were forced to write your manuscript by hand. I'm guessing the length of your non-fiction manuscript would be shorter, sharper and more to the point.
Minor nit: writing ≠ editing. One could argue that the ease of editing could result in more concise pieces as it's easier to refactor what's already been written. Editing does take effort, though.
From what I've heard, it's more of a market pressure.
Imagine you wrote a typical 250 page non-fiction book that is padded out in the typical way. Just before publishing, you get fed up and edit it down to just 50 pages that convey everything without any fluff. Your publisher will tell you you're nuts and insist on publishing the 250 page version. Why?
Imagine you are shopping for a book on a topic. You find 6 such books in the store. 5 are the typical 200-300 page pieces. One 50 pages. They all cost the same. You don't have time or patience to investigate their relative quality. Do you A: assume the 50 page book is a low-effort blog series repackaged in print. Or, B: bet that the 50 page version is a high-effort careful edit? Most people choose A and I'd bet they are almost always correct in current practice.
Tldr: Short books look cheap. Customers assume they are ripoffs and don't buy them.
Sure, if you want to trust someone else summary of the material.
Clearly the details have to spelled out somewhere otherwise there would be no way to create a TL;DR version.
I don't think anyone has invented a lossless summary algorithm for natural language so you are inevitably throwing away details, perhaps important details.
Self help/productivity/pop business books all seem to follow the same template these days(I had a 100 book reading challenge this year and read a at least a quarter of them fit in one of those groups.
Chapter 1: Tell a bit about the author
Chapter 2: Tell about the amazing thing someone has done because of "the technique"
Chapter 3: Tell about the authors path to discovery
Chapter 4: More stories about amazing things people have achieved(note by this point the author has never mentioned what their great one thing is
Chapter 5: Another bunch of stories about how great the author is
Chapter 6-12: More stories from people about how their life was changed by the author. Possibly a sales pitch for an online course.
Chapter 13: About 2 paragraphs describing something super simple "Start a mailing list"
The recommendation to take notes is helpful. I prefer to make my notes directly in the book. This has the added bonus of making a book's value much clearer to me when it comes time to cull.
This person is either reading the lightest self-help type of books, or not really "reading" these books. I'm an academic, and my only job is to read books (and articles, etc), and I do my job at least 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and I don't even read this many books.
My advice for getting genuinely intelligent about a topic: read hard books, intensively, and leave the buffet-stats-counter stuff to those who just want to impress.
After reading ~10 different authors on self-help, you realize they're all saying the same thing.
So no, your assumption is not true.
Yes, I did read a lot of light self-help books in the beginning, but their number in total is less than ~40.
It's totally not important how many books you read, but their quality, we agree about that :)
That's why I mentioned it's better to read more times the same book, than more books on the same topic once.
One book every five days is both fairly remarkable yet not overly demanding for an intellectual. If books were my only source of reading, I would read that much too. But I read journals, newspapers and blogs too.
I agree that reading a book a week is not impossible. However, the author mentions reading ~1 hour per day. That's also doable for books that can be consumed at ~60 pages per hour, and for some topics (and some fiction) that's also not impossible. But for challenging books, particularly technical books and 'literature', 60 pages per hour is probably 2x-5x too optimistic.
My advice would be that if you really want to learn something then you have to do it. The book is a reference but there is no substitute for on hands training. Unless all you want to learn is facts like an encyclopedia, which I guess is ok but I find it hard to see as a good method to learn something deeply.
True - doing is an important part. But good (and hard) books are not like encyclopedias - they're not a collection of facts, they're also a way to discover and internalize author's mental model. You get to learn the connection between the facts and their relative importance. I feel it's something that later greatly aids you in the "doing" phase.
If you go to goodreads you can find thousands of people reading ~80 books a year with their lists publicly available. If you want to see what software engineers read just click on a popular software book and keep clicking on profiles that have read it until you find one with enough books.
Interesting.
The first point resonates with the famous quote made by Bruce Lee.
"I fear not the man who has practiced 10000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10000 times."
That works for the kicks but not the book on a single topic though IMO, not only would reading the same book more than a couple times be boring but you wouldn't learn a whole lot.
It sounds to me like the author of this post is going for quantity over quality. In the realm of book-reading, that's almost always a losing proposition.
Here's an approach that has worked better for me: pick a complex question and try to answer it. For example, "Why did the Great Depression happen?" It turns out there isn't actually a simple answer (that everyone can agree on).
Quantity can actually help you here - for complex questions, you want to get a feel of the answer-space first, instead of picking a single point on it and exploring it thoroughly.
I would add that it's important to put what you read into action. Also, summarizing what you read makes you think about what you read. Your less likely to forget. I learnt this after many forgotten books.
300 books in 4 years, basically it's one book per week if my math is correct. But still it seems like some kind of consumerism, where the main goal is to scrape together as much information as possible, hoping that you can use some of it in the future.
Does it have to be "advertising bullshit"? Maybe GRRM sees reading differently than you do? For someone who has devoted their life to writing, that is a sensible perspective.
There's an interesting thread in Dark Forest by Cixin Liu (second book of the Three Body Problem trilogy (yes, I know I'm being boring constantly recommending them here but these are really good books)). I actually wonder whether it's a real thing.
A short (minor) spoiler follows.
One of the protagonists is married to a writer. He follows her advice about writing, and in the process of developing a character he manages to, well, instantiate a pretty much living version of that character in his own mind - a version that grows and thinks independently of its creator. He eventually gets emotionally involved with his imaginary creation, and later learns that it's something that happens to good writers, and that his wife has such a character "living" with her too.
What I wonder is whether it's really the case that good writers actually develop their characters to the point of them turning pretty much into tulpas? A kind of background thread in their brains, with separate micro-consciousness.
imho usually the best books, are those complex ones, which I read for 4 months. Because after every page, 15 new questions arise, where settling them takes time, and then internalization of that wisdom takes time as well. And I don't even mention, that best books get better after re-reading.
In this light, 300 books in 4 years, seems quite a lot...
This is very true for some types of books. For example, I am not able to read Dostoyevsky or Carlyle fast. For some sort of books, I even feel like I need a nap after 30 mins of reading, as I feel that my brain gets tired :)
- Understand what a book is going to attempt to communicate before you read it, either by checking the table of contents, going through a summary, reading reviews or reading the back or inner cover of a book.
http://juvoni.com/book/how-to-read-a-book
- You can read multiple books at a time and not get the narrative scrambled by doing context specific reading by time or location. For example only reading book A while in transit, reading book B before bedtime and only reading book C on weekends. The context specific memory will be attached to when and where you habitually read that specific book.
http://juvoni.com/reading-multiple-books
- Not all book recommendations are made equal, even from friends. I use a concept called 'Book Purgatory', where book recommendations go to await judgment on whether they are worthy of your time and attention to read. I do not commit to reading any recommendation. It is only after I give it a review based on what I want or need from a book and the quality of it's reviews do I consider getting it.
http://juvoni.com/book-purgatory
- Reading a lot of books when you have a full lifestyle is difficult, it's in you're best interest to stay organized and have a pre-defined list of books you want to read, and intend to read after you are finished and actively track the books you are currently reading.
http://juvoni.com/trello-book-reading-management
- Identify your learning styles and device preferences and find books that are a good balance of right medium and comfortable preference. For example, I have a hard time reading history books but find them easier over audible, I also prefer to read books with diagrams as physical rather than e-books.
http://juvoni.com/print-ebook-audiobook
I'm actually trying to read less and do more. So instead of reading about compilers I'm building some. It feels like a slower way of learning sometimes, but it's exposed lots of places where I thought I knew how things work but I actually didn't. It has also taught me more than reading alone would.
The downside is that I find it harder to get time for building. It's easy enough to read at night in bed, but harder to concentrate on writing code.
We ought to only read the kind of books that wound and stab us. If
the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head,
what are we reading it for? We need the books that affect us like a
disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved
more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from
everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea
inside us. That is my belief.
Franz Kafka
91 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 281 ms ] thread"* It’s much better to read the best book on the topic 5 times, than to read 5 different books on the topic once."
Flat out no. Unless you're a freaking machine. Reading different books covering the same topic keeps me interested more. I don't mind the repetition then because I get the warm "I know that" feeling.
"* Eyes that pay read better than eyes that don’t. Eyes that pay more read better than eyes that pay less. In other words, when you pay for a book or a course, you’ll dedicate more to it, so you’ll get more value from it."
Total nonsense. I'm not paying my friends or the library to borrow their books. Next you'll be telling me hardback books transfer ideas better. Well, my e-reader has a hard case. And I paid 300 quid for it.
"* If you read ~1h (almost) every day, you’ll be able to read 60-80 books per year."
If you use all your idle time you can read a book a day. Cooking? You mean reading and cooking. Commuting? Reading. Sitting on the toilet? You get the idea. Waiting for the kettle? Seconds add up!
I agree with the rest.
I think it's really important to have time to think and make notes about what you read. Even re-reading the same books can often give you different insights, depending on your inner state, life circumstances, etc.
I respect your opinion on your points, and I'll not argue those. I shared my insights, based on my experience, and I wish I knew some of them before much earlier - it would save me a lot of time.
-Jovica
As for a book a day being overkill - you're right, I'm not going to keep this up next year. Normally I read ~80 books but last year I was unemployed for several months and ended up reading >200 even though I was busy looking for work (which involves a lot travel and waiting around which is when I got religious about using my deadtime rather than "killing" time with HN) and I thought fuck it, I'll give it a go at which point I got hired within a month but wanted to see if I can keep going. It's getting really busy with deadlines but I'm confident I can catch up during christmas. For people wondering: yes, I have no family.
Good luck with your quest! If you need some inspiration for books to read, check out this great list: https://sivers.org/book
Wow! What kind of books are these? How long do you spend everyday reading?
I don't know how much time I spend reading, it's almost never exclusive reading time - it's almost always multitasking with something else. I spent at least 4 hours today and it's only mid-afternoon here. Limiting my HN time seems to work and HN is the only social media I'm on. I always have at least two books on the go and one of them is an audiobook so I can keep reading when I'm cycling, doing laundry, etc.
I think the author has a point. Maybe re-reading a book 5 times is not better than 5 different books, but re-reading it at least once is still a good investment. First, it turns out one doesn't remember all that much from the book after the first read. Second - and more important - when you're re-reading the book, you benefit from having the overall big picture in your head already, so you can re-evaluate earlier parts of the book using your knowledge about the whole.
I agree that it is expressed in a too strong way for me. I will probably say that it is better to read twice the best 5 books in a topic that to read 10 on that same topic. Variety helps, but repetition is also good for retaining ideas. And for me the "best" books are the ones that present that ideas more clearly. The value of re-reading probably depends on how good is your memory and varies for each individual. I like the combination of re-reading with reading more on the same topic to get knowledge.
As you said, repetition is good to retain ideas. Also, I was able to get different ideas and insights from the same books, just based on my inner personal state, and my life circumstances at that point in time.
Even if it took 8 hours on average (which might be right, I never actually tried to measure this) you could still read 9 books a week with 72 hours:
( (24 * 7) week
- 40 work
- (8 * 7) sleep )
/ 8 hr/book
= 9 books
- "The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books I-II"
- "The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, books III-IV"
- "The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, books V-VII"
Even though these are genuinely the best books I've read this year and genuinely world-view altering that might be not what you're after. Here are 3 good books I'm happy to recommend instead:
- "Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945" by Tony Judt
- "A History of Future Cities" by Daniel Brook
- "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space" by Carl Sagan
(if you already read Pale Blue Dot which I appear to be late to the party on try "Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective" by Thomas Sowell)
And if you're after fiction instead:
- "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera
- "The Cunning Man" by Robertson Davies
- "East of Eden" by John Steinbeck
That's a nice round 10 recommendations so let me have a bonus one for year 2015:
- "The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics"
You will never read the news the same way.
And "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" by Samuel P. Huntington?
Also, Gleick: Chaos?
Oh, and for fiction the James S. A. Corey: The Expanse series, veeeery easy to read, normally funny, and quite clever.
Rather than being an obvious truth, for me it is a grave mistake.
I rarely read a book a few times (but also: I am very slow (careful!) reader), and go back if I want to quote something verbatim, or lookup a number/reference. In book reading I prefer quality than quantity.
But what is crucial, rarely there is a single, obvious "best book". At the same time, reading only a single book leaves false impression that everything is known, there are no controversies, no different looks or approaches, etc.
Solution for that is pretty simple for very many fields:
Google:
- best books on <field X>
- best books on <field X> reddit
Read a few lists from sites, especially those frequented by people in that field. See which books tend to appear often in those lists. There, you have quite probably just identified the very best books for the <field X> the human race has to offer.
Can't we make reading a lot more efficient than it is right now?
That's why I think is better to read the best books on the topic more times, than few other average books repeating the same stuff in different words.
Literature and verse? Harold Bloom's western canon list, whatever its faults, is pretty damn good and could keep one busy for a lifetime. If you want to mix in more works by e.g. women or more asian works or whatever, there are very good lists for that, too:
http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/whatbooks.html
(above includes Bloom's list)
Want to learn science and math from classics? The list from How to Read a Book should help, and St. John's College's reading list is public: https://www.sjc.edu
For a given topic, there's often a subreddit with a decent reading list in the FAQ.
Which topic(s) are you having trouble with?
Most lists just tell you which books are popular. I'd be reading nothing but Harry Potters if I followed those lists. I'm talking about choosing a book I will like. Not you, not the critic, not the public. Following these kinds of static lists doesn't really fair better than looking at the cover.
There needs to be some algorithm that can be applied to my books which is what I was hoping goodreads would do for me but their recommendations are a joke - they just recommend whatever goodreads author they're currently promoting regardless of what you like.
As for recommendation engines for fiction, I don't know any that don't have this conflict of interests you described with Goodreads. Personally, I tend to pick up books that are recommended by friends, writers I like reading and people on HN. There's way too much fiction to read all of it, but I try to aim for one (or both) of two separate types: insightful and genre-popular. Insightful, because I love to read new ideas, and genre-popular, because culture is pretty much defined by your ability to talk about it with other people.
- best books on <subject X>
- best books on <subject X> reddit
Look for titles most often mentioned/recommended by people in the <field X>.
I'm not proud of the number of books I've read. Actually, I would prefer that I've read less books, but that I've read more times the best ones (in my opinion).
I wonder what the perfect number is. For non-fiction, I guess you'll hit diminishing returns with most books in something like 5 iterations. But then again, I want to take a following challenge: pick one good fiction book, and read it 100 times. I've read (in Adler's "How to Read a Book", I think) that the way you understand and feel about a piece of writing will change profoundly after so many read-throughs.
For English it must be crazy, but I am not aware of a single one.
More importantly, the same material is interpretable in many ways. For example if you ask someone what is the main point of Orwell's 1984, you will usually hear something about surveillance. But to me, reading it as an adult, far more important is the idea that we need war as an outlet for our surpluses. That might be in the Cliffs Notes but it won't be in the first blog post on Google.
There are a lot of takeaways from Orwell's book, basically on how "Stalinism with English characteristics" might look, extrapolating from Orwell's encounters with actual Stalinists in Spain. Orwell is pretty much required reading for anyone who wants to be on the sensible left. But a need for war is not one of them.
(Brave New World has leisure industry as an explicit sink for surplus, though).
I confess I am an impatient reader, and many non-fiction titles I read feel padded out with unnecessary verbiage. I do wonder if the tools we use to write have some bearing on this. When using a computer to write, the ease of editing means it's much easier to just write and write and write.
Imagine if you were forced to write your manuscript by hand. I'm guessing the length of your non-fiction manuscript would be shorter, sharper and more to the point.
Imagine you wrote a typical 250 page non-fiction book that is padded out in the typical way. Just before publishing, you get fed up and edit it down to just 50 pages that convey everything without any fluff. Your publisher will tell you you're nuts and insist on publishing the 250 page version. Why?
Imagine you are shopping for a book on a topic. You find 6 such books in the store. 5 are the typical 200-300 page pieces. One 50 pages. They all cost the same. You don't have time or patience to investigate their relative quality. Do you A: assume the 50 page book is a low-effort blog series repackaged in print. Or, B: bet that the 50 page version is a high-effort careful edit? Most people choose A and I'd bet they are almost always correct in current practice.
Tldr: Short books look cheap. Customers assume they are ripoffs and don't buy them.
Clearly the details have to spelled out somewhere otherwise there would be no way to create a TL;DR version.
I don't think anyone has invented a lossless summary algorithm for natural language so you are inevitably throwing away details, perhaps important details.
Chapter 1: Tell a bit about the author
Chapter 2: Tell about the amazing thing someone has done because of "the technique"
Chapter 3: Tell about the authors path to discovery
Chapter 4: More stories about amazing things people have achieved(note by this point the author has never mentioned what their great one thing is
Chapter 5: Another bunch of stories about how great the author is
Chapter 6-12: More stories from people about how their life was changed by the author. Possibly a sales pitch for an online course.
Chapter 13: About 2 paragraphs describing something super simple "Start a mailing list"
Chapter 14-25: More stories
My advice for getting genuinely intelligent about a topic: read hard books, intensively, and leave the buffet-stats-counter stuff to those who just want to impress.
Yes, I did read a lot of light self-help books in the beginning, but their number in total is less than ~40.
It's totally not important how many books you read, but their quality, we agree about that :) That's why I mentioned it's better to read more times the same book, than more books on the same topic once.
In any case, I'm doing a book a week project myself and don't find it that challenging or time consuming.
Here's an approach that has worked better for me: pick a complex question and try to answer it. For example, "Why did the Great Depression happen?" It turns out there isn't actually a simple answer (that everyone can agree on).
The closest approximation might be Jorge Luis Borges with Tolkien with a dash of Neal Stephenson and Murakami.
At first I thought: I know what this is.
Then I thought. Wait... something's wrong here.
Then I thought. There is no way that is in the text. Can't be.
This was just the point where the rollercoaster is beginning the climb.
If you like complex and strange things, then this is for you.
- George R.R. Martin quotes
The reader doesn't 'live' squat, he reads about someone else's life. Watching cooking shows doesn't feed anyone.
A short (minor) spoiler follows.
One of the protagonists is married to a writer. He follows her advice about writing, and in the process of developing a character he manages to, well, instantiate a pretty much living version of that character in his own mind - a version that grows and thinks independently of its creator. He eventually gets emotionally involved with his imaginary creation, and later learns that it's something that happens to good writers, and that his wife has such a character "living" with her too.
What I wonder is whether it's really the case that good writers actually develop their characters to the point of them turning pretty much into tulpas? A kind of background thread in their brains, with separate micro-consciousness.
Hopefully he doesn't go the way of Robert Jordan or Frank Herbert.
In this light, 300 books in 4 years, seems quite a lot...
I agree with a lot of the author's takeaways. I'll try to add some of the lessons I've gotten out of it, that don't appear on his list.
In addition, I post my book reviews at http://juvoni.com/books
- Understand what a book is going to attempt to communicate before you read it, either by checking the table of contents, going through a summary, reading reviews or reading the back or inner cover of a book. http://juvoni.com/book/how-to-read-a-book
- You can read multiple books at a time and not get the narrative scrambled by doing context specific reading by time or location. For example only reading book A while in transit, reading book B before bedtime and only reading book C on weekends. The context specific memory will be attached to when and where you habitually read that specific book. http://juvoni.com/reading-multiple-books
- Not all book recommendations are made equal, even from friends. I use a concept called 'Book Purgatory', where book recommendations go to await judgment on whether they are worthy of your time and attention to read. I do not commit to reading any recommendation. It is only after I give it a review based on what I want or need from a book and the quality of it's reviews do I consider getting it. http://juvoni.com/book-purgatory
- Reading a lot of books when you have a full lifestyle is difficult, it's in you're best interest to stay organized and have a pre-defined list of books you want to read, and intend to read after you are finished and actively track the books you are currently reading. http://juvoni.com/trello-book-reading-management
- Identify your learning styles and device preferences and find books that are a good balance of right medium and comfortable preference. For example, I have a hard time reading history books but find them easier over audible, I also prefer to read books with diagrams as physical rather than e-books. http://juvoni.com/print-ebook-audiobook
- Understand why you read. http://juvoni.com/discovering-love-reading-read-read-smarter
Nothing like a NASA astronaut though.
The downside is that I find it harder to get time for building. It's easy enough to read at night in bed, but harder to concentrate on writing code.