However for all technical books, things like O’Reilly, No Starch, etc, I always buy physical. The decision to do that has very much 10x my learning. Even when it comes to long documentation (MySQL is an astounding 5,000+ pages) I’ll usually print out portions to cover if it’s reasonable.
I don’t know why this has increased my learning so much. The best I can come up with is that memory is based on some kind of spatial geography + other stuff. As I’m working on something, like configuring a CentOS server to a lengthy CIS Security Benchmark, I can recall in books what the page looked like, where I was when I read it, the feel of the page, and the part of the text I underlined in pen. Very strange.
In my current job I have a lot of downtime, which means I can do whatever I want for a few hours a day. I try to read but I find it so difficult. I don't know what it is about reading ebooks but I can't hold my attention on them for more than a few minutes at a time. I have a few physical books in my desk that I can focus on very well, but they aren't the ones I need right now. Considering ebooks are typically half the cost of physical books (also that most ebooks can be obtained for 'free' through some medium), it's hard to pull the trigger on getting a physical copy.
If you buy from Amazon, some books fall under their "Matchbook" program, where if you buy the paper copy you receive the ebook version for free or small additional cost ($2-3).
It's sad to read the reason why they ditched the online store.
I was in BN awhile ago.
I distinctly heard a girlfriend scolding her boyfriend over a small book purchase.
"Only idiots buy books anymore. Just look it up on the internet?"
It stuck with me. Don't agree, and found the statement depressing.
I repair/service watches. I have learned so much from books, especially older books. Yes--it's a niche field. There are times where I'm looking through a 60 year old book, and find something I didn't know.
E-Books may be half the cost of retail books, but there are lots of used books out there at much less than half. Or, free books to read from your local library.
Obviously this doesn't applies to all new books, but if you're willing to read older books, there's a lot to read for relatively little cost.
For books I'm trying to learn and retain from, like a textbook or a technical book it really helps me to take notes, underline, highlight, write questions, etc in the book itself. I think it both helps me retain it better the first time and then allows me to review the text later and get more out of it.
I tend to prefer PDFs for technical books because it has a search feature. Most of the time I'm not reading a 1200 page technical reference cover to cover and of course Indexes aren't always comprehensive.
I like physical books for textbooks because they do much better with illustrations and tables and are far easier to flip back and forth in. For anything I"m going to read sequentially pretty strictly I'll go with an e-book.
Literally the opposite of me. eBooks are searchable, paper books are not. I don't need to search a novel for a particular phrase, but I certainly do for a textbook.
With real books I find it easy to remember where in the book and what part of the page whatever I read was on, plus I find I'm much more likely to actually sit down and read offline.
> for all technical books, things like O’Reilly, No Starch, etc, I always buy physical
Same here. I always feel odd when I'm reading a physical book at my desk, though, since I've never, ever, not even once in 25 years, seen anybody else actually reading a book - not even the ones who have a shelf full of them at their desks.
Honest question - how do you have that flexibility? I'm qualified as hell - or at least, I look really good on paper. Yet I probably have at least a 3-to-1 rejection ratio for jobs that I'm insanely qualified for. As much as they go on about a "tech labor shortage", I feel pretty grateful when I find full time work because I get turned down so often - plus, I feel like even if I demanded (the quiet that I actually need to work effectively but who cares, right?), they could rescind that at any moment and I'd be left choosing between quitting and being unemployed again or just gritting my teeth and taking what they dish out.
Yeah, the spatial aspect of books is definitely a factor in why its easier for you (and just about everyone probably) to learn from physical texts than current electronic texts.
For myself, though, it's just not resource efficient to use physical copies of all the technical documentation I read. For example, I'm learning Vulkan right now, and there's just 0% chance I'm going to print out 1300+ pages of documentation that's liable to change a few times a year in subtle ways.
Then again, just thinking about it now, maybe specifically printing out just the diffs when the spec changes could make it easier to stay up to date?
The issue I've found is that my primary reading device is my Kindle Paperwhite, however for many technical books, that screen size is just not big enough. The net result is that code examples are often too tiny to easily read. Particularly when reading at night with dimmer brightness settings.
Is it possible that losing one's taste for Hesse is simply a result of age and career choice? Critics, professional readers, have a very different mission than casual readers like me. It's their job to sift through great piles of words to find what's important. I have no such burden -- I've found that time and exposure to the internet have made me more interested in challenging books, not less.
Nothing too revelatory here, but I can certainly agree with the ideas presented. So many of us are used to a constant, reliable dopamine drip while reading things on the internet that larger texts bore us. The conclusion at the end of the piece is right, though--it just takes willpower.
Choosing delayed gratification in the form of good, rich, long-form writing is a lot like choosing a balanced diet. The benefits of traipsing through difficult texts may not be readily apparent but doing so invariably pays dividends for years to come.
I find the new trend of long form articles infuriating. Just get to the point, without all the rigamarole! Is there an actual benefit? Or is it just something people say?
I enjoyed long articles from the ye olde early days of the world wide web, when long articles were long because the author had a lot of interesting things to say. Now, too many articles are long just for the sake of being long. And often peppered with animated / video advertisements for products I do not want.
I heard that for SEO purposes you want to reach >2000 words. If it's true, for now, you'll be seeing articles around this word count for the same reason you see YouTube videos slightly longer than 10 minutes.
Try paying for something that's behind a hard paywall and you'll see shorter articles.
Long articles are fine but -- remember five-paragraph essays from grade/primary school? Good, because many online journalists seem to have forgotten them.
The thing about the five-paragraph essay is its structure scales well to longer articles. You state your main idea up front, then spend a bit of time elaborating on that main idea, then you wrap up. Online articles are like -- they pick a source, say, a college professor or someone with a new book out. Then they spend half the article or more talking about their source's early childhood, failed marriage and/or relationship with their dog, anything that might have a loose tenuous relationship with the main idea. THEN they hit you with the main idea, then they pad out their essay with quotes from the source, whom by now you have "gotten to know". It's infuriating, but I guess the idea is to tease a main idea with the headline, then keep you slogging through barely relevant detail long enough to show you quite a few ads before wrapping up with stuff that relates what was teased to you, even if the body doesn't justify the headline. Clickbait, in other words.
I agree -- I wouldn't mind long articles as much if they got the main points upfront. But the New Yorkers of the world don't do that. They're obsessed with starting in media res with some anecdote that gives painstaking details about the subject's mannerisms or appearance or fashion sense.
When I want people to summarize links they post, it's not because I have a short attention span or categorically refuse to read them. It's because I want to know the broad sketches of what it's claiming so that I know whether I need the extra detail (sorry, "color") it provides vs. whether it's citing a study or argument I'm already familiar with (or is even a relevant point to make).
Well that and scanning text for fast insight combined with your current knowledge is a kind of skill. I can't tell you how many P1s I've solved with 5-10 mins of googling and a gut check.
I think she has a very valid point, since I didn't finish the article at all, and merely hopped over various phrasea in the first couple of paragraphs before feeling compelled to post here, and then move on to other stuff.
This times a thousand. To justify an entire book on their thoughts, which aren't that deep, they write a long winded book, when 2-3 articles would have sufficed. Or worse, the book was based off their 2-3 most successful articles.
Fiction has suffered the same bloat. Used to be that letting an author ramble for 200,000+ words was considered indulgent. Dune told it's entire story in around 180,000 words, I can hardly say anything more intriguing is going on in Song of Ice & Fire at 1.7 million words.
I'm not very interested in fantasy, but the idea that writing is more long-winded than it used to be doesn't really survive even the most cursory survey of literature from the 1800s. Or if that's not your speed check ancient literature and see if you find it more to-the-point.
You're the second person I see in this thread complaining that texts have become too bloated and using this exact example. Perhaps the guy is just a hack.
I picked Dune/Song of Ice and Fire because they're thematically similar.
In terms of bloat, excluding the Tale of Genji or the Story of the Stone, I can hardly think of anything in the 1800s that pushes into the 1M+ word mark in order to tell a complete story. I mean, people used to joke about War & Peace being long and it's hovering around 1/2 a million words -- and at least when I read it, Tolstoy seemed to be using every last one of them.
In absolute length of the longest works I can't really tell you. But the style of diction is much wordier and can often be trying for modern readers. I feel bad about this, being a proud New Englander, but I find the transcendentalists practically unreadable.
That's not a perspective I expected someone to argue, and I'd argue directly the opposite.
I find the older the book, the slower and more waffly (if you want to be uncharitable) its prose. I haven't looked into this at all, but it always feels to me like editors are a new edition to the writing process.
Ironically I usually really enjoy the actual prose they wrote, because it's often beautiful, but after dozens and dozens of pages of hearing about how pious some bishop is you have no context for you really start to wish Victor Hugo would just move the fuck on.
Dune and A Song of Ice & Fire use very different narrative techniques.
In Dune most of the narration follows a protagonist that navigates the world. In A Song of Ice & Fire there is not a single protagonist. There are multiple characters that are elevated to the same level of importance. Covering world events from each point of view requires more pages. Having multiple characters that are the same level of importance is one of the hallmarks of the series. When starting to read the series a person is usually told that they will not be able to predict who will die. This is a key element of the story telling process.
A Song of Ice and Fire has more named minor characters and a wider range of named minor characters. In my opinion this makes the world more rich and represents a deep understanding of the entire society. Dune deals primarily (99% or more) with aristocrats and their servants/warriors. A Song of Ice and Fire will talk about everyone from Kings to poor fisherman.
Come on, the Song of Ice & Fire books are particularly long, but you're still comparing an entire series with a single book. Dune is a series too, and I'll argue that the quality drops off much more sharply after the first one than ASoI&F does.
For what it's worth, in SF & Fantasy short fiction is still hanging in there:
I have to agree with "a lot of filler" part of your comment. This must be a result of the expectation that publishers set for authors regarding the minimum expected length of the book. I found that I would stop reading many books past the first few chapters because then the repetition sets in. The first few chapters deliver the core message and then the author is forced to extend the narrative to deliver the expected word count.
In any case, I find reading a physical book to be more enjoyable and effective (in terms of retention and recall) than reading on a digital screen.
Publishers are part of it but basically there's a whole economic and distribution system built around books being 200+ pages. Arguably consumers "should" be willing to pay as much for a 75 page book as a 400 page one for a given level of quality (whatever that means) but they're not. So you end up with a large class of non-fiction that pads out ideas which probably deserve something more than a 3,000 word magazine article into a 75,000-100,000 word book because that's what's required for everyone to get paid (however little). And ebooks don't really change that because very little of the cost is in physical distribution.
Agree. There are usually one 2-3 good ideas in most non-fiction books these days. I don't feel any guilt about skimming and not finishing such books.
Another effective way to absorb the main points quickly is to Youtube the author giving a longish talk about his/her book, typically Talks at Google or some such. Or a podcast in which the author discusses the book.
I agree, and even reading this piece, I just couldn't. For factual pieces, just give me the bullet points.
Perhaps the the worst consistent example is the New Yorker - I just read, uh ok, skimmed, a piece about Elliot hedge fund. It's many many pages long, but could be summarized in a paragraph, or a page, to add some supporting examples.
But, there's a big difference between reading for information, and reading for pleasure/escape.
I get quite frustrated by information pieces fluffed into literature, but can still find the time for engrossing stories and captivating writing.
I don't really agree for the most part. But, individual preferences aside, the economic reality is that you don't get paid for doing weeks of research and turning it into a few bullet points in an abstract. At some level, people pay for quantity as well as quality.
> The narrative action struck her as intolerably slow.
> She had, she concluded, “changed in ways I would never have predicted. I now read on the surface and very quickly; in fact, I read too fast to comprehend deeper levels
Here she lays the blame solely on her, but I would think that it's also a writer's skill to hook the reader.
It takes two to tango, and if she felt the narrative was so slow she started to skim the sentences and ended up missing the deeper parts, perhaps the book could have used some trimming, better pacing, or a different approach to present the subject.
I feel that while we tend to read faster in general, we also read a lot more volume than the previous generations and I genuinely think we are pretty optimised to understand a lot very fast.
There is a ton of last century news articles or magazines that are unbearably slow and very diluted. Sometimes there will be deeper thoughts buried there, but 98% of the times it's not, which is depressing.
Even nowadays, there is a cute TLDR bot on reddit, and from times to times reading the original article really doesn't bring anything more than what the bot put in a more succinct way.
Editors have gotten indulgent IMHO, especially if the author is famous. For example, I'm sure George R. R. Martin is really interested in medieval royal feasts, but readers tend to get bored with yet another page filled with food items after the 20th time.
I was more comparing to early 20th century works. There seemed to be a period where pages were expensive and authors more often felt the need to get to the point. Novels were considered long if they were more than an inch thick. The Lord of the Rings was considered epic length (it is dwarfed by a Song of Ice and Fire, especially if you count the unfinished works).
When you pick up a copy of Fahrenheit 451 one thing you notice is how thin it is. To Kill a Mockingbird is another example. There are plenty of others.
Now I wonder if that wasn't an indirect response to ponderous tomes like Moby Dick and War and Peace? Maybe the authors who grew up with those books realized that brevity was a virtue and learned to tamp back their natural urges to digress into long rambling and ultimately pointless interludes?
If we take so few examples, we can easily make the opposite argument. The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Bartleby the Scrivener are quite a bit shorter than Gravity's Rainbow or For Whom the Bell Tolls.
War and Peace and Moby Dick are both exceptionally compelling, by the way, and the latter was actually much more appreciated in the early 20th Century than when it was written.
I'd say that in order to stay with a book, it needs a hook that the reader can grab on to. But readers have different tastes, so while you might enjoy slow moving brooding works (just guessing), someone else enjoys some fast paced, packed, dense writing. But in either case, if the book fails to meet expectations, chances are that you'll put it aside before you finish.
So, for instance, if you're writing an avant-garde novel, the point may be to alienate the reader. That's not really "hooking" them in the traditional sense.
“Readers” are so judgey. There is nothing wrong with reading the wikipedia summary of books instead of the whole thing. I read “Fellowship of the Ring” in middle school. Took forever! Put me off the whole enterprise.
I did not like the Hobbit, but other door-stop books like Moby Dick and Crime and Punishment I really have enjoyed. Seems stupid to stop because you didn't like one book. Would you write off movies if the first one you saw were bad?
But you're missing out on a person's voice. Prose can be as beautiful as any piece of visual art in a gallery. Not only are you depriving yourself of an aesthetic experience, but also a learning experience. Reading will boost your vocabulary and help your writing and give you more cultural references to pull from (and recognize, when they come up in another's work).
But...if you can't be assed, you can't be assed, I suppose.
> But you're missing out on a person's voice. Prose can be as beautiful as any piece of visual art in a gallery. Not only are you depriving yourself of an aesthetic experience...
Sure, but people who enjoy art don't write high-and-mighty articles titled "Just Go to MOMA Already." "Readers" act like these aesthetic experiences are something that are universally important.
> Reading will boost your vocabulary and help your writing and give you more cultural references to pull from
But this is only valuable if you're writing for other "readers" (which typically you're not).
> Prose can be as beautiful as any piece of visual art in a gallery
For many people, "prose" is just what you have to get through to find out what happens in the plot or to the characters. A lot of people have a minimal appreciation for most forms of art and literature is far more subtle and unappreciated than visual and auditory forms of art.
> Not only are you depriving yourself of an aesthetic experience, but also a learning experience. Reading will boost your vocabulary and help your writing and give you more cultural references to pull from (and recognize, when they come up in another's work).
I'm not sure what the inherent merit you see in boosting one's vocabulary is. I know a lot of words that I never use and no one I know ever uses. If I didn't know them, my life wouldn't be any different.
Reading is important for writers but most of us aren't writers. The vast majority of us that are writers write things like emails, internet comments, and work related documents. Not the kind of thing that reading fiction is going to help with.
As for cultural references, culture has been trending away from literature and towards movies and television for a very long time. I'd go so far as to say that in modern American culture, you're not going to be missing anything by not reading books.
Anyways, it's not that people "can't be assed", it's that books don't hold the same value for them that they hold for you. There's nothing wrong with that.
Problem I have with books is that it's much harder to justify the "time" to get lost in books. When I was a kid, I was near the top of the school's reading program and devoured books. But now, when I do have time on vacation or sick, I'd almost much rather read something that's educational-ish. It's hard to justify the X hours falling into a fantasy world, though it's still almost as fun as it used to be.
Practically I think I have more "ties" to the real world, with a job, family, etc, and it's harder for me to stop worrying about those things long enough to slip inside the mind of a character in a book.
Be careful with that. It's easy to get overwhelmed when you least expect it. Let yourself relax and get lost on occasion. It will do wonders for your mental health.
Good fiction can teach you more about human nature than any non-fiction. Marginally more knowledge about human nature can get you further than marginally more technical knowledge.
If you have to justify it, you're doing it wrong. Your free time is your playground. Take half an hour -- or ten minutes -- each day and enjoy those fantasy worlds. They might refresh you.
A problem with fantasy worlds is the escapism is mild, and I develop something like tolerance to it. The tolerance effect makes finishing very long fantasy books / trilogies slow, since it causes me to put them down in the middle if the story slows down at any point.
Once I've put it down for a few days, the mild escapism isn't enough to pull me back and I start losing touch with the characters and plot. I experience something like that with video games as well.
This got out of hand. TL; DR: If the fantasy novels you're reading don't work for you, try different styles or even different genres. We don't all have to read the same books.
I'd disagree strongly that fantasy novels have only mild escapism, but that leads me to this point: It sounds more like you need a different genre of book or style of writing. Fantasy may just not be engaging for you, or maybe you need something less Tolkien/Robert Jordan/Steven Erikson style. Something more escapist/lighthearted (Brandon Sanderson is good, R.A. Salvatore's Forgotten Realms novels are good, L.E. Modesitt Jr's Imager series, etc.). Or vice/versa - escapism may just not work for you, in which case something more thoughtful like Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen may be worth trying.
I will say I've rarely put down a fantasy series in the middle the way you've mentioned. Scifi will get me to do that though - I have the entire Mars trilogy on my bookshelf, but I've only read half of the first book - it's just too dry for me (and, frankly, I dislike the author's style. Revealing plot points near the beginning of the novel was a very poor choice). On the other hand, I very much enjoy the Culture novels, and Peter Hamilton's work.
For other unrelated genres: I really don't do mystery novels at all, as they don't interest me. Alternate history, I quite enjoy (at least Harry Turtledove's work- I can't say I've read much else)
Incidentally, there's one other thing that just kind of happens, but avoids me avoid dropping a novel - I rarely start a new series with only a short time to read. Get 15 minutes in to a series and go away for the day, and you may not feel that it's interesting enough to come back. Get an hour in, and usually that's not a problem.
Your 'free' time is valuable currency, and every minute must be invested as productively as possible, or you'll lose to someone else who does in this kill or die monkey knife fight economy
[https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/].
Poe's law may be in effect here, especially as I'm unfamiliar with SSC Moloch, but I can't agree with you if you are serious.
I don't need to win a knife fight against an opponent who poisons himself. And, well, we're on HN: as we all know, burnout will pretty quickly put you out of the fight.
"So be it with Gnon. Our job is to placate him insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and invasion. And that only for a short time, until we come into our full power."
To give everything of yourself over to Gnon/Moloch is to deny Elua, who Scott names the god of art, science, philosophy, love, niceness, community, civilization. One might add to that: the god of play, of gardening – of reading.
I don't think you want to go down this rabbit hole. Free time and relaxing is important investment IMO. My own experience with this philosophy was that it results in heavy burnout. And besides, you never know what you'll get out of a book or a TV show, some of them have been just as impactful on my life as works of philosophy or workout podcasts or what have you.
I read about 30-40 books a year but I am the same as you, I don't have the time or patience to cut out a slice dedicated to staring at a page.
Can I recommend you try an audio book? I have found that most of the time I do chores, like dishes, fixing stuff around the place, the treadmill or even the shower can be quite enjoyable when listening to an audio book.
Any automatic mundane task which you are already expending time on can easily be overlaid with audio.
A fun example is that I am listening to "Countdown to Day Zero: Stuxnet" which was recommended here! I ended up enjoying the book for an hour, and at the end of it, the kitchen was spotless.
I feel the exact same way. I tend to lean towards self-help books but this ranges anywhere from your typical self-help, to dog training books, to biographies, to educational, to technical ones for developing.
I found it funny that immediately following the article (at least on mobile) were the worst clickbait ads “10 questions to figure out your mental wealth!”
This is an excellent ad-blocker, available for Firefox, Chrome, Edge & macOS Safari. It's well worth using; the only time I see clickbait is when I use someone else's computer.
For around ten years I didn’t read much, not because I didn’t want to, I certainly did, but because it takes too long. I get up at around 6am, get home from work at around 5pm and then I have daily chores mixed with family stuff for 3-5 hours. Not much left after that, and I’m not good at setting fixed hours for specific hobbies, so reading a whole book just didn’t work out for me.
I soon found that even if I managed to pick a book up, it’d have to be really great for me not to start questioning if it was worth the time.
I did take a few courses related to work, where I had to read books and articles, but I don’t count those because they were part of studying, so reading them had a specific purpose of getting me good grades at whatever certification/examination came with the course.
Then a few years ago I started listening to audiobooks, and it’s really changed things. Now I “read” one or two books a month. Sometimes it’s stuff like Sapiens, other times it’s the new world of Warcraft novel, but both kinds have really improved the quality of my life. I do have two hours of commute each day, where the audiobook fits in perfectly. I used to fill it with music and podcasts, but for me the books have been a huge improvement exactly because of the depth.
Was halfway through an almost identical reply when you posted this haha (also enjoyed Sapiens!).
I think the level of absorption is as high if not higher than reading but I have been wondering if it 'counts' (and wondering what I mean by that).
With audiobooks we're not practicing the physical scanning of words (assuming that's a skill which can deteriorate) and difficult sentences are definitely easier to follow when stressed by a good voice actor. That said I think we're still picking up vocabulary, empathizing and learning which feel like the biggest wins of reading a variety of books.
I’m kind of in your camp. Back when I had a lot of time, I used to read a lot. But it’s such a low bandwidth communication, and books seem to have so much useless filler material. I tried e-books but failed. If I listen to them while I’m doing something else like commuting, I don’t pay attention (since I’m trying to not get killed on I-680), and if I listen while I’m not doing anything else, I fall asleep. Still waiting for someone to invent that The Matrix style “download into my brain” technology.
A year or so ago, I decided I wanted to read all of the "best" books so I found a few lists of the best literature in English from the past few hundred years and read a few dozen of the books that showed up on most lists, and I realized that really well written books aren't nearly as low-bandwidth as a lot of more pulpy type books are.
Obviously I didn't enjoy all of the books on the list, but even the ones I kind of slogged through felt like they contained more... knowledge (wisdom?)
I'm also really into sci-fi and fantasy, so I've been working my way down awards lists like the Hugos. The books on these lists also seem more high bandwidth, with the bonus of giving you exposure to a bunch of different authors who have mostly all written a bunch of stuff that's similar to whatever won them the award.
N. N. Taleb always says you shouldn’t read any books that are less than 200 years old. If a book survives for 200 years it must have something genuinely valuable to say.
I think this is good advice. I try to follow it for the most part, but obviously I don’t apply that to technical material. Still, I bet if you read Euclid instead of O’Reilly you’d end up a pretty good programmer.
I've read some of Taleb's books and while I find him very smart and with very valuable insights, I'd rather take some of these extreme things he says (like what you pointed) with a grain of salt.
I find audiobooks excellent when I'm doing something that occupies my body but not my mind. Excercise (whether working out or just going for a walk) is great, as are any jobs you do around the house that are >90% autopilot -- cooking familiar meals, vacuuming, washing up, that sort of thing.
(When driving I think it's better and safer to listen to something you can easily drift into and out of, like music or a podcast you don't feel the need to follow closely, rather than a book.)
Yep. I knock out 30-40 books a year through audiobooks. I rotate between NF, sci-fi, and fantasy, and literature.
Audiobooks are perfect while commuting, working out, and doing chores. During the times I'd have time to read a physical book, I read a technical one, a comic book, or a video game instead.
It depends on the books and your rate of reading. I spend about $100/month on books which is often only 2 or 3. I can't always justify spending more. I would agree with you in the case of fiction, as the books are cheaper and better represented at libraries. But non-fiction is expensive, and I read a lot of technical and niche nonfiction.
I see. I mostly read history and fiction. I read a lot of technical books when I was trying to become a programmer but now it's often the last thing I feel like reading.
Interesting read (no pun intended). I find that it is hard to read something when I'm thinking about other things, which is to say my mind wanders into other areas while reading so I lose track of where I am. But on the flip side when I'm fully engaged I have a hard time stopping reading and that can lead to some late nights where resting/sleeping would have been a "better" use of my time.
My biggest challenge has been with what I consider poorly written documentation for things. If I'm really busy and just want to use something to get one thing done, but can't because I have to read the documentation thoroughly in order to understand the special way a particular tool works, it can be excruciatingly difficult to force myself to read that.
> I find that it is hard to read something when I'm thinking about other things, which is to say my mind wanders into other areas while reading so I lose track of where I am.
I do this too, so I've started keeping a small notebook and pen in my bag. When my mind starts to wander, I write my thoughts into the notebook. I don't know why or how it works, but getting the thoughts onto a page gets them out of my head, which lets me focus.
I started really reading a lot a few years ago and I have to say that it's mostly a matter of practice. If you are used to reading dense texts and not anxious about how many books you "have to" blow through, you can slowly and calmly read a book and you'll finish it sooner than you think. I actually am reading the book mentioned in the article, War and Peace, and rather enjoying it.
Wow, do I feel this pain. As both an author[1] and a book-lover, I've been on both sides of this divide. People just don't consume books the same way they used to.
As a reader, I find I have to slowly re-introduce deep reading -- even if I've just been away for a week or two. I usually do this by getting a physical book and a physical distraction device, usually my phone. I go to a place where there's nothing else in the room.
Then I read as much as I can until I feel "bothered" (beats me what the correct adjective is here. "Bored"?) At that point I pick up the distraction device and poke around: Twitter, Facebook, HN, and so on. I make an effort to put it down. Eventually I succeed, then back to reading.
Over a period of many cycles, my reading time gets up to close to an hour long. But it's a struggle.
I don't think I could do it with an e-book reader. In those things, they put the distraction stuff just a click away. Hell, they'll sell you more distraction stuff you can play the millisecond you get bored with the text.
What I'd like to know is whether I'm some weird outlier or whether many other readers are going through this same process.
As a book writer, I tried as hard as possible to plug into a feedback loop with my readers. I ran beta groups, I emailed extensively to find out what worked and what didn't. All of the communication, as far as I could tell, collapsed into some version of "Make it take five minutes so I can go consume more material" Hey, I'm with you, but some things can't be covered in five minutes. Some things require a narrative and background for you to make sense of it, dear reader. What to do then?
(Add: Had one beta reader assure me that he already understood all the stuff around the first third of the book and I was wasting his time. So I jumped him directly to the second third. He was completely lost. I thought about cross-indexing the book to show how each part was used later, but what the heck would that accomplish, aside from reassuring myself that the text was needed? It is a frustrating problem from both sides.)
The Kindle Paperwhite helps a great deal with the e-book reader problem, and having distractions just a click away. It's useless as anything but a book.
> I don't think I could do it with an e-book reader. In those things, they put the distraction stuff just a click away. Hell, they'll sell you more distraction stuff you can play the millisecond you get bored with the text.
I have owned some model of Kindle for six years now. For each device I have owned, I put it in airplane mode as soon as I took it out of the box and I kept it that way. (I generally download what I want to read from pirated ebook communities, so no need to deal with an online bookshop’s ecosystem.) It is not hard to avoid distractions of being sold more stuff.
> Then I read as much as I can until I feel "bothered" (beats me what the correct adjective is here. "Bored"?) At that point I pick up the distraction device and poke around: Twitter, Facebook, HN, and so on. I make an effort to put it down. Eventually I succeed, then back to reading.
This sounds reinforcing. I understand you have to fight through the boredom a bit, but not sure giving yourself a quick fiddle on your phone is optimal.
> Then I read as much as I can until I feel "bothered" (beats me what the correct adjective is here. "Bored"?) At that point I pick up the distraction device and poke around: Twitter, Facebook, HN, and so on. I make an effort to put it down. Eventually I succeed, then back to reading.
I noticed myself doing this while watching a movie. Even at suspenseful moments, I press "pause" and pick up my phone to browse around HN and Facebook. After a while I continue watching, but then five or ten minutes later I'm back on the phone.
> What I'd like to know is whether I'm some weird outlier or whether many other readers are going through this same process.
Been there, done that. I blame several things:
(a) the Internet, of course.
(b) I am much pickier about what I read. In the past I would have simply said "the language is poor, but the story is good" etc. Now, such things really bother me and I don't want to continue.
(c) I somehow lost my ability to read without subvocalization (actually, I know why, but it's really hard to get it back). Extremely annoying!
>I don't think I could do it with an e-book reader. In those things, they put the distraction stuff just a click away. Hell, they'll sell you more distraction stuff you can play the millisecond you get bored with the text.
My first ereader did not have wifi. For me, the absence was a feature. Still, I now have a Kobo which has wifi, but I don't find it a distraction at all. Everything is pretty slow - if I wanted to browse the web, it's easier to put down the ereader and do it on my PC or phone. So for me, there isn't any distraction at all.
Mabye you're just not reading things you find interesting? I personally find that I only get bored of reading if I'm reading something I've read already or if it's about a topic I don't feel like reading at the time.
I've recently regained the ability to do in-depth reading. I attribute the final loss of my old since-childhood book habit to the Kindle app on my iPad... it seemed "better" to buy electronic books instead. But that meant the Internet was there waiting for me, after every chapter or pause, I could just go check Facebook or email, or... yeah.
So I started reading paper books again. The context switch into paper is relatively expensive, so I'd stay there, not cutting over to the internet. I started reading serious material again. From there, my spouse gave me her unused Kindle Paperwhite (she reads a ton on her iPad, so she doesn't use the Paperwhite), and I found the Paperwhite gave me most of the Kindle advantages without the multipurpose device disadvantages.
Next, I cut back seriously on my social media. I went cold turkey on Facebook for a bit (and on Twitter shortly after), and I consciously avoid bad FB habits. Nonetheless, it's an addiction machine, and when I do use it again, I realize that cold turkey is probably better.
Without social media apps on my phone, I find myself with a Kindle app instead. Much better!
When I was 20 or so and reading very heavily (I had a job that gave me four hours of sitting time in half hour chunks, so I read a lot), I started a self-control process of reading one fiction and one non-fiction book simultaneously - at that time, to make sure I read plenty of non-fiction. Now, I have to make myself read fiction instead. I seem to have settled that divide by reading fiction on my phone, and non-fiction on my Kindle.
Audiobooks and podcasts have been a change for me, too. I started with a serious audiobook on a road trip (The Order of Time, by Carlo Rovelli). From there, I blew through all 120 episodes of the Philosophize This! podcast. A new job has me on an ugly commute for the first time in years, so I'm filling that time in the car with Hardcore History (the monstrous six hour Celtic Holocaust episode about the Roman invasion of Gaul), and foreign language vocabulary study (Spanish).
Having a proper reading habit of an hour or two a day on average has me back to reading heavy things. I've read a lot of history this year, and I'm currently back to reading philosophy (Simone de Beauvoir and Herbert Marcuse). Plus, I'm managing to dig through a backlog of software industry books, mostly DevOps things I'd missed out on before.
So what I am hearing here is that practicing reading will help develop that skill of deep reading? I remember in High School when I used to run through my History textbooks and loving the process, remembering most everything I encountered. Now (5 years later), I feel this block in my mind that prevents me from going deep on those topics. It's hard to describe, but it feels like the material isn't being absorbed... Somehow it's getting stuck in my short-term memory and not making it much further unless I really study the material.
Whenever he tried to read anything substantial, Carr wrote, “I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. … The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”
I've gone from reading 10 books a year to reading 25+ books a year over the last few years. Mostly I've cut down on my screen time. I am on a computer all day for work but once I go home I try to spend as little time as possible on a computer.
What do I do now? Come home, do yoga for 15-30 minutes, make tea, meditate for 10 minutes, read for 15 - 50 minutes. Then I'll allow myself to do other things that may occupy my time.
I'll admit that as a single man without kids I have a lot more freedom over my schedule but this is very similar to my morning routine. At the minimum I've got 30 minutes of reading and 20 minutes of meditation in my day every day. This has done wonders for my ADD brain.
The other big thing is focuses on books I know I'll enjoy. For me that means Sci-Fi fiction novels and Magical Realism books. Also if I find myself not wanting to pick up the book then I'll move on from it.
Right now I'm reading alternating Murakami book, Vonnegut books, and books from The Sparrow (Mary Doria Russell) series. Are they all at the level or War and Peace? No. But I enjoy them and that's what maters.
P.S. I've got a kindle paperwhite which is IMO the best e reading device I've ever used. It sits in my draw while paper stack up around my house and near my bedside. It just doesnt feel the same. It's great for when I'm going to be traveling and need a few novels but dont have the space in my travel bag.
Getting an e-ink reader is the reason I've had a similar boost in reading hours, also over the last few years.
The thing's fantastic. I don't even mind the low dpi, or the delayed responsiveness (it's not slower than turning a paper page). I bring it with me and read anywhere. It does not have the attention seeking alerts nor the eye-straining of a back-lighted smartphone.
There's under a dozen simultaneous books I'm reading at any given time, spanning both fiction and non-fiction, and have already put 1500+ hours on it (the device has nifty time tracking stats!). To me it's about the niftiest piece of consumer tech the industry has put out the past two decades.
Smartphones are great for books, but you need an OLED screen (and hence no backlight). I was a very early adopter of eInk tech - got into it when Chinese started making the first affordable alternatives to the very first Kindle. It was great, but eventually, the smartphone won out of sheer convenience - it's always there in the pocket with me, so whenever I have to wait on the go, I can just whip it out and continue reading.
Yes, I recently got a Kobo Aura One. At 7.8" and high resolution screen it is not much different from reading a largish pocket book. Also being able to read in the dark without disturbing the wife, thanks to screen back light is also a big plus.
But even with bigger screen and higher resolution than most e-ink readers, it is still a bit small to read most magazines comfortably, which was a bit of a disappointment to me.
I read some ebooks on my phone before, but as you say, it does not compare. You have constant distractions and reading on a phone / tablet outside in daylight is no fun.
I have a Kobo Aura One too -- it's really a fantastic device. Waterproof (bathtime reading), large screen and "open" to all e-book formats. I used to have a Kindle but felt like I was reading a book on a postage stamp.
Yes - I wish I enjoyed my kindle paperwhite more because it is so incredibly useful. It's so useful because although I havnt touched it in months I'm sure it still has a 50%+ charge.
I’m also reading more books than I ever have — and I have kids. Partly it’s because the library is a fun thing for us to do as a family, but also because it’s easier for me to wind down with a book than a screen when they go to bed.
I tend to check out more books than I’ll actually read, looking for the ones that really grab me; I read those through to completion. The ones that change me fundamentally, I buy a copy to hold on to.
I did the Marie Kondo discarding thing with books a couple of years back and it opened up a lot of shelf space; it’s very useful for keeping an always rotating stack of books from the library.
I just joined the library near me (Shout out for the incredible Harold Washington Library in Chicago!) and I've realized that It's a great way to test books out from authors I don't know about. It's also great for e books as you can check them out without even going to the library.
I had a problem focusing on reading until I started just listening to books on Audible while doing chores or taking walks. The physical activity occupies my mind enough to allow me to focus on the content.
Same here. I listen while driving, cleaning, and walking my dogs and am able to focus much better on the content of the book. I went from struggling to finish 3-5 paper books per year to completely finishing 20-30 audiobooks per year. I am often disappointed with the limited selection on Audible for things I am interested in, though.
I use the Samsung voice. It's great. I don't really like the voice actin in audiobooks. I just want to hear the story. The google one is tolerable, but Samsung's is super nice.
I gradually stopped reading books over a period of years. I didn't really know why. Then I got progressive eyeglasses, and suddenly I was reading again.
Apparently, I had stopped reading because it was getting hard to see the words, a process so slow I didn't notice it.
I had this problem but it's ok now. Meditation or yoga before reading is helpful for me. It stops the constant flow of thought so it is easier to read after. And also, I don't force myself to read books I don't like
I've got ADD and have difficulties reading from time to time because of it. Do you have a meditation practice at all? I do 10 minutes every morning with an app called, "simply being" and 10 minutes at night. It's changed my life. It took the constantly running internal monologue and slowed it down and/or quieted it a bit for me. I'm able to focus in on things a little better now which has helped a lot.
I also know that it takes me a few pages to really get into a book. I read all of Lovecraft's works in college. I had to set aside 45 minutes for reading time. The first 5-10 I would struggle but then eventually something would click and I would be locked into the book. If I took a few days off it was harder to lock in. I think sometimes reading is like getting on board with someone else's internal monologue or at least the characters via the authors writing style and that can be difficult for people with ADD.
The problem with reading on digital screen is maybe a generation one.
Being a teenager i am very grateful that we have so many books on an electronic device. I read on a smartphones because 2 things:
Spaced repetition. I can read anywhere, anytime. At school, at home, in the car etc.
TTS Audiobooks on offline epub with speed changer. It took me a while but because of the technology improvement of TTS I don't see a difference. I can listen to the next pages where I last read on the way to the gym or school. Or I can listen to the introduction and then read when I have time where I bookmarked it.
The modern problem with understanding is the need of recall and effort. There is a great video:https://youtu.be/V-UvSKe8jW4
Edit 1: I started taking productivity more serious after 6 months detox of my smartphone. (during my school time and during exams, I was successful because I broke it and my parents never give me gifts or have good income)
Edit 2: off time is the best app. It basically doesn't allow to access only some apps that you choose for a period of time
>Wolf resolved to allot a set period every day to reread a novel she had loved as a young woman, Hermann Hesse’s Magister Ludi. It was exactly the sort of demanding text she’d once reveled in. But now she discovered to her dismay that she could not bear it. “I hated the book,” she writes. “I hated the whole so-called experiment.” She had to force herself to wrangle the novel’s “unnecessarily difficult words and sentences whose snakelike constructions obfuscated, rather than illuminated, meaning for me.”
"Demanding text"? "unnecessarily difficult words and sentences"? "snakelike constructions"?
Who described the book as such, Beavis and Butthead? Herman Hesse is at the young adult fiction level of difficulty (and in Europe has been traditionally read by adolescents).
The article was excellently written and worth the time to read & digest. Your comment is beautifully indicative of the shallow "garbage in, garbage out" point the author made at the end.
I disagree with most of what she says. I know I spend too much time online, but at the same time I don't have any problems getting lost in books. Just last week I devoured Name of the Wind (600+ pages) in a matter of days, even though I ultimately didn't particularly like it.
It seems like she has trained herself to read a certain way and then blames the world around her for her own actions. Spending time online doesn't have to affect your reading behaviour, especially if you practice self awareness.
I'm not sure if this is supposed to be directed at me or a general comment, but the internet was most certainly there when I started reading. In fact I hated reading when I was in middle school. It was only in my last couple years (of school) that I really started to enjoy it.
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[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 400 ms ] threadHowever for all technical books, things like O’Reilly, No Starch, etc, I always buy physical. The decision to do that has very much 10x my learning. Even when it comes to long documentation (MySQL is an astounding 5,000+ pages) I’ll usually print out portions to cover if it’s reasonable.
I don’t know why this has increased my learning so much. The best I can come up with is that memory is based on some kind of spatial geography + other stuff. As I’m working on something, like configuring a CentOS server to a lengthy CIS Security Benchmark, I can recall in books what the page looked like, where I was when I read it, the feel of the page, and the part of the text I underlined in pen. Very strange.
I still buy textbooks to this day because I find it far easier to absorb technical information from that medium.
It's sad to read the reason why they ditched the online store.
I was in BN awhile ago.
I distinctly heard a girlfriend scolding her boyfriend over a small book purchase.
"Only idiots buy books anymore. Just look it up on the internet?"
It stuck with me. Don't agree, and found the statement depressing.
I repair/service watches. I have learned so much from books, especially older books. Yes--it's a niche field. There are times where I'm looking through a 60 year old book, and find something I didn't know.
https://www.thebookseller.com/futurebook/why-oreilly-media-n...
Obviously this doesn't applies to all new books, but if you're willing to read older books, there's a lot to read for relatively little cost.
Same here. I always feel odd when I'm reading a physical book at my desk, though, since I've never, ever, not even once in 25 years, seen anybody else actually reading a book - not even the ones who have a shelf full of them at their desks.
For myself, though, it's just not resource efficient to use physical copies of all the technical documentation I read. For example, I'm learning Vulkan right now, and there's just 0% chance I'm going to print out 1300+ pages of documentation that's liable to change a few times a year in subtle ways.
Then again, just thinking about it now, maybe specifically printing out just the diffs when the spec changes could make it easier to stay up to date?
Choosing delayed gratification in the form of good, rich, long-form writing is a lot like choosing a balanced diet. The benefits of traipsing through difficult texts may not be readily apparent but doing so invariably pays dividends for years to come.
Try paying for something that's behind a hard paywall and you'll see shorter articles.
The thing about the five-paragraph essay is its structure scales well to longer articles. You state your main idea up front, then spend a bit of time elaborating on that main idea, then you wrap up. Online articles are like -- they pick a source, say, a college professor or someone with a new book out. Then they spend half the article or more talking about their source's early childhood, failed marriage and/or relationship with their dog, anything that might have a loose tenuous relationship with the main idea. THEN they hit you with the main idea, then they pad out their essay with quotes from the source, whom by now you have "gotten to know". It's infuriating, but I guess the idea is to tease a main idea with the headline, then keep you slogging through barely relevant detail long enough to show you quite a few ads before wrapping up with stuff that relates what was teased to you, even if the body doesn't justify the headline. Clickbait, in other words.
When I want people to summarize links they post, it's not because I have a short attention span or categorically refuse to read them. It's because I want to know the broad sketches of what it's claiming so that I know whether I need the extra detail (sorry, "color") it provides vs. whether it's citing a study or argument I'm already familiar with (or is even a relevant point to make).
Semantic dyslexia, perhaps.
You're the second person I see in this thread complaining that texts have become too bloated and using this exact example. Perhaps the guy is just a hack.
In terms of bloat, excluding the Tale of Genji or the Story of the Stone, I can hardly think of anything in the 1800s that pushes into the 1M+ word mark in order to tell a complete story. I mean, people used to joke about War & Peace being long and it's hovering around 1/2 a million words -- and at least when I read it, Tolstoy seemed to be using every last one of them.
I find the older the book, the slower and more waffly (if you want to be uncharitable) its prose. I haven't looked into this at all, but it always feels to me like editors are a new edition to the writing process.
Ironically I usually really enjoy the actual prose they wrote, because it's often beautiful, but after dozens and dozens of pages of hearing about how pious some bishop is you have no context for you really start to wish Victor Hugo would just move the fuck on.
In some cases older writers were actually paid per word. Dickens comes to mind.
Our aesthetics have changed, that is for sure.
In Dune most of the narration follows a protagonist that navigates the world. In A Song of Ice & Fire there is not a single protagonist. There are multiple characters that are elevated to the same level of importance. Covering world events from each point of view requires more pages. Having multiple characters that are the same level of importance is one of the hallmarks of the series. When starting to read the series a person is usually told that they will not be able to predict who will die. This is a key element of the story telling process.
A Song of Ice and Fire has more named minor characters and a wider range of named minor characters. In my opinion this makes the world more rich and represents a deep understanding of the entire society. Dune deals primarily (99% or more) with aristocrats and their servants/warriors. A Song of Ice and Fire will talk about everyone from Kings to poor fisherman.
For what it's worth, in SF & Fantasy short fiction is still hanging in there:
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com http://dailysciencefiction.com http://www.analogsf.com
In any case, I find reading a physical book to be more enjoyable and effective (in terms of retention and recall) than reading on a digital screen.
Another effective way to absorb the main points quickly is to Youtube the author giving a longish talk about his/her book, typically Talks at Google or some such. Or a podcast in which the author discusses the book.
Perhaps the the worst consistent example is the New Yorker - I just read, uh ok, skimmed, a piece about Elliot hedge fund. It's many many pages long, but could be summarized in a paragraph, or a page, to add some supporting examples.
But, there's a big difference between reading for information, and reading for pleasure/escape.
I get quite frustrated by information pieces fluffed into literature, but can still find the time for engrossing stories and captivating writing.
1. Kindle
2. Prepare lunch and dinner such that I have about 15 minutes of waiting time each time.
3. Read during this waiting time
After two days of reading this way, if I am not enjoying the book, then I drop it and move on.
> She had, she concluded, “changed in ways I would never have predicted. I now read on the surface and very quickly; in fact, I read too fast to comprehend deeper levels
Here she lays the blame solely on her, but I would think that it's also a writer's skill to hook the reader.
It takes two to tango, and if she felt the narrative was so slow she started to skim the sentences and ended up missing the deeper parts, perhaps the book could have used some trimming, better pacing, or a different approach to present the subject.
I feel that while we tend to read faster in general, we also read a lot more volume than the previous generations and I genuinely think we are pretty optimised to understand a lot very fast.
There is a ton of last century news articles or magazines that are unbearably slow and very diluted. Sometimes there will be deeper thoughts buried there, but 98% of the times it's not, which is depressing.
Even nowadays, there is a cute TLDR bot on reddit, and from times to times reading the original article really doesn't bring anything more than what the bot put in a more succinct way.
When you pick up a copy of Fahrenheit 451 one thing you notice is how thin it is. To Kill a Mockingbird is another example. There are plenty of others.
Now I wonder if that wasn't an indirect response to ponderous tomes like Moby Dick and War and Peace? Maybe the authors who grew up with those books realized that brevity was a virtue and learned to tamp back their natural urges to digress into long rambling and ultimately pointless interludes?
War and Peace and Moby Dick are both exceptionally compelling, by the way, and the latter was actually much more appreciated in the early 20th Century than when it was written.
The return can be entertainment, practical info on a legal subject, or thought provoking opinions on a message board.
But the worst the text is written, the higher the return needs to be for the reader to continue reading.
But you're missing out on a person's voice. Prose can be as beautiful as any piece of visual art in a gallery. Not only are you depriving yourself of an aesthetic experience, but also a learning experience. Reading will boost your vocabulary and help your writing and give you more cultural references to pull from (and recognize, when they come up in another's work).
But...if you can't be assed, you can't be assed, I suppose.
Sure, but people who enjoy art don't write high-and-mighty articles titled "Just Go to MOMA Already." "Readers" act like these aesthetic experiences are something that are universally important.
> Reading will boost your vocabulary and help your writing and give you more cultural references to pull from
But this is only valuable if you're writing for other "readers" (which typically you're not).
For many people, "prose" is just what you have to get through to find out what happens in the plot or to the characters. A lot of people have a minimal appreciation for most forms of art and literature is far more subtle and unappreciated than visual and auditory forms of art.
> Not only are you depriving yourself of an aesthetic experience, but also a learning experience. Reading will boost your vocabulary and help your writing and give you more cultural references to pull from (and recognize, when they come up in another's work).
I'm not sure what the inherent merit you see in boosting one's vocabulary is. I know a lot of words that I never use and no one I know ever uses. If I didn't know them, my life wouldn't be any different.
Reading is important for writers but most of us aren't writers. The vast majority of us that are writers write things like emails, internet comments, and work related documents. Not the kind of thing that reading fiction is going to help with.
As for cultural references, culture has been trending away from literature and towards movies and television for a very long time. I'd go so far as to say that in modern American culture, you're not going to be missing anything by not reading books.
Anyways, it's not that people "can't be assed", it's that books don't hold the same value for them that they hold for you. There's nothing wrong with that.
can't be assed -> can't be bothered -> doesn't hold literature in high-regard -> I suppose - > okay.
Anyway, spice-of-life, and all that. To each, their own. Etc.
Practically I think I have more "ties" to the real world, with a job, family, etc, and it's harder for me to stop worrying about those things long enough to slip inside the mind of a character in a book.
I am in process of learning this the hard way. Too much stress built up has lead to lots of physical manifestations.
I'd disagree strongly that fantasy novels have only mild escapism, but that leads me to this point: It sounds more like you need a different genre of book or style of writing. Fantasy may just not be engaging for you, or maybe you need something less Tolkien/Robert Jordan/Steven Erikson style. Something more escapist/lighthearted (Brandon Sanderson is good, R.A. Salvatore's Forgotten Realms novels are good, L.E. Modesitt Jr's Imager series, etc.). Or vice/versa - escapism may just not work for you, in which case something more thoughtful like Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen may be worth trying.
I will say I've rarely put down a fantasy series in the middle the way you've mentioned. Scifi will get me to do that though - I have the entire Mars trilogy on my bookshelf, but I've only read half of the first book - it's just too dry for me (and, frankly, I dislike the author's style. Revealing plot points near the beginning of the novel was a very poor choice). On the other hand, I very much enjoy the Culture novels, and Peter Hamilton's work.
For other unrelated genres: I really don't do mystery novels at all, as they don't interest me. Alternate history, I quite enjoy (at least Harry Turtledove's work- I can't say I've read much else)
Incidentally, there's one other thing that just kind of happens, but avoids me avoid dropping a novel - I rarely start a new series with only a short time to read. Get 15 minutes in to a series and go away for the day, and you may not feel that it's interesting enough to come back. Get an hour in, and usually that's not a problem.
Your 'free' time is valuable currency, and every minute must be invested as productively as possible, or you'll lose to someone else who does in this kill or die monkey knife fight economy [https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/].
(edit: corrected link. Thank you!)
I don't need to win a knife fight against an opponent who poisons himself. And, well, we're on HN: as we all know, burnout will pretty quickly put you out of the fight.
I've read that twice now. Just as interesting, funny and depressing both times.
"So be it with Gnon. Our job is to placate him insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and invasion. And that only for a short time, until we come into our full power."
To give everything of yourself over to Gnon/Moloch is to deny Elua, who Scott names the god of art, science, philosophy, love, niceness, community, civilization. One might add to that: the god of play, of gardening – of reading.
Free time is for enjoying life, doing things you love, spending time with loved ones,... Not everything has to be about ones productivity.
Our time is way too short to spend everything producing things that will likely be forgotten or not used anymore in 75 years.
We must not forget to live life.
Can I recommend you try an audio book? I have found that most of the time I do chores, like dishes, fixing stuff around the place, the treadmill or even the shower can be quite enjoyable when listening to an audio book.
Any automatic mundane task which you are already expending time on can easily be overlaid with audio.
A fun example is that I am listening to "Countdown to Day Zero: Stuxnet" which was recommended here! I ended up enjoying the book for an hour, and at the end of it, the kitchen was spotless.
This is an excellent ad-blocker, available for Firefox, Chrome, Edge & macOS Safari. It's well worth using; the only time I see clickbait is when I use someone else's computer.
I soon found that even if I managed to pick a book up, it’d have to be really great for me not to start questioning if it was worth the time.
I did take a few courses related to work, where I had to read books and articles, but I don’t count those because they were part of studying, so reading them had a specific purpose of getting me good grades at whatever certification/examination came with the course.
Then a few years ago I started listening to audiobooks, and it’s really changed things. Now I “read” one or two books a month. Sometimes it’s stuff like Sapiens, other times it’s the new world of Warcraft novel, but both kinds have really improved the quality of my life. I do have two hours of commute each day, where the audiobook fits in perfectly. I used to fill it with music and podcasts, but for me the books have been a huge improvement exactly because of the depth.
I think the level of absorption is as high if not higher than reading but I have been wondering if it 'counts' (and wondering what I mean by that).
With audiobooks we're not practicing the physical scanning of words (assuming that's a skill which can deteriorate) and difficult sentences are definitely easier to follow when stressed by a good voice actor. That said I think we're still picking up vocabulary, empathizing and learning which feel like the biggest wins of reading a variety of books.
Obviously I didn't enjoy all of the books on the list, but even the ones I kind of slogged through felt like they contained more... knowledge (wisdom?)
I'm also really into sci-fi and fantasy, so I've been working my way down awards lists like the Hugos. The books on these lists also seem more high bandwidth, with the bonus of giving you exposure to a bunch of different authors who have mostly all written a bunch of stuff that's similar to whatever won them the award.
I think this is good advice. I try to follow it for the most part, but obviously I don’t apply that to technical material. Still, I bet if you read Euclid instead of O’Reilly you’d end up a pretty good programmer.
Paradoxes are fun, but dangerous to organize your life around.
(When driving I think it's better and safer to listen to something you can easily drift into and out of, like music or a podcast you don't feel the need to follow closely, rather than a book.)
Audiobooks are perfect while commuting, working out, and doing chores. During the times I'd have time to read a physical book, I read a technical one, a comic book, or a video game instead.
Many libraries let you listen to unlimited free audiobooks using the Libby app (honestly a life-changer for me).
My biggest challenge has been with what I consider poorly written documentation for things. If I'm really busy and just want to use something to get one thing done, but can't because I have to read the documentation thoroughly in order to understand the special way a particular tool works, it can be excruciatingly difficult to force myself to read that.
I do this too, so I've started keeping a small notebook and pen in my bag. When my mind starts to wander, I write my thoughts into the notebook. I don't know why or how it works, but getting the thoughts onto a page gets them out of my head, which lets me focus.
As a reader, I find I have to slowly re-introduce deep reading -- even if I've just been away for a week or two. I usually do this by getting a physical book and a physical distraction device, usually my phone. I go to a place where there's nothing else in the room.
Then I read as much as I can until I feel "bothered" (beats me what the correct adjective is here. "Bored"?) At that point I pick up the distraction device and poke around: Twitter, Facebook, HN, and so on. I make an effort to put it down. Eventually I succeed, then back to reading.
Over a period of many cycles, my reading time gets up to close to an hour long. But it's a struggle.
I don't think I could do it with an e-book reader. In those things, they put the distraction stuff just a click away. Hell, they'll sell you more distraction stuff you can play the millisecond you get bored with the text.
What I'd like to know is whether I'm some weird outlier or whether many other readers are going through this same process.
As a book writer, I tried as hard as possible to plug into a feedback loop with my readers. I ran beta groups, I emailed extensively to find out what worked and what didn't. All of the communication, as far as I could tell, collapsed into some version of "Make it take five minutes so I can go consume more material" Hey, I'm with you, but some things can't be covered in five minutes. Some things require a narrative and background for you to make sense of it, dear reader. What to do then?
(Add: Had one beta reader assure me that he already understood all the stuff around the first third of the book and I was wasting his time. So I jumped him directly to the second third. He was completely lost. I thought about cross-indexing the book to show how each part was used later, but what the heck would that accomplish, aside from reassuring myself that the text was needed? It is a frustrating problem from both sides.)
1. Shameless book plug: https://leanpub.com/info-ops
I have owned some model of Kindle for six years now. For each device I have owned, I put it in airplane mode as soon as I took it out of the box and I kept it that way. (I generally download what I want to read from pirated ebook communities, so no need to deal with an online bookshop’s ecosystem.) It is not hard to avoid distractions of being sold more stuff.
This sounds reinforcing. I understand you have to fight through the boredom a bit, but not sure giving yourself a quick fiddle on your phone is optimal.
I noticed myself doing this while watching a movie. Even at suspenseful moments, I press "pause" and pick up my phone to browse around HN and Facebook. After a while I continue watching, but then five or ten minutes later I'm back on the phone.
Been there, done that. I blame several things:
(a) the Internet, of course.
(b) I am much pickier about what I read. In the past I would have simply said "the language is poor, but the story is good" etc. Now, such things really bother me and I don't want to continue.
(c) I somehow lost my ability to read without subvocalization (actually, I know why, but it's really hard to get it back). Extremely annoying!
My first ereader did not have wifi. For me, the absence was a feature. Still, I now have a Kobo which has wifi, but I don't find it a distraction at all. Everything is pretty slow - if I wanted to browse the web, it's easier to put down the ereader and do it on my PC or phone. So for me, there isn't any distraction at all.
So I started reading paper books again. The context switch into paper is relatively expensive, so I'd stay there, not cutting over to the internet. I started reading serious material again. From there, my spouse gave me her unused Kindle Paperwhite (she reads a ton on her iPad, so she doesn't use the Paperwhite), and I found the Paperwhite gave me most of the Kindle advantages without the multipurpose device disadvantages.
Next, I cut back seriously on my social media. I went cold turkey on Facebook for a bit (and on Twitter shortly after), and I consciously avoid bad FB habits. Nonetheless, it's an addiction machine, and when I do use it again, I realize that cold turkey is probably better.
Without social media apps on my phone, I find myself with a Kindle app instead. Much better!
When I was 20 or so and reading very heavily (I had a job that gave me four hours of sitting time in half hour chunks, so I read a lot), I started a self-control process of reading one fiction and one non-fiction book simultaneously - at that time, to make sure I read plenty of non-fiction. Now, I have to make myself read fiction instead. I seem to have settled that divide by reading fiction on my phone, and non-fiction on my Kindle.
Audiobooks and podcasts have been a change for me, too. I started with a serious audiobook on a road trip (The Order of Time, by Carlo Rovelli). From there, I blew through all 120 episodes of the Philosophize This! podcast. A new job has me on an ugly commute for the first time in years, so I'm filling that time in the car with Hardcore History (the monstrous six hour Celtic Holocaust episode about the Roman invasion of Gaul), and foreign language vocabulary study (Spanish).
Having a proper reading habit of an hour or two a day on average has me back to reading heavy things. I've read a lot of history this year, and I'm currently back to reading philosophy (Simone de Beauvoir and Herbert Marcuse). Plus, I'm managing to dig through a backlog of software industry books, mostly DevOps things I'd missed out on before.
It's so much better than social media.
Good recommendation (based on the first episode anyway).
:)
100% describes me. Haven’t found a solution yet.
What do I do now? Come home, do yoga for 15-30 minutes, make tea, meditate for 10 minutes, read for 15 - 50 minutes. Then I'll allow myself to do other things that may occupy my time.
I'll admit that as a single man without kids I have a lot more freedom over my schedule but this is very similar to my morning routine. At the minimum I've got 30 minutes of reading and 20 minutes of meditation in my day every day. This has done wonders for my ADD brain.
The other big thing is focuses on books I know I'll enjoy. For me that means Sci-Fi fiction novels and Magical Realism books. Also if I find myself not wanting to pick up the book then I'll move on from it.
Right now I'm reading alternating Murakami book, Vonnegut books, and books from The Sparrow (Mary Doria Russell) series. Are they all at the level or War and Peace? No. But I enjoy them and that's what maters.
P.S. I've got a kindle paperwhite which is IMO the best e reading device I've ever used. It sits in my draw while paper stack up around my house and near my bedside. It just doesnt feel the same. It's great for when I'm going to be traveling and need a few novels but dont have the space in my travel bag.
And I write iOS apps for a living.
The thing's fantastic. I don't even mind the low dpi, or the delayed responsiveness (it's not slower than turning a paper page). I bring it with me and read anywhere. It does not have the attention seeking alerts nor the eye-straining of a back-lighted smartphone.
There's under a dozen simultaneous books I'm reading at any given time, spanning both fiction and non-fiction, and have already put 1500+ hours on it (the device has nifty time tracking stats!). To me it's about the niftiest piece of consumer tech the industry has put out the past two decades.
But even with bigger screen and higher resolution than most e-ink readers, it is still a bit small to read most magazines comfortably, which was a bit of a disappointment to me.
I read some ebooks on my phone before, but as you say, it does not compare. You have constant distractions and reading on a phone / tablet outside in daylight is no fun.
I tend to check out more books than I’ll actually read, looking for the ones that really grab me; I read those through to completion. The ones that change me fundamentally, I buy a copy to hold on to.
I did the Marie Kondo discarding thing with books a couple of years back and it opened up a lot of shelf space; it’s very useful for keeping an always rotating stack of books from the library.
Apparently, I had stopped reading because it was getting hard to see the words, a process so slow I didn't notice it.
I also know that it takes me a few pages to really get into a book. I read all of Lovecraft's works in college. I had to set aside 45 minutes for reading time. The first 5-10 I would struggle but then eventually something would click and I would be locked into the book. If I took a few days off it was harder to lock in. I think sometimes reading is like getting on board with someone else's internal monologue or at least the characters via the authors writing style and that can be difficult for people with ADD.
Being a teenager i am very grateful that we have so many books on an electronic device. I read on a smartphones because 2 things:
Spaced repetition. I can read anywhere, anytime. At school, at home, in the car etc.
TTS Audiobooks on offline epub with speed changer. It took me a while but because of the technology improvement of TTS I don't see a difference. I can listen to the next pages where I last read on the way to the gym or school. Or I can listen to the introduction and then read when I have time where I bookmarked it.
The modern problem with understanding is the need of recall and effort. There is a great video:https://youtu.be/V-UvSKe8jW4
Edit 1: I started taking productivity more serious after 6 months detox of my smartphone. (during my school time and during exams, I was successful because I broke it and my parents never give me gifts or have good income)
Edit 2: off time is the best app. It basically doesn't allow to access only some apps that you choose for a period of time
"Demanding text"? "unnecessarily difficult words and sentences"? "snakelike constructions"?
Who described the book as such, Beavis and Butthead? Herman Hesse is at the young adult fiction level of difficulty (and in Europe has been traditionally read by adolescents).
It seems like she has trained herself to read a certain way and then blames the world around her for her own actions. Spending time online doesn't have to affect your reading behaviour, especially if you practice self awareness.