Ask HN: How do you balance reading books vs. articles
I’m an avid reader. I have many books going at any given time. I’m also interested in reading articles and blog posts online. But when I spend my time reading articles, I sometimes have this thought at the back of my mind about using the same reading time for books instead. Do you have any tips and tricks on how you’ve build a balance in this?
63 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadI read books either after work / later on weekends / before bed.
This is an interesting result! Why do you suppose this is?
"I am always amazed by what happens: no matter how stringent I was in the original collecting, no matter how certain I was that this thing was worthwhile, I regularly eliminate 1/3 of my list before reading. The post that looked SO INTERESTING when compared to that one task I’d been procrastinating on, in retrospect isn’t even something I care about.
What I’m essentially doing is creating a buffer. Instead of pushing a new piece of info through from intake to processing to consumption without any scrutiny, I’m creating a pool of options drawn from a longer time period, which allows me to make decisions from a higher perspective, where those decisions are much better aligned with what truly matters to me."
https://medium.com/praxis-blog/the-secret-power-of-read-it-l...
Looking forward to him converting his Building a Second Brain course to a book, because no way in hell I'm paying a thousand bucks for a course.
- They don't seem as interesting as they appeared to be at first. Example: https://www.wired.com/story/his-writing-radicalized-young-ha... (captivating title, but I find Doctorow's fiction mediocre at best)
- I open them, get their essence in the first few sentences, decide it's not worth the time compared to others in queue. Example: https://github.blog/2020-11-16-standing-up-for-developers-yo... (don't need to spend 8 min on that, I got the gist from the title)
- Context gets removed. I forget what made me save them, making my judgement on them more objective. Example: https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2016/03/how-seriously-rea... (I read like 2-5 papers a year front-to-back, I don't really need to know this)
I also have a two or three layer setup. I star the material in rss reader, then if it looks ok after some time, I add to Pocket. I skim the article in Pocket and if it looks worthy enough, I favorite it and an IFTTT rule adds it to Instapaper. I read once more in Instapaper.
In my opinion, if you don't think you'll revisit an article, it's not worth reading even once.
Edit: typo
Articles are often more contemporary in topic matter and so should be fit to your current purpose, rather than acting as your primary means of exploring topics (which is their most common use when reading feeds, if we call "filling up time due to boredom" a form of foraging). Books are better for both exploration and depth when it comes to understanding important and long-lasting ideas.
[0] https://twitter.com/ThinkingAboutT6
[1] https://longreads.com/
[0] https://twitter.com/thinkingaboutt6
This implies that books are inherently superior. But sometimes the author's content isn't a book length. (I see this a lot in books from Harvard Business Review where what is really called for is a dense article, but that doesn't put a book on the author's resume.)
Some arguments are intrinsically long. Building up an understanding of thermodynamics (not just a summary of its formulation) is certainly book length. Scheidel's 'Escape from Rome' is not going to fit into an article.
So I don't really balance. Sometimes I have a big book in flight and that's going to take a lot of my attention. Sometimes I don't, but I have a number of interesting articles. I aim to optimize the enrichment I get instead.
- Before bed time, I avoid screens and read novels instead - When I have spare time, I go out and read on a bench - I have my phone set to a black and white screen from 9:30pm on
But before bed, I want my brain to calm down and books help that. Routine is 30 minutes before bed reading a paper novel. I also attempt to make this fiction (as most of my other reading is non-fiction)
It's tough with two kids, but I've prioritized it this year and have appreciated myself for doing so.
So, when you choose book vs article, I think this distinction should be part of the thought process. Basically, if you do give up a blog post or article in favor of a book, make sure you're getting the right bang for you buck and are not just re-reading the same idea over and over again.
A couple examples are Cal Newport and Mark Manson. Their books aren't bad, but they could be reduced to probably 1/3 of their actual length without much loss of insight.
That said, many/most are padded out. In general, you can't publish a book unless it's 250 pages or so. The economics for publishers apparently just don't work out. Fairly or not, a lot of people at least subconsciously buy by the pound. They're not going to pay $20 for a 50 page book in general.
* "inspire" me with useless stories from other people, i.e. stuff that isn't anything beyond "wow amazing feat!" with no practical utility. These are most of the trash pop-biz or pop-psych books that talk about the marshmallow experiment for the Nth time... * use their book to get speaking engagements (e.g. by checking their website) * does the book contain a goofy diagram to abstractly illustrate their point in a bass-ackwards way? (The Conjoined Triangles of Six-Sigma Success!)
Anyone else experience this, and how did you get past it?
I didn't read any non-fiction for a long time before I was given a book as a gift [0] that was really good. Since then, I have received a few other recommendations that I enjoyed [1-2].
[0] Artificial Intelligence by Melanie Mitchell
[1] Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
[2] The Theoretical Minimum Series by Leonard Susskind
I would really appreciate more of this kind, any commenters here have suggestions?
same goes with blog posts to a certain extent - there are a number of shorter works that are constantly posted on HN (http://jsomers.net/hn/) and many of them are worth reading. though tbh I read a lot of articles all over the internet from any time. blame it on lack of discipline
In other words, you let everyone else filter for you.
Music is almost purely for entertainment and not for information so tastes can afford to be variable. And books are published on all sorts of topics so even despite this, among old books you can find weird things that disagree with each other.
This is recursive and implies a decrease in diversity over time, starting from enormously high and reaching abysmally small. But I am fairly certain that it doesn't hold.
> among old books you can find weird things that disagree with each other.
I fail to see what makes old books capable of disagreeing with each other and recent releases incapable. At some point new releases become old and therefore they suddenly attain the ability to disagree with each other?
I fail to see the difference between music and books tbh. Whatever remains popular has, as you said, some property or quality that helps preserve it in memory.
What books are considered part of a canon will always trail behind the total number of books being published, so the total set will either remain stable or increase in size.
However, I think your assumption that it will somehow converge only holds if the criterion of quality are both universal and consistent. Neither has to be true – different cultures have different measures and weights for quality, and within cultures there are disagreement as to what quality is (even in a contemporary setting). Hence my next claim.
> I fail to see what makes old books capable of disagreeing with each other and recent releases incapable. At some point new releases become old and therefore they suddenly attain the ability to disagree with each other?
That's the point – it equivocates the two which allows you to be indifferent between them upto other factors, since you should expect both new and old books to be diverse, rather than the monoculture of thought you are attempting to resist by going completely your own way. Those other factors can include possible selection effects like I have claimed above which act as signals for a book's quality.
I guess the only thing left to add is that you can't read everything, but there's a lot you could read. Given this problem, does one be an early adopter for a book or not?
A better heuristic that can accommodate both the observation and necessity of change in how books are appraised could be: "What is the oldest possible correct book for the given topic, that continues to be read today?" If new books come for new topics that's fine, read them if the topic matters. Else older books might be better to use given the previous argument.
> I guess the only thing left to add is that you can't read everything, but there's a lot you could read. Given this problem, does one be an early adopter for a book or not?
The answer to the explore-exploit dilemma is dependent on the remaining time and your reward function, i.e. goals. I am still in my infancy as an avid reader, therefore I can not give a good enough comment.
The only issue I really have with this is textbooks. Especially true for humanities/history where some new things have come to light or new theories/fields have developed.
What? Oh, well, in that regard most elements in any category is mediocre. Doesn’t really mean much...
There is a great book "how to read a book" by Mortimer J. Adler. It teaches to filter books and understand if it worth reading
Typically, I am doing this in the evening and I have a regular time after my evening meditation and walk.
Being able to structure that only happened after my kiddo got into high school and it's been easier since he's at college and I am wholly on my own.
Some really short ones --- a short news for instance, I just skim over them when I see them.
Some articles require more concentration, and I'll usually add them to my At-Desk to do list. When I'm at my desk, and has a chunk of free time, I'll pick one and read.
One thing is that over the week, some articles will have the same topic, with varying depth and quality. So by waiting a little bit, I can often read less words while still being informed.
But I probably spend much more time on books, mostly in mornings and evenings, because I prefer books in general. However, I read fictions most of the time. It's probably not what you have in mind, and it isn't really comparable to articles.
I make a zine called https://WaldenPond.press that I get delivered once a month. Then I leave my phone inside and read for 20 minutes or so on the balcony while I have a coffee in the morning.
It doesn't sound like much, but I'm consistently getting through the 4 hour edition in about 2 weeks. Then I switch to just reading my fiction book in the morning as well as at night.
Are you reading for pleasure, or for study?
If for study, you can save a lot of time by scanning the text, contents, and index for what's relevant to you, and only reading those parts (or at least reading them first). For articles you can usually just read the middle half, ignoring the introduction and conclusion.
If for pleasure, you're out of luck. You'll never read everything you'll want to read in one lifetime. You can maximize the value of your limited time by casting off any sense of obligation you may have to books you aren't getting value from. If a book isn't justifying itself after an hour, or 50 pages, or whatever, toss it out and find something else. Life is too short to slog through garbage.
when i used pocket a few years ago i found that it was too easy add an article if I had the browser extension installed so i removed that and only added articles by going to the website, which meant i would usually think a bit more about whether I really wanted to read it or not.
ive just bought an android eink tablet and im going to start saving articles using a browser extension to save the article as epub or text, and then use syncthing to sync it to the tablet and read them there.
another thing that might help is to use an rss reader since you won't see a sidebar of other articles like you would on a website that might distract you
Do you have any recommendation on such an extension? I've been using EpubPress[0], but it doesn't always make a great job (e.g. missing important images and still weighing many MBs)
[0] https://epub.press/
In practice, I read more articles day to day, but I read more book when I travel, because I dedicate more time to reading. I love to sip a beer and read a book in distant places.
I might cut Netflix time for reading, but articles are kind of a necessity to keep up to date.