Do you read?
I enjoy reading. I have actually devised a time table to organise all of my activities and reading takes most of the time (although not easy to stick to it).
I was wondering though if you read and by read I mean books. If so what are you currently reading and why? What is your most favourite book and why? How many books would you estimate you read a month and finally do you think all this reading is worth it, would it not be better if you spent your time doing something else and why?
Now I know that's a lot of question, I am not doing a study or anything, I am just curious to know what you guys (I assume slightly more intellectually curious that most) think about engaging in reading.
104 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 396 ms ] threadI can't think of any better activity to spend my time on than reading. Eloquence in writing and speaking is built partially from reading, reading can make great practice for formal reasoning, it helps me think of creative solutions. So much so that often, when I'm stuck, I will sit down and read a couple of pages, maybe a chapter, before going back to what I was working on.
I find it necessary to have books covering a wide range of topics - even those I have no practical use for - to act as a sort of "mental compost" to inspire me in my usual pursuits. I find that books on art, architecture, graphic design, medicine, and fashion all help me be more creative in other disciplines. This also goes for magazines. I'm no yuppie, but I subscribe to both Wallpaper and Monocle, simply for the inspiration.
I think there are two types of reading. The first type is conversational or fun reading. It's like having a dialog with the author. The second is structured reading, where the goal is information transfer at the expense of readability. It's great when you can get a book that does both, but the trick is to be able to make yourself read the second type when the information is worth getting.
So the books I have open right now are "Expert F#", "Getting past Ok" (recommended by another HN'er). "Practical ML", and "When Genius Failed"
I'm also watching a series of college lectures on the history and evolution of spoken language -- very interesting!
I read 2-4 books a month. It's definitely worth it to me. Many times consulting is just being able to consume and process information that most people don't have time for. That means a lot of reading. So while everybody else is watching football or dancing with the stars, I'm either working on startup stuff or learning.
The current one is the evolution of language in general, but, of course, the audience is assumed to be English-speaking (he does use many other languages as examples however) http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/CourseDescLong2.aspx?cid=1600
Enjoy!
I used to feel honor-bound to finish any book I started, but now I'm smarter than that. Life is too short to keep slogging through something that doesn't interest me.
Tyler Cowen http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/12...
The book gets added to my to-read list if:
* it has received a a good recommendation from someone I respect
* the author has a good interview on a program such as KQED's Forum or NPR's To the Best of Our Knowledge
* has generally good reviews on amazon.com
The more criteria it matches, the higher it sits in my list.
I really wish I could bring myself to sit down and read, but if its not in my feed reader (or Hacker News), then I'm probably not going to read it.
I've always had quite a short attention span and when I sit down, open a book and start reading, within five minutes I'm thinking of everything else I could be doing instead of sitting there doing virtually nothing.
Don't get me wrong -- I don't consider reading to be doing nothing, but it just feels that way while I'm doing it... so I have to stop and go do something else.
I have countless programming books and a lot of Terry Pratchett Discworld novels... and when I can get over my attention span, I'll hopefully sit down and read.
Current reading list: Christianity and Anarchy Jacques Ellul The Gulag Archipelago Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Third Ways Allan Carlson
My reading time seems to come in fits. Some days I won't pick up a book, and others I'll read for several hours. As for my favorites:
The Town and the City Jack Kerouac The Death of Adam Marilynne Robinson The Presence of the Kingdom Jacques Ellul
But it is worth it. Science fiction authors and computer scientists (lots of overlap there) seem to be only people on Earth that have zero respect for bullshit. Ideologically, those are the people who raised me. One of the ways in which I've been very lucky is that I have pursued very few blind alleys compared to most people. I can go back to the material I consumed at a young age and not shake my head in disapproval at my younger self as many other people seem to do. My life has largely been a continuous iterative process of ever better approximations of reality with no restarts (so far, i might still decide to live in the mountains and contemplate the pebble).
I call bullshit on that statement and point you in the direction of a certain L Ron Hubbard.
I am reading two books at the moment though - Iain M Bank's latest - Matter, and Dennet's Darwin's Dangerous Idea
Do I recommend it? Yes, but not for everyone. The preface itself is one of the heaviest essays on theology/philosophy out there, but the whole book is crammed with brilliant ideas/wisdom and is a masterpiece of literature (but it's heavy and the story moves fairly slowly).
Something lighter along those lines would be Narziss & Goldmund, by Herman Hesse - also heavy-weight, contemporary and compatriot to Thomas Mann, but capable of a lighter style!
But yeah, I love to read (and not just German literature... those are just the examples that spring to mind right now out of the countless ocean).
To answer your other questions...
What is your most favourite book and why?
What's your favourite movie? If you read any significant number of books, naming a single favourite is impossible - unthinkable, even.
How many books would you estimate you read a month?
It really depends on the books and the time of my life... sometimes I've finished a book in 3 days, but other times it's taken me months to get through a single book (such as the Thomas Mann brick I'm currently reading).
do you think all this reading is worth it?
I think life would be pointless without it. At the very least, it would reduce my mental freedom to not read books. I made an argument for that on my blog: http://inter-sections.net/2007/12/13/sapir-whorf-books-and-y...
would it not be better if you spent your time doing something else and why?
It really depends on what you're reading. If you spend your time reading Dragonlance novels (I've done that, it's nothing to be ashamed of, so long as it's a phase that passes), then yeah, you could probably do something better with your time. But books are still far and away the deepest and most fruitful repository of human wisdom that we have available to us. Sure, you can learn all you can learn from books, from your own life. But you'd be a fool not to climb on the shoulders of those giants who have come before us if all it takes is a few hours of comfortable, enjoyable time with a good book.
;-)
(thanks for the tip, I'll try and peep the preface at least)
As for Joseph, a word of encouragement: the further you get into it, the more the story starts to come together and pick up pace. The first 300 pages or so, it feels like you're reading random shreds of a story... but keep faith, it's all packed with mental wealth and well worth it!
You might like Eco's "The Name of the Rose" since you seem to be into really good fiction set in Medieval Europe ;-)
I still need to read his other book, the Pendulum...
I both read and buy a lot of books. Infact, most of my funny money goes on books, as I go through them fast. I have a reading speed of around 6 ppm for fiction and 3-4ppm for non-fiction.
$100 of books barely lasts a few days :(
You should get your books at the library. Its much cheaper and then you give it back and somebody else gets to read it. Far fewer dead trees and moving is infinitely easier.
I tend to read a sentence or paragraph at a time.
I always find a lot of great PDF books but it's hard to read them on the PC. I really want a Kindle, but its price range is too much for me just yet.
Privately, I call it procrastination. It has plenty of good side effects. Without reading, I would never come up with the list of silly ideas I have per day; some of which pay off for the rest in excess.
If I was to buy every book I read, I'd be broke. "Public libraries"--in its most extended meaning--are the best idea ever.
One common excuse for fiction reading is to suggest you learn passive facts about the setting as you progress pleasantly through the story, but that's not a particularly strong argument in favor or reading fiction. Sure I could pick up a book about Austen-era England or I could read an Austen novel and get a slightly inferior product education wise with a nice romantic chaser.
That's not what I'm talking about. Specifically I think fiction is a way to learn though experience vicariously, and I think there are some things learned best and perhaps only that way.
For example I could read a terse description of objectivism or I could read a Rand novel and walk a moment in the shoes of her characters. I would argue that the chance of fundamentally understanding what her philosophy is about through channel one is very low, although it takes a lot less time.
Another example: I could say "Sentience is not mutually inclusive or exclusive of understanding" or alternatively read Speaker for the Dead. "Morality resides entirely with intent rather than result" or read Ender's Game. "What is self?" or read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
The deepest and perhaps most important topics can best be addressed this way. Regardless of how you feel about the historical accuracy of the Bible or Qur'an, certainly someone found it valuable to tell stories and parables to covey abstract concepts.
To top it off, I read because it's fun. Why does everything have to have some Franklinesque color of self-improvement?
nice quip, until followed to its logical conclusion ;-)
EDIT: Ok, not all, just the ones in English. ;-)
And a further EDIT: all three of those books are about "Art" more or less. I can't see how someone who read those books can't read fiction. So I'm guessing you missed "only."
This doesn't mean that fiction is useless for learning about the world. It just means that fiction does not contain the tools necessary to decide if something is true (or accurate, or possible). Fiction may spark an idea or make an argument, but you must go outside of fiction to see if those ideas have merit.
Plus, and this is often ignored today, big pictures are not entirely mutually exclusive. To use a comp sci analogy let's look at search algorithms:
Use cases are more similar to deterministic partial solution searches (backtracking depth first search, breadth first search) for which the more interesting problems are intractable. Additionally, such search algorithms are very self contained, and it is usually quite difficult to combine them, making these algorithms a one time tool.
On the other hand, big pictures are more similar to stochastic solution spaces searches, which won't get you the best solution, but they'll get you a pretty good one much, much more quickly. And since solution space searches all interface with the same space, they can be mixed and matched depending on what is most useful for the problem domain. For example, with genetic algorithms, once you can make your problem domain fit a standard GA representation, the whole of GA theory can be applied.
Aldous Huxley, for instance, both in his fiction and non-fiction, and I see no great gap between them other than the mechanisms employed, has profoundly shaped my thought with his writing.
That's why my two favorite startup books are High Stakes No Prisoners and Founders at Work.
At the moment I am reading The Black Swan by Nasim Nicholas Taleb. In the fiction category I last read Haruka Murakami's (hope I spelled it right) After Dark.
Also, anything by Murakami is worth reading.
I must have missed something. To me the premise seems like something you could communicate and grasp in like 5 minutes or so.
Next up is Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky.
I'm also reading GEB, The Interpreter of Maladies, and Confederacy of Dunces, but, really, I'm reading IJ.
I usually read something to help me further my knowledge base, right now that means a lot of teamwork and business books. I usually read on the Kindle, highly recommended, it makes airplane travel a godsend.
My favorite book is definitely Ender's Game. The psychological twists and turns in that book (plus a very cool concept and game) makes it mesmerizing. Once I start it, I can never put it down until I finish.
I read about 2 books a month, all books are worth reading, everyone has something valuable to share. You just need to skim through the fluff.
I'm reading Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor, because O'Connor is wicked and funny. Favorite book? As others have pointed out, this is a ridiculous question -- my favorite kind! Some books I love: Lolita, As I Lay Dying, The Ghost Writer, Goodbye, Columbus, Blood Meridian, Anna Karenina, Where I'm Calling From, Huck Finn, Dubliners and on and on. I read mostly literary novels, but I read fairly widely -- genre stuff (skiffy, crime), history, philosophy, pop science, whatever's good. I average around 1 book per week, but I read in jags and sometimes go a couple of weeks without reading anything but blogs and news.
I'm sure there are any number of studies that will show the benefit of reading, but I much prefer to classify books with whiskey and cigarettes. How do you measure the utility of whiskey and cigarettes? I like the Romantic idea that books are bad for you. You know, the kind of thing that destroyed Emma Bovary and robbed Señor Quixote of his sanity. Maybe I just need to manufacture a vice. I don't like cigarettes, and a beer (and a book) after the kids are in bed is about all I can handle these days.
Definitely worth it. Probably worth it even in purely financial terms since some of what I read is job-related, but the main reason is that I (1) enjoy reading and (2) have omniscience as a primary goal in life.
I usually have several books on the go at once. The two I had open most recently are Chris McManus's "Left hand, right hand" (a book about asymmetry, especially in human beings; recommended) and Peter Winkler's "Mathematical mind-benders" (a selection of mathematical puzzles ranging from tricky high-school level to harder-than-IMO; highly recommended to those who like such things).
just in time to get a kick out of the "brave new obamian world" video