Well I heard it said from Joyce experts that reading Finnegans Wake and Ulysses, which was intended to be read out loud, is an important part to unlock some of the meanings.
I've just been catching up with Corey Olsen's exploration of Lord of the Rings, and he makes the same point regarding Tolkien: the man thought in alliterative prose, and there are some places where it stands out even to the eye, but you can catch a lot more of the alliteration by reading passages out loud.
The example that brought it up was towards the end of the attempt to climb the Redhorn: "Soon they all stood once more on the flat shelf at the head of the steep slope where they had felt the first flakes of snow the night before." (The F in 'before' might not line up with the previous F's unless you've been reading out loud.)
To be honest the overwhelming impression I get from this author is that he's just massively up his own arse. I've read plenty of the books he name drops. I've spent an incredibly slow summer reading The Brothers Karazamov. But if you think that reading a few books on a topic has gotten you to the point where you "match up with professors at Harvard or Oxford" you just don't understand the depth of knowledge you get from devoting your life to studying one specific area of study in depth. It's important he lets you know he's amazingly smart and well read, but it's also important that you know he doesn't do this for any lower moral imperatives such as looking smart, no it's important to know that he does it for the pure pleasure. He takes no pride in quoting Ovid in the original latin, that's just a silly side-effect of his pure path.
To learn he's an American Jazz critic makes perfect sense, it's almost exactly who you would expect to be this pretentious.
I was about to say the same thing: this just came across as snobbery, especially when he tells you that classroom learning is worthless.
So worthless, yet he couldn't miss the opportunity to brag about his top-tier college education.
He's just saying that because any pleb can go to class, study, and get an A. Only snobby smartypants people can read an excessive number of books and reach "nirvana."
Having a conversation about problems in a subject space or field of work does not require years of specialization. A handful of books does suffice.
Our world leaders and billionaires have these conversations everyday. Many are well read.
If you're talking about having conversations in the same light as a Solvay Conference, sure. The context I got from the article is that they are talking about the former, not the latter.
I’ve always much preferred Dana of the two Gioia brothers, and mostly for this reason. Ted is a great jazz critic and historian, but his constant sense of being impressed with himself is just too much. I had a friend in grad school—an exceptionally good amateur historian of music himself—who got into a fight with Ted about music on Ted’s Facebook page. My friend offered a pretty cogent and insightful defense of popular music, to which Ted responded with disdainful bloviating. Ted is the kind of elitist who is is adamant that he isn’t one—as though his background somehow precludes it. (Nevermind that background, while beginning in a working-class milieu, also includes two degrees from Stanford, a degree from Oxford, and a stint at McKinsey.)
To own my own biases: nothing interesting has happened in jazz for at least a half century. I have as much use for a jazz critic as I do for a telegraph operator. (All of the really good shit in jazz is live, not on record, anyway.)
Not to mention the fact that I have about zero fucks to spare for a critic who isn't a musician.
Saying that you could have meaningful conversations with experts I would interpret as that the method works, and experts probably like talking about their domain as well with hobbyists even if theres an air of naive showmanship from the hobbyist. Some slight pretension is better than some saintly masochism where nothing happens at all from time and effort, as opposed to sharing cool stuff that people might otherwise not be motivated to look into if not for the sense of joy that a slight pretension can give socially as initial motivation. Sure earnestness is better but ego is convincing since many of us want to be just as confident, for a hobbyist to other hobbyist I give it a pass. If we were afraid of looking pretentious all the time we would share less beautiful experiences
> To learn he's an American Jazz critic makes perfect sense, it's almost exactly who you would expect to be this pretentious.
TFA:
"Most young people listen to new music and only become less interested in the current hits when they get older"
"I did the exact opposite. I learned the tradition and heritage first, and only then felt I had the proper perspective for the current day."
"I wasn’t quite as extreme in my music listening habits, but I still focused primarily on the tradition when I was learning how to be a pianist and critic. Today I’m much more focused on new music."
All this reading and it's right over his head his "most people x when it comes to music, i am not them" deeply contrasts proceeding to devote your life to "old people music." (sorry jazz fans)
Strangely, he is the brother of Dana Gioai, who I find to be absolutely lovely and not pretentious. He was the poet laureate of California, and ran the national endowment for the arts and is a pleasure to listen to:
https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/dana-gioia/
A very Nietzsche approach to ego-driven writing. I don't disagree with the points the author makes. I just disagree with the way he makes them like you do.
I’d be incredibly surprised if this smug attitude would last someone til their deathbed. I truly don’t understand how when faced with your own mortality you wouldn’t suddenly see through your own BS and realised you’ve dedicated this much time to manicuring your public image in an attempt to impress other over-educated faux-intellectuals.
It’s a great example of there being These Sorts Of People in all communities, classes, cultures, etc. it’s why I’ve gotta roll my eyes when someone implies that people that write software for a living are somehow impartial, infallible, logical, gods amongst men. We’ve got all this same shit going on in our professional community, just like everyone else. Remember Kenneth Reitz? How about the hoards of self-professed YouTube educators? Or those few greybeard hackers that rose to and maintain their notoriety pretty much entirely because they were in Berkeley in the ‘80s or whatever. We just fall for it when people dress down and wear glasses or whatever.
To add to this sentiment: I increasingly find the idea of "reading a book" (in the sense of "completing a book") when talking about serious works of literature, philosophy (or even technical books) somewhat nonsensical.
In technical books people often criticize recommendations of TAOCP or SCIP because "nobody really reads those", however this misses the point that books of this nature are perpetual projects for the reader. I have moved my eyes over every word in SCIP, done ~20% of the exercises, but would still say I haven't "read it" in the sense of completing it.
This is even more true for works of philosophy. I would be far more impressed with someone saying that had spent the last 3 years working through the first section of Spinoza's Ethics (a fairly lean volume) than someone who claims to have read Heidegger's Being and Time over a break.
I was talking to someone recently who remarked that it's embarrassing to see a bookshelf covered with bookmarks visibly only part way through the text, implying the reader has never "completed" the work. I found this view somewhat shocking as the older I get the more I realize you never finish a good book.
> To learn he's an American Jazz critic makes perfect sense, it's almost exactly who you would expect to be this pretentious.
As someone who's not into jazz critique, i've only ever seen "I read books on topic X so I'm an expert now" levels of hubris from developers. Another thread on the frontpage right now has people discussing how they don't need a therapist because they can just read therapy textbooks!
How I do wish the site owner would get rid of that newsletter signup modal. It's right up there with slow site speed in terms of reasons I'll leave a page.
If tapping the escape key to say you don't want to be on their mailing list is a major reason to not finish reading an essay, perhaps you aren't the target audience.
For some time I’ve been consuming a lot of material on certain subjects I am interested in. Daily commentary, regular blogs, every interview a few people that I follow give, various background info related, etc. I’ve been doing it for over a year, often more than 3-4 hours per day. I’ve become quite informed, sure. But I have to admit that I don’t recall the contents of the information that I consumed all that well. Certainly not well enough to debate someone on the topic.
Perhaps this is a limitation of my own brain physiology, or deficiencies in the approach I’ve taken to consuming the information, and others would have faired better in my place. But this experience has made me seriously doubt the effectiveness of such consumption if the goal is to learn, as the OP advocates.
Thankfully that wasn’t necessarily a goal for me personally, I was just satisfying my interest in the subject I care deeply about.
You might surprise yourself. The familiarity with a subject and its lingo can do wonders for complete understanding. A deliberate and focused study session on your subject will put a lot of pieces together. Sometimes all you need to know is what questions to ask.
Yes your physiology is limited and you need to augment your functionality with some kind of remembering machine. Like a notebook, or like some kind of app on your phone. Or a spreadsheet. Or a SQLite DB. Basically I think if you take notes on important details and then have some system for organizing and looking them up, that might be very helpful. Like I found a part of a book that explains how to do logical synthesis and I bookmarked it, so I can keep going back to reread it every now and then in order to do stuff.
> Like I found a part of a book that explains how to do logical synthesis and I bookmarked it, so I can keep going back to reread it every now and then in order to do stuff.
What’s the book?
I’ve never developed a good system for note-taking while I read, apart from marking up books and making marginal notes, which can be somewhat helpful. But I never developed the discipline of turning those into useful notes. My memory, which has never been good, has naturally gotten worse as I’ve gotten older and more sleep-deprived, so I now feel like most of my reading is retained for about twenty minutes after I’ve read something.
This exactly. There's an old-school method called Zettelkasten, which you can apply to modern computing systems like Org Roam or similar "databases" if you so choose.
> Certainly not well enough to debate someone on the topic.
This part in particular is tricky, because debate is a specialized skill of its own, and most people who you might see publicly debate others on a given topic aren't (necessarily) experts in the topic, they're experts in debating it.
Story time: one example of how that forms is being a person with strongly held minority beliefs. I have had good friends who were the lone very conservative person among a university left-leaning crowd, or on the other side an avowed Maoist communist among again, just normal vaguely left-of-centre folks. Both of those people got into an argument every single day defending their basic outlooks on life; sometimes 10 arguments in a day. They built up a repertoire of points and phrases, heard the same objections and accusations over and over, and developed strategies over time to handle each of these.
In reality they each became experts at debating novices more than true debate experts, but you can see how their type of knowledge, and how it lived in their brains was totally different from reading a lot of books about the topics they knew about, and different from just developing expertise in those topics.
One thing that struck me in conversations with these people over time is that they sometimes came to not even really believe a fallback phrase they had developed and would use often, because they came to learn enough nuance to know how it was a flawed take, but they knew it would stop a drive-by-arguer in their tracks. It could make the driver-by realize they didn't know all the details and second-guess themselves, even when the actual details sometimes weren't so bad for them. But at that point, they've lost the debate, and the expert moves on.
Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts on debate in such a thorough fashion. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately and my conclusions fall along the same lines as yours, but its definitely interesting to hear someone confirm your own thinking. I agree, ability to skillfully and convincingly argue your point of view is not purely dictated by the depth of ones knowledge of the subject, though in my impression is that when the debater possesses such knowledge it often shows, especially if you are a somewhat informed onlooker.
A tangential point that comes to mind, is that I found that it takes quite a bit of knowledge in the first place to even discover and separate people to follow that bring informed thoughts and original conclusions on the subject from the artful bullshitters. And its frequently the latter that are more prominent at the first glance and it takes time to realize who you are dealing with.
As a person who reads a lot of books (1 book every 1-3 weeks depending on its length) I can say most of them are crap garbage and I throw them in the garbage when I'm finished with them. A lot of murder mysteries. I don't know why so many authors write murder mysteries. It's so hard to make a mystery compelling in a book format, because I know no matter how opaque or confusing things are in the beginning, if I just keep reading eventually everything will be explained. Even if the explanation doesn't make sense, there will be an explanation, eventually.
Maybe I should just stop reading random books. Follow Oprah's book club or the commandant's reading list or something like that.
Well that seems like a waste. Why not give them to your local second-hand shop, put them up to pick up for free on your local small ads website, donate them to a library, give away to friend, or anything besides throwing them in the garbage?!
If you wanted to read it, surely someone else wants to as well. Then they can see for themselves that it's crap, without needing to have a new book produced for that.
> Maybe I should just stop reading random books
Sounds like a good idea if the trash can is your star rating for a significant fraction of them
I understand there is a market for these books. There has to be for someone to bother writing hundreds of pages and then for someone else to invest in editing and publishing and making cover art. That's why I'm not naming specific names, because I know there are a lot of people involved in making these things and I'm genuinely happy for them. I already buy these books from goodwill but I guess I should just give them back on the off chance that this stuff actually connects with someone.
Avid mystery (and romance) readers just burn through books. A lot of them aren't that great, but they're designed to pass the time, not stand out as works of art. So that's why there are so many of them, and why they're often kind of crap. Like sitcoms, or TV police procedurals. The standards aren't that high because people just want something that's pretty okay in a familiar style.
Of course there are writers who write in any genre and produce really great stuff, but you're not likely to find them by picking books at random from Goodwill, by Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is crap) alone.
I don't hate all murder mysteries. It's more specifically books with really bad pacing, boring characters driving boring plots. That can happen in any book really. And those kinds of things don't really come out until I get past the first few chapters and at that point I just want to see how awful things can get before the end. A book can still be entertaining even if I don't like it.
How do people physically read this much? How comfortable/supportive is that chair?
The only way I've been able to sustain reading for more than a half hour without adverse postural effects is to lie on my side with an e-reader (+ pop-socket). In fact it's the primary reason I read mostly on Kindle - to assume this posture.
I've even gone as far as building a contraption which lets me lie flat underneath it, and read hand-free. The issue with both methods of lying down to read is of course that I fall asleep :) (so much so that I keep a book on my nightstand as a sleep aid).
Otherwise, reading feels worse than working at a computer. I'm hunched over, similar to using a phone. Or I'm holding the book up a little higher and hold that tension in my arms/shoulders/neck.
Serious advice: strengthen your core & hips. Your posture is largely affected by your muscles.
This makes even sitting at your computer for hours on end more bearable and you'll have less back/neck pain overall - nevermind all the other positive effects of working out
For many, long books are not read in comfortable/perfect environments, they just read wherever they are for whatever time they have. In the train, at the doctor, while waiting for your meal to cook etc. In that respect having a commute helps tremendously.
If you feel staying still doesn't help, moving around (or even walking around) should be fine.
What about a position or chair that lets you lean back a little (convex) instead of slouch forward (concave)? I've always felt much better in that position than slouching forward. Though my ideal position is laying belly down on the floor (insane). I've also been known to pace circles on my patio while reading.
I personally moved to audiobooks. It's slower, but made up for the fact that I can go for a walk, cook, clean the house, so it's much more time effective than sitting down to read for extended periods.
Interesting, I find audiobooks faster end-to-end as I don't re-read pages again and again. But it means i have to focus more, so I absolutely can't walk/cook/clean at the same time!
I couldn't focus on audiobooks for a long time so I avoided them for years.
At some point I started listening to Youtube scary stories at night to wind down while cooking or running since it wasn't a big deal to miss out. And then I realized I could eventually maintain full concentration while multitasking and gave audiobooks another try successfully.
So maybe it's a muscle you have to exercise for some of us.
I don't believe sheer reading volume is the key here. I speak from some experience.
A long, long time ago, I did a degree in English literature. This was a bad name for it as a lot of it wasn't English. Or literature for that matter. But over the course of three years I must have read in the order of 300 seriously sized books / texts and a bunch of other secondary material.
Only a handful of memories stand out, out of a small swimming pool of ink. The Greek tragedies, some 20th century drama, and Chaucer.
What I really memorised though was what I _wrote_. My _essays_ are still easy to recall: parentheses in Thomas More; control of space in Ben Jonson; body integrity in Greek tragedy. I can still remember them 15 years on.
I didn't really like my English degree, and I probably shouldn't have done it, but I did gain a lot through the process of writing. I synthesised knowledge and developed my skill for spotting patterns. I forced myself to write original observations week in week out. I made myself start with an intimidating blank page and end with an artefact I could call my own.
(These things became part of my make-up as a software engineer, which is a job that rewards those willing to start from blank pages)
My advice is to match time spent reading with time spent writing. There's a reason why traditional pedagogy entails writing essays, not just sheer volume of reading. You are as smart as what you can write, not what books are on your shelf.
Just a tangent, but there are also a lot of niches in software engineering that reward those willing to start from pages filled with millions of lines of code written by other people ;-)
> There's a reason why traditional pedagogy entails writing essays, not just sheer volume of reading.
I shudder to think what AI is doing for today’s students. They don’t have to struggle thinking about _what_ to write anymore, and that struggle is where the growth and learning happen.
To second your path, the best software engineers are also good writers who can communicate their plans over writing. Your English degree probably helped you as much as any computer science degree.
Agreed. Reading is an active process, in interplay with your life experience, your worldview, and ideally, your character. You can go broad with extensive reading, and simply become well-read. But I find those who go deep, and eventually focus on a single book or author, far more impressive.
Even for a blogger, this guy uses the pronoun "I" way too much and his sentence structure is too simplistic to be as well read as he claims. Ever hear of a semicolon? Also, who reads Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, Heidegger's Being & Time, and the Egyptian Book of the Dead and doesn't take any notes?
Ted's booklist/review websites have been my go-to for "I need something to read" for years now. He appears to not be maintaining them and some of the domains have expired, but here's "The New Canon" (fiction since 1985):
The top comment here is about him giving the impression of being "massively up his own arse." Maybe -- but I think his attempts to create something useful for others, which I have found genuinely useful, outweighs that. What does it say that he's letting those attempts link-rot and writing on substack instead now?
I don't know. I just know he has good taste in literature.
A lot of commenters are saying this is cringe or pretentious, and sure, it is a bit, but the advice provided here is also truthful. I don't write or talk about my reading habits when I was younger, nor am I as dedicated to it at my current age as the OP is, but the idea of taking your time, reading old classics, and giving deep thought (really time to have deep thought) to the ideas within helping to expand your mind and your conception of the universe is definitely true. I used to read so obsessively that one of the punishments used for me was to take away my books, similar to how people take away phones from teenagers now.
If I look at my own life and career, as a college dropout who nevertheless attended for four years, both in my professional and my personal life most of what I know I either learned from books or from other people directly (or sometimes via YouTube). I don't see it as elitist for the OP to point out his prestigious education when making this point as some other commenters do, but rather intended to reinforce that even if you have the world's best college education it pales in comparison to what you can learn by simply giving yourself the space and time to think and reading through the source material upon which such an education would be based in some way, anyhow. To a large degree, what he's describing trying to attempt was the entire point of a classical liberal arts education, but our current institutions largely fail to actually provide such an education anymore.
What's so pretentious, ultimately, about sharing a methodology and the benefits of that methodology, when the source material is largely available to anyone for free or minimal cost via the Internet and their local library? I feel like it should be refreshing to know that there is still deep value in exploring the world through the written word without needing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on schooling. It's essentially the same thing that was said in the famous quote from Good Will Hunting: “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.”
So much of the writing about reading encourages people to use reading as a social activity, reading only what's new and popular, or to read quickly thinking that it's the volumes on your shelf that matter, this article is a somewhat refreshing take by making the very truthful point that you should take your time, read things that are old but important enough that people still remember them, and write about what you read and your observations.
For me, at least, it's less about the reading. I always used to be a big reader like you describe - I had exactly the same experiences having my books being taken away from me for misbehaving, or even just reading too late at night - so I'm fully on board with the idea that people should read more, and challenge themselves to read new and different things.
For me, it's more the idea that reading is going to turn your life around somehow, or that just by reading the right classics you can make yourself a better person. That feels like a self-justification for pretention more than anything else - the literary equivalent of the "holds up spork" meme where you make something you're interested in into an entire character trait.
I think the idea of reading replacing an entire liberal arts education is also kind of laughable. I've done a lot of reading, and although my own formal education veered more towards engineering, I had friends who did the liberal arts properly. There's no real comparison between my casual reading of Dostoevsky ("a bit morose, wouldn't recommend") and someone who understands enough of his literary context that they can take his books apart and show you why everything is like it is. (That's not to say you can't learn these things as a lay person, just that there's a lot more to literary criticism and the wider liberal arts than just "go away and read".)
Why are people so mean here? according to his bio he’s an author in his late 60s. It’s his job. And he’s telling us not to follow this yourself right at the start.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadWell I heard it said from Joyce experts that reading Finnegans Wake and Ulysses, which was intended to be read out loud, is an important part to unlock some of the meanings.
The example that brought it up was towards the end of the attempt to climb the Redhorn: "Soon they all stood once more on the flat shelf at the head of the steep slope where they had felt the first flakes of snow the night before." (The F in 'before' might not line up with the previous F's unless you've been reading out loud.)
To learn he's an American Jazz critic makes perfect sense, it's almost exactly who you would expect to be this pretentious.
Love it!
So worthless, yet he couldn't miss the opportunity to brag about his top-tier college education.
He's just saying that because any pleb can go to class, study, and get an A. Only snobby smartypants people can read an excessive number of books and reach "nirvana."
But yeah, reading a book about a subject doesn't get you anywhere near the ballpark of professors in that subject from any university at all.
Am I missing something here?
Our world leaders and billionaires have these conversations everyday. Many are well read.
If you're talking about having conversations in the same light as a Solvay Conference, sure. The context I got from the article is that they are talking about the former, not the latter.
You're not alone in your thinking!
Not to mention the fact that I have about zero fucks to spare for a critic who isn't a musician.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Gioia
I mean, he's writing on Substack; I'm pretty sure that's a signup requirement for Substack.
But yeah. If you told me that this was, rather than someone's personal blog, a piece of first-person 'Frasier' fanfiction, I'd probably buy that.
One can argue that ±65% of blogging is first-person fan fiction.
TFA: "Most young people listen to new music and only become less interested in the current hits when they get older"
"I did the exact opposite. I learned the tradition and heritage first, and only then felt I had the proper perspective for the current day."
"I wasn’t quite as extreme in my music listening habits, but I still focused primarily on the tradition when I was learning how to be a pianist and critic. Today I’m much more focused on new music."
All this reading and it's right over his head his "most people x when it comes to music, i am not them" deeply contrasts proceeding to devote your life to "old people music." (sorry jazz fans)
It’s a great example of there being These Sorts Of People in all communities, classes, cultures, etc. it’s why I’ve gotta roll my eyes when someone implies that people that write software for a living are somehow impartial, infallible, logical, gods amongst men. We’ve got all this same shit going on in our professional community, just like everyone else. Remember Kenneth Reitz? How about the hoards of self-professed YouTube educators? Or those few greybeard hackers that rose to and maintain their notoriety pretty much entirely because they were in Berkeley in the ‘80s or whatever. We just fall for it when people dress down and wear glasses or whatever.
In technical books people often criticize recommendations of TAOCP or SCIP because "nobody really reads those", however this misses the point that books of this nature are perpetual projects for the reader. I have moved my eyes over every word in SCIP, done ~20% of the exercises, but would still say I haven't "read it" in the sense of completing it.
This is even more true for works of philosophy. I would be far more impressed with someone saying that had spent the last 3 years working through the first section of Spinoza's Ethics (a fairly lean volume) than someone who claims to have read Heidegger's Being and Time over a break.
I was talking to someone recently who remarked that it's embarrassing to see a bookshelf covered with bookmarks visibly only part way through the text, implying the reader has never "completed" the work. I found this view somewhat shocking as the older I get the more I realize you never finish a good book.
As someone who's not into jazz critique, i've only ever seen "I read books on topic X so I'm an expert now" levels of hubris from developers. Another thread on the frontpage right now has people discussing how they don't need a therapist because they can just read therapy textbooks!
Imagine the hubris.
lmao
Perhaps this is a limitation of my own brain physiology, or deficiencies in the approach I’ve taken to consuming the information, and others would have faired better in my place. But this experience has made me seriously doubt the effectiveness of such consumption if the goal is to learn, as the OP advocates.
Thankfully that wasn’t necessarily a goal for me personally, I was just satisfying my interest in the subject I care deeply about.
What’s the book?
I’ve never developed a good system for note-taking while I read, apart from marking up books and making marginal notes, which can be somewhat helpful. But I never developed the discipline of turning those into useful notes. My memory, which has never been good, has naturally gotten worse as I’ve gotten older and more sleep-deprived, so I now feel like most of my reading is retained for about twenty minutes after I’ve read something.
https://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Methods-Artificial-Intel...
I found my copy at Goodwill.
This part in particular is tricky, because debate is a specialized skill of its own, and most people who you might see publicly debate others on a given topic aren't (necessarily) experts in the topic, they're experts in debating it.
Story time: one example of how that forms is being a person with strongly held minority beliefs. I have had good friends who were the lone very conservative person among a university left-leaning crowd, or on the other side an avowed Maoist communist among again, just normal vaguely left-of-centre folks. Both of those people got into an argument every single day defending their basic outlooks on life; sometimes 10 arguments in a day. They built up a repertoire of points and phrases, heard the same objections and accusations over and over, and developed strategies over time to handle each of these.
In reality they each became experts at debating novices more than true debate experts, but you can see how their type of knowledge, and how it lived in their brains was totally different from reading a lot of books about the topics they knew about, and different from just developing expertise in those topics.
One thing that struck me in conversations with these people over time is that they sometimes came to not even really believe a fallback phrase they had developed and would use often, because they came to learn enough nuance to know how it was a flawed take, but they knew it would stop a drive-by-arguer in their tracks. It could make the driver-by realize they didn't know all the details and second-guess themselves, even when the actual details sometimes weren't so bad for them. But at that point, they've lost the debate, and the expert moves on.
A tangential point that comes to mind, is that I found that it takes quite a bit of knowledge in the first place to even discover and separate people to follow that bring informed thoughts and original conclusions on the subject from the artful bullshitters. And its frequently the latter that are more prominent at the first glance and it takes time to realize who you are dealing with.
Maybe I should just stop reading random books. Follow Oprah's book club or the commandant's reading list or something like that.
If you wanted to read it, surely someone else wants to as well. Then they can see for themselves that it's crap, without needing to have a new book produced for that.
> Maybe I should just stop reading random books
Sounds like a good idea if the trash can is your star rating for a significant fraction of them
Of course there are writers who write in any genre and produce really great stuff, but you're not likely to find them by picking books at random from Goodwill, by Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is crap) alone.
The only way I've been able to sustain reading for more than a half hour without adverse postural effects is to lie on my side with an e-reader (+ pop-socket). In fact it's the primary reason I read mostly on Kindle - to assume this posture.
I've even gone as far as building a contraption which lets me lie flat underneath it, and read hand-free. The issue with both methods of lying down to read is of course that I fall asleep :) (so much so that I keep a book on my nightstand as a sleep aid).
Otherwise, reading feels worse than working at a computer. I'm hunched over, similar to using a phone. Or I'm holding the book up a little higher and hold that tension in my arms/shoulders/neck.
This makes even sitting at your computer for hours on end more bearable and you'll have less back/neck pain overall - nevermind all the other positive effects of working out
If you feel staying still doesn't help, moving around (or even walking around) should be fine.
I personally moved to audiobooks. It's slower, but made up for the fact that I can go for a walk, cook, clean the house, so it's much more time effective than sitting down to read for extended periods.
At some point I started listening to Youtube scary stories at night to wind down while cooking or running since it wasn't a big deal to miss out. And then I realized I could eventually maintain full concentration while multitasking and gave audiobooks another try successfully.
So maybe it's a muscle you have to exercise for some of us.
(though not a bad one either)
A long, long time ago, I did a degree in English literature. This was a bad name for it as a lot of it wasn't English. Or literature for that matter. But over the course of three years I must have read in the order of 300 seriously sized books / texts and a bunch of other secondary material.
Only a handful of memories stand out, out of a small swimming pool of ink. The Greek tragedies, some 20th century drama, and Chaucer.
What I really memorised though was what I _wrote_. My _essays_ are still easy to recall: parentheses in Thomas More; control of space in Ben Jonson; body integrity in Greek tragedy. I can still remember them 15 years on.
I didn't really like my English degree, and I probably shouldn't have done it, but I did gain a lot through the process of writing. I synthesised knowledge and developed my skill for spotting patterns. I forced myself to write original observations week in week out. I made myself start with an intimidating blank page and end with an artefact I could call my own.
(These things became part of my make-up as a software engineer, which is a job that rewards those willing to start from blank pages)
My advice is to match time spent reading with time spent writing. There's a reason why traditional pedagogy entails writing essays, not just sheer volume of reading. You are as smart as what you can write, not what books are on your shelf.
I shudder to think what AI is doing for today’s students. They don’t have to struggle thinking about _what_ to write anymore, and that struggle is where the growth and learning happen.
To second your path, the best software engineers are also good writers who can communicate their plans over writing. Your English degree probably helped you as much as any computer science degree.
I tried a programme of taking notes every time I read a "serious" nonfiction book a few years ago and for me it sucked all the joy out of it.
Even when reading programming books I tend not to take notes – though I'll do practical exercises so that the skills stick.
https://www.thenewcanon.com
And here's an archive snapshot of the Conceptual Fiction (sci fi) one, which is now dead:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160305124258/http://conceptual...
The top comment here is about him giving the impression of being "massively up his own arse." Maybe -- but I think his attempts to create something useful for others, which I have found genuinely useful, outweighs that. What does it say that he's letting those attempts link-rot and writing on substack instead now?
I don't know. I just know he has good taste in literature.
If I look at my own life and career, as a college dropout who nevertheless attended for four years, both in my professional and my personal life most of what I know I either learned from books or from other people directly (or sometimes via YouTube). I don't see it as elitist for the OP to point out his prestigious education when making this point as some other commenters do, but rather intended to reinforce that even if you have the world's best college education it pales in comparison to what you can learn by simply giving yourself the space and time to think and reading through the source material upon which such an education would be based in some way, anyhow. To a large degree, what he's describing trying to attempt was the entire point of a classical liberal arts education, but our current institutions largely fail to actually provide such an education anymore.
What's so pretentious, ultimately, about sharing a methodology and the benefits of that methodology, when the source material is largely available to anyone for free or minimal cost via the Internet and their local library? I feel like it should be refreshing to know that there is still deep value in exploring the world through the written word without needing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on schooling. It's essentially the same thing that was said in the famous quote from Good Will Hunting: “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.”
So much of the writing about reading encourages people to use reading as a social activity, reading only what's new and popular, or to read quickly thinking that it's the volumes on your shelf that matter, this article is a somewhat refreshing take by making the very truthful point that you should take your time, read things that are old but important enough that people still remember them, and write about what you read and your observations.
For me, it's more the idea that reading is going to turn your life around somehow, or that just by reading the right classics you can make yourself a better person. That feels like a self-justification for pretention more than anything else - the literary equivalent of the "holds up spork" meme where you make something you're interested in into an entire character trait.
I think the idea of reading replacing an entire liberal arts education is also kind of laughable. I've done a lot of reading, and although my own formal education veered more towards engineering, I had friends who did the liberal arts properly. There's no real comparison between my casual reading of Dostoevsky ("a bit morose, wouldn't recommend") and someone who understands enough of his literary context that they can take his books apart and show you why everything is like it is. (That's not to say you can't learn these things as a lay person, just that there's a lot more to literary criticism and the wider liberal arts than just "go away and read".)
You'll never see all the places, or read all the books. But fortunately, not all are recommended.