3 ms·

So you "hacked" novel reading. I think one more hack is stop reading a book you know is not worth the time. It's a hard habit for me, but I've finally realized

So you "hacked" novel reading. I think one more hack is stop reading a book you know is not worth the time. It's a hard habit for me, but I've finally realized there are too many great books out there to waste time on ones that aren't. Put the book down, it's OK.

shanusmagnus 10y ago
It's funny how abundance has changed reading, vs. scarcity. There used to be this implicit assumption that if it got published, it was worth reading (with a few caveats), so you were willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the piece, really engage with it, wait for the payoff. A lot of fiction demanded that approach. Now I, like you, am willing to give up on things. I demand proof that you have something to offer before I'm willing to invest in the relationship with a book. Only very rarely do I violate this practice -- if something gets a ton of a buzz I might push through when otherwise I'd quit. I wonder if we're better or worse off. Certainly we're different readers now, and probably writers.
- rpgmaker 10y ago
  There's also the fact that we demand way more from our fiction now (or maybe not so much if you look at the bestsellers of the past decade). Back in the day people got exposed to very few new stories in their lifetime, most of them were probably part of the folklore and some from books but now it's the other way around: thanks to the multimedia landscape it's very difficult to find a storyline pattern that you haven't already seen somewhere else (it can be a movie or even another book). The best books are way more than this but I believe that this is the reason why some of the "classics" are found to be profoundly boring by today's standards. They were edgy and original back in the day but by the time you're 30 you have been exposed to most (if not all) patterns and those books become boring.
rpgmaker 10y ago
> I think one more hack is stop reading a book you know is not worth the time. It's a hard habit for me, but I've finally realized there are too many great books out there to waste time on ones that aren't. Put the book down, it's OK. I'm in exactly the same situation and do the same thing. There's nothing that reminds me more of my mortality than looking at my (digital) library of books that I have yet to read. It's obvious now that unless I make it very big I won't ever have the time to read all of them so it's very important that I do not waste time reading books that aren't worth it (technical books are mostly exempted from this though). Like you say it's a hard habit but it's the most efficient thing you can do since time is such a scarce commodity and books are dime a dozen these days.

shanusmagnus 10y ago

It's funny how abundance has changed reading, vs. scarcity. There used to be this implicit assumption that if it got published, it was worth reading (with a few caveats), so you were willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the piece, really engage with it, wait for the payoff. A lot of fiction demanded that approach. Now I, like you, am willing to give up on things. I demand proof that you have something to offer before I'm willing to invest in the relationship with a book. Only very rarely do I violate this practice -- if something gets a ton of a buzz I might push through when otherwise I'd quit. I wonder if we're better or worse off. Certainly we're different readers now, and probably writers.

rpgmaker 10y ago
There's also the fact that we demand way more from our fiction now (or maybe not so much if you look at the bestsellers of the past decade). Back in the day people got exposed to very few new stories in their lifetime, most of them were probably part of the folklore and some from books but now it's the other way around: thanks to the multimedia landscape it's very difficult to find a storyline pattern that you haven't already seen somewhere else (it can be a movie or even another book). The best books are way more than this but I believe that this is the reason why some of the "classics" are found to be profoundly boring by today's standards. They were edgy and original back in the day but by the time you're 30 you have been exposed to most (if not all) patterns and those books become boring.

rpgmaker 10y ago

> I think one more hack is stop reading a book you know is not worth the time. It's a hard habit for me, but I've finally realized there are too many great books out there to waste time on ones that aren't. Put the book down, it's OK. I'm in exactly the same situation and do the same thing. There's nothing that reminds me more of my mortality than looking at my (digital) library of books that I have yet to read. It's obvious now that unless I make it very big I won't ever have the time to read all of them so it's very important that I do not waste time reading books that aren't worth it (technical books are mostly exempted from this though). Like you say it's a hard habit but it's the most efficient thing you can do since time is such a scarce commodity and books are dime a dozen these days.