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This article touches on, in my opinion, the 2 great problems with non-fiction reading nowadays: * Deciding which book to read next out of the seemingly infinit

This article touches on, in my opinion, the 2 great problems with non-fiction reading nowadays: * Deciding which book to read next out of the seemingly infinite decision space (which book is optimal?) * Reading books "well", such that you truly elevate your level of understanding of a topic to that of the author, and then remember what you've learned. Notably, I think "Read More Books", the title of the article, is more of a symptom. If people could choose the _right_ books and then read them satisfyingly enough to truly become smarter and wiser, reading would be such a great deal that no one would have the problem of needing to read "more". What's craziest is that these problems are the same ones readers faced centuries ago. Reading hasn't evolved at all! People still prefer reading physical books in the world of the internet and data science. And how do readers choose books? One-off recommendations from people that they may or may not trust. I think with technology we can do a lot better. Specifically, I've been hacking on solving the two aforementioned problems with books such that we can read and learn like it's really 2017. Would love advice/conversation with any reading-inclined HNers! I'm tristan@rekindled.io

gexla 9y ago
I think finding the topic is the harder issue. Or picking a topic among those you are interested in. If you are interested in a specific topic, then usually you can find discussions of "game changing" books in that topic. Or trace the "tree" of current books to earlier books in the topic. If you want to know what influenced an author, take a look at the sources the book cites. A quick Google search revealed a bunch of sites which offer search for book / pub citation info. Maybe that's a good place to start. An interesting service might be to take this a step further and add some sort of visualization for a given topic.
- tristanho 9y ago
  Interesting! For myself, I tend to already know what topics I care about, e.g Entrepreneurship, History of Computing, Stoicism, etc. These topics usually become quite apparent when I look at my goals in life. Can you explain more about how you decide on topics? As for the "game changing" books, I definitely agree! It seems that most areas seem to have those "seminal" books that most of the other books in the genre reference non-stop. One example that jumps out at me is Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, which seems to be referenced by every book I can get my hands on. The visualization of a tree is definitely interesting: I suppose the goal of it would to be able to find the roots.

gexla 9y ago

I think finding the topic is the harder issue. Or picking a topic among those you are interested in. If you are interested in a specific topic, then usually you can find discussions of "game changing" books in that topic. Or trace the "tree" of current books to earlier books in the topic. If you want to know what influenced an author, take a look at the sources the book cites. A quick Google search revealed a bunch of sites which offer search for book / pub citation info. Maybe that's a good place to start. An interesting service might be to take this a step further and add some sort of visualization for a given topic.

tristanho 9y ago
Interesting! For myself, I tend to already know what topics I care about, e.g Entrepreneurship, History of Computing, Stoicism, etc. These topics usually become quite apparent when I look at my goals in life. Can you explain more about how you decide on topics? As for the "game changing" books, I definitely agree! It seems that most areas seem to have those "seminal" books that most of the other books in the genre reference non-stop. One example that jumps out at me is Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, which seems to be referenced by every book I can get my hands on. The visualization of a tree is definitely interesting: I suppose the goal of it would to be able to find the roots.