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Just Read the Book Already
- CraneWorm 8y agojust don't post anything from slate, there is no way to opt-out from their tracking shit
- Bucephalus355 8y agoFor fiction I read e-books. However for all technical books, things like O’Reilly, No Starch, etc, I always buy physical. The decision to do that has very much 10x my learning. Even when it comes to long documentation (MySQL is an astounding 5,000+ pages) I’ll usually print out portions to cover if it’s reasonable. I don’t know why this has increased my learning so much. The best I can come up with is that memory is based on some kind of spatial geography + other stuff. As I’m working on something, like configuring a CentOS server to a lengthy CIS Security Benchmark, I can recall in books what the page looked like, where I was when I read it, the feel of the page, and the part of the text I underlined in pen. Very strange.
- ionised 8y agoI'm the same. I still buy textbooks to this day because I find it far easier to absorb technical information from that medium.
- Rotdhizon 8y agoIn my current job I have a lot of downtime, which means I can do whatever I want for a few hours a day. I try to read but I find it so difficult. I don't know what it is about reading ebooks but I can't hold my attention on them for more than a few minutes at a time. I have a few physical books in my desk that I can focus on very well, but they aren't the ones I need right now. Considering ebooks are typically half the cost of physical books (also that most ebooks can be obtained for 'free' through some medium), it's hard to pull the trigger on getting a physical copy.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoIf you buy from Amazon, some books fall under their "Matchbook" program, where if you buy the paper copy you receive the ebook version for free or small additional cost ($2-3).
- jamespo 8y agoO'Reilly used to do this until they ditched their online store
- icantdrive55 8y agoWow---I had no idea. It's sad to read the reason why they ditched the online store. I was in BN awhile ago. I distinctly heard a girlfriend scolding her boyfriend over a small book purchase. "Only idiots buy books anymore. Just look it up on the internet?" It stuck with me. Don't agree, and found the statement depressing. I repair/service watches. I have learned so much from books, especially older books. Yes--it's a niche field. There are times where I'm looking through a 60 year old book, and find something I didn't know. https://www.thebookseller.com/futurebook/why-oreilly-media-no-longer-selling-books-online-607871 https://www.thebookseller.com/futurebook/why-oreilly-media-n...
- derrikcurran 8y agoJust to make sure, have you tried an E Ink display? They really make the difference for me. They look very much like paper and ink.
- psychometry 8y agoLiterally the opposite of me. eBooks are searchable, paper books are not. I don't need to search a novel for a particular phrase, but I certainly do for a textbook.
- cgag 8y agoWith real books I find it easy to remember where in the book and what part of the page whatever I read was on, plus I find I'm much more likely to actually sit down and read offline.
- neaden 8y agoFor books I'm trying to learn and retain from, like a textbook or a technical book it really helps me to take notes, underline, highlight, write questions, etc in the book itself. I think it both helps me retain it better the first time and then allows me to review the text later and get more out of it.
- emodendroket 8y agoI find myself often marking up e-books a lot more
- jandrese 8y agoI tend to prefer PDFs for technical books because it has a search feature. Most of the time I'm not reading a 1200 page technical reference cover to cover and of course Indexes aren't always comprehensive.
- emodendroket 8y agoI like physical books for textbooks because they do much better with illustrations and tables and are far easier to flip back and forth in. For anything I"m going to read sequentially pretty strictly I'll go with an e-book.
- pharrington 8y agoYeah, the spatial aspect of books is definitely a factor in why its easier for you (and just about everyone probably) to learn from physical texts than current electronic texts. For myself, though, it's just not resource efficient to use physical copies of all the technical documentation I read. For example, I'm learning Vulkan right now, and there's just 0% chance I'm going to print out 1300+ pages of documentation that's liable to change a few times a year in subtle ways. Then again, just thinking about it now, maybe specifically printing out just the diffs when the spec changes could make it easier to stay up to date?
- commandlinefan 8y ago> for all technical books, things like O’Reilly, No Starch, etc, I always buy physical Same here. I always feel odd when I'm reading a physical book at my desk, though, since I've never, ever, not even once in 25 years, seen anybody else actually reading a book - not even the ones who have a shelf full of them at their desks.
- dmd 8y agoWhere on earth do you work? Everyplace I've ever worked (over the last 15-20 years), people constantly close their doors and read.
- darioush 8y agoWhere do you work that has doors?
- dmd 8y agoI would never in a million years even consider working someplace that doesn't.
- commandlinefan 8y agoHonest question - how do you have that flexibility? I'm qualified as hell - or at least, I look really good on paper. Yet I probably have at least a 3-to-1 rejection ratio for jobs that I'm insanely qualified for. As much as they go on about a "tech labor shortage", I feel pretty grateful when I find full time work because I get turned down so often - plus, I feel like even if I demanded (the quiet that I actually need to work effectively but who cares, right?), they could rescind that at any moment and I'd be left choosing between quitting and being unemployed again or just gritting my teeth and taking what they dish out.
- Apocryphon 8y agoIn Silicon Valley, I've only seen offices for all employees at Microsoft's Mountain View campus.
- SamReidHughes 8y agoFor me it depends on whether the subject matter requires flipping back through pages a lot.
- shostack 8y agoThe issue I've found is that my primary reading device is my Kindle Paperwhite, however for many technical books, that screen size is just not big enough. The net result is that code examples are often too tiny to easily read. Particularly when reading at night with dimmer brightness settings.
- sevensor 8y agoIs it possible that losing one's taste for Hesse is simply a result of age and career choice? Critics, professional readers, have a very different mission than casual readers like me. It's their job to sift through great piles of words to find what's important. I have no such burden -- I've found that time and exposure to the internet have made me more interested in challenging books, not less.
- jihadjihad 8y agoNothing too revelatory here, but I can certainly agree with the ideas presented. So many of us are used to a constant, reliable dopamine drip while reading things on the internet that larger texts bore us. The conclusion at the end of the piece is right, though--it just takes willpower. Choosing delayed gratification in the form of good, rich, long-form writing is a lot like choosing a balanced diet. The benefits of traipsing through difficult texts may not be readily apparent but doing so invariably pays dividends for years to come.
- rayiner 8y agoI find the new trend of long form articles infuriating. Just get to the point, without all the rigamarole! Is there an actual benefit? Or is it just something people say?
- kornakiewicz 8y agoNew trend?
- tjr 8y agoI enjoyed long articles from the ye olde early days of the world wide web, when long articles were long because the author had a lot of interesting things to say. Now, too many articles are long just for the sake of being long. And often peppered with animated / video advertisements for products I do not want.
- SilasX 8y agoAnd giant floating headers, and autoplay, and making me look at it through blinds on mobile.
- tartrate 8y agoI heard that for SEO purposes you want to reach >2000 words. If it's true, for now, you'll be seeing articles around this word count for the same reason you see YouTube videos slightly longer than 10 minutes. Try paying for something that's behind a hard paywall and you'll see shorter articles.
- jacknews 8y agoI think she has a very valid point, since I didn't finish the article at all, and merely hopped over various phrasea in the first couple of paragraphs before feeling compelled to post here, and then move on to other stuff. Semantic dyslexia, perhaps.
- ChuckMcM 8y agoInteresting read (no pun intended). I find that it is hard to read something when I'm thinking about other things, which is to say my mind wanders into other areas while reading so I lose track of where I am. But on the flip side when I'm fully engaged I have a hard time stopping reading and that can lead to some late nights where resting/sleeping would have been a "better" use of my time. My biggest challenge has been with what I consider poorly written documentation for things. If I'm really busy and just want to use something to get one thing done, but can't because I have to read the documentation thoroughly in order to understand the special way a particular tool works, it can be excruciatingly difficult to force myself to read that.
- CaptSpify 8y ago> I find that it is hard to read something when I'm thinking about other things, which is to say my mind wanders into other areas while reading so I lose track of where I am. I do this too, so I've started keeping a small notebook and pen in my bag. When my mind starts to wander, I write my thoughts into the notebook. I don't know why or how it works, but getting the thoughts onto a page gets them out of my head, which lets me focus.
- emodendroket 8y agoI started really reading a lot a few years ago and I have to say that it's mostly a matter of practice. If you are used to reading dense texts and not anxious about how many books you "have to" blow through, you can slowly and calmly read a book and you'll finish it sooner than you think. I actually am reading the book mentioned in the article, War and Peace, and rather enjoying it.
- paulpauper 8y agoA lot of non-fiction books have a lot of filler. No need to read 300 pages when a wiki articles or PDF gives you important points
- merpnderp 8y agoThis times a thousand. To justify an entire book on their thoughts, which aren't that deep, they write a long winded book, when 2-3 articles would have sufficed. Or worse, the book was based off their 2-3 most successful articles.
- emodendroket 8y agoThe author's more concerned with fiction
- bowlich 8y agoFiction has suffered the same bloat. Used to be that letting an author ramble for 200,000+ words was considered indulgent. Dune told it's entire story in around 180,000 words, I can hardly say anything more intriguing is going on in Song of Ice & Fire at 1.7 million words.
- emodendroket 8y agoI'm not very interested in fantasy, but the idea that writing is more long-winded than it used to be doesn't really survive even the most cursory survey of literature from the 1800s. Or if that's not your speed check ancient literature and see if you find it more to-the-point. You're the second person I see in this thread complaining that texts have become too bloated and using this exact example. Perhaps the guy is just a hack.
- bowlich 8y agoI picked Dune/Song of Ice and Fire because they're thematically similar. In terms of bloat, excluding the Tale of Genji or the Story of the Stone, I can hardly think of anything in the 1800s that pushes into the 1M+ word mark in order to tell a complete story. I mean, people used to joke about War & Peace being long and it's hovering around 1/2 a million words -- and at least when I read it, Tolstoy seemed to be using every last one of them.
- cheez 8y agoI read about 30 minutes a day, using the following approach: 1. Kindle 2. Prepare lunch and dinner such that I have about 15 minutes of waiting time each time. 3. Read during this waiting time After two days of reading this way, if I am not enjoying the book, then I drop it and move on.
- hrktb 8y ago> The narrative action struck her as intolerably slow. > She had, she concluded, “changed in ways I would never have predicted. I now read on the surface and very quickly; in fact, I read too fast to comprehend deeper levels Here she lays the blame solely on her, but I would think that it's also a writer's skill to hook the reader. It takes two to tango, and if she felt the narrative was so slow she started to skim the sentences and ended up missing the deeper parts, perhaps the book could have used some trimming, better pacing, or a different approach to present the subject. I feel that while we tend to read faster in general, we also read a lot more volume than the previous generations and I genuinely think we are pretty optimised to understand a lot very fast. There is a ton of last century news articles or magazines that are unbearably slow and very diluted. Sometimes there will be deeper thoughts buried there, but 98% of the times it's not, which is depressing. Even nowadays, there is a cute TLDR bot on reddit, and from times to times reading the original article really doesn't bring anything more than what the bot put in a more succinct way.
- jandrese 8y agoEditors have gotten indulgent IMHO, especially if the author is famous. For example, I'm sure George R. R. Martin is really interested in medieval royal feasts, but readers tend to get bored with yet another page filled with food items after the 20th time.
- emodendroket 8y agoHow much 19th-Century writing have you read, man?
- jandrese 8y agoI was more comparing to early 20th century works. There seemed to be a period where pages were expensive and authors more often felt the need to get to the point. Novels were considered long if they were more than an inch thick. The Lord of the Rings was considered epic length (it is dwarfed by a Song of Ice and Fire, especially if you count the unfinished works). When you pick up a copy of Fahrenheit 451 one thing you notice is how thin it is. To Kill a Mockingbird is another example. There are plenty of others. Now I wonder if that wasn't an indirect response to ponderous tomes like Moby Dick and War and Peace? Maybe the authors who grew up with those books realized that brevity was a virtue and learned to tamp back their natural urges to digress into long rambling and ultimately pointless interludes?
- rayiner 8y ago“Readers” are so judgey. There is nothing wrong with reading the wikipedia summary of books instead of the whole thing. I read “Fellowship of the Ring” in middle school. Took forever! Put me off the whole enterprise.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- redisman 8y agoWith fiction it's not about the one point the author wanted to make like some waste-of-paper self-help books, it's more about the journey
- emodendroket 8y agoI did not like the Hobbit, but other door-stop books like Moby Dick and Crime and Punishment I really have enjoyed. Seems stupid to stop because you didn't like one book. Would you write off movies if the first one you saw were bad?
- byproxy 8y agoIf all you care about are plot details, maybe. But you're missing out on a person's voice. Prose can be as beautiful as any piece of visual art in a gallery. Not only are you depriving yourself of an aesthetic experience, but also a learning experience. Reading will boost your vocabulary and help your writing and give you more cultural references to pull from (and recognize, when they come up in another's work). But...if you can't be assed, you can't be assed, I suppose.
- rayiner 8y ago> But you're missing out on a person's voice. Prose can be as beautiful as any piece of visual art in a gallery. Not only are you depriving yourself of an aesthetic experience... Sure, but people who enjoy art don't write high-and-mighty articles titled "Just Go to MOMA Already." "Readers" act like these aesthetic experiences are something that are universally important. > Reading will boost your vocabulary and help your writing and give you more cultural references to pull from But this is only valuable if you're writing for other "readers" (which typically you're not).
- Raidion 8y agoProblem I have with books is that it's much harder to justify the "time" to get lost in books. When I was a kid, I was near the top of the school's reading program and devoured books. But now, when I do have time on vacation or sick, I'd almost much rather read something that's educational-ish. It's hard to justify the X hours falling into a fantasy world, though it's still almost as fun as it used to be. Practically I think I have more "ties" to the real world, with a job, family, etc, and it's harder for me to stop worrying about those things long enough to slip inside the mind of a character in a book.
- zebrafish 8y agoBe careful with that. It's easy to get overwhelmed when you least expect it. Let yourself relax and get lost on occasion. It will do wonders for your mental health.
- Skunkleton 8y ago> It's easy to get overwhelmed when you least expect it. I am in process of learning this the hard way. Too much stress built up has lead to lots of physical manifestations.
- emodendroket 8y agoMaybe you could do history or classic literary fiction to combine the enjoyment with a somewhat educational feel.
- samirm 8y agoApparently you think there's not much to be gained from reading fiction. Maybe there's your problem.
- sutterbomb 8y agoGood fiction can teach you more about human nature than any non-fiction. Marginally more knowledge about human nature can get you further than marginally more technical knowledge.
- nicklovescode 8y agoI found it funny that immediately following the article (at least on mobile) were the worst clickbait ads “10 questions to figure out your mental wealth!”
- zeveb 8y agohttps://github.com/gorhill/uBlock https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock This is an excellent ad-blocker, available for Firefox, Chrome, Edge & macOS Safari. It's well worth using; the only time I see clickbait is when I use someone else's computer.
- Udo_Schmitz 8y agoSafari version looks to be abandonware :/
- 0xffff2 8y agoNot available on iOS AFAIK.
- zeveb 8y agoPity — it works great on Firefox on Android.
- sidstling 8y agoFor around ten years I didn’t read much, not because I didn’t want to, I certainly did, but because it takes too long. I get up at around 6am, get home from work at around 5pm and then I have daily chores mixed with family stuff for 3-5 hours. Not much left after that, and I’m not good at setting fixed hours for specific hobbies, so reading a whole book just didn’t work out for me. I soon found that even if I managed to pick a book up, it’d have to be really great for me not to start questioning if it was worth the time. I did take a few courses related to work, where I had to read books and articles, but I don’t count those because they were part of studying, so reading them had a specific purpose of getting me good grades at whatever certification/examination came with the course. Then a few years ago I started listening to audiobooks, and it’s really changed things. Now I “read” one or two books a month. Sometimes it’s stuff like Sapiens, other times it’s the new world of Warcraft novel, but both kinds have really improved the quality of my life. I do have two hours of commute each day, where the audiobook fits in perfectly. I used to fill it with music and podcasts, but for me the books have been a huge improvement exactly because of the depth.
- emodendroket 8y agoI read a lot on the train, but I find it impossible to keep the thread with audiobooks.
- ardillaroja 8y agoWas halfway through an almost identical reply when you posted this haha (also enjoyed Sapiens!). I think the level of absorption is as high if not higher than reading but I have been wondering if it 'counts' (and wondering what I mean by that). With audiobooks we're not practicing the physical scanning of words (assuming that's a skill which can deteriorate) and difficult sentences are definitely easier to follow when stressed by a good voice actor. That said I think we're still picking up vocabulary, empathizing and learning which feel like the biggest wins of reading a variety of books.
- ryandrake 8y agoI’m kind of in your camp. Back when I had a lot of time, I used to read a lot. But it’s such a low bandwidth communication, and books seem to have so much useless filler material. I tried e-books but failed. If I listen to them while I’m doing something else like commuting, I don’t pay attention (since I’m trying to not get killed on I-680), and if I listen while I’m not doing anything else, I fall asleep. Still waiting for someone to invent that The Matrix style “download into my brain” technology.
- sampl 8y agoShort plug: your local library has thousands of books, all free to borrow. Many libraries let you listen to unlimited free audiobooks using the Libby app (honestly a life-changer for me).
- emodendroket 8y agoI doubt the cost is the barrier for most of us here. Reading books isn't a very expensive hobby even if you buy them all.
- cossatot 8y agoIt depends on the books and your rate of reading. I spend about $100/month on books which is often only 2 or 3. I can't always justify spending more. I would agree with you in the case of fiction, as the books are cheaper and better represented at libraries. But non-fiction is expensive, and I read a lot of technical and niche nonfiction.
- emodendroket 8y agoI see. I mostly read history and fiction. I read a lot of technical books when I was trying to become a programmer but now it's often the last thing I feel like reading.
- kuwze 8y agoI think there is a huge difference between reading fiction and nonfiction. One is tied to reality, the other is a socially accepted temporary delusion. I say this as someone who loves fiction in all forms. I wish I had only read nonfiction growing up.
- DanielBMarkham 8y agoWow, do I feel this pain. As both an author[1] and a book-lover, I've been on both sides of this divide. People just don't consume books the same way they used to. As a reader, I find I have to slowly re-introduce deep reading -- even if I've just been away for a week or two. I usually do this by getting a physical book and a physical distraction device, usually my phone. I go to a place where there's nothing else in the room. Then I read as much as I can until I feel "bothered" (beats me what the correct adjective is here. "Bored"?) At that point I pick up the distraction device and poke around: Twitter, Facebook, HN, and so on. I make an effort to put it down. Eventually I succeed, then back to reading. Over a period of many cycles, my reading time gets up to close to an hour long. But it's a struggle. I don't think I could do it with an e-book reader. In those things, they put the distraction stuff just a click away. Hell, they'll sell you more distraction stuff you can play the millisecond you get bored with the text. What I'd like to know is whether I'm some weird outlier or whether many other readers are going through this same process. As a book writer, I tried as hard as possible to plug into a feedback loop with my readers. I ran beta groups, I emailed extensively to find out what worked and what didn't. All of the communication, as far as I could tell, collapsed into some version of "Make it take five minutes so I can go consume more material" Hey, I'm with you, but some things can't be covered in five minutes. Some things require a narrative and background for you to make sense of it, dear reader. What to do then? (Add: Had one beta reader assure me that he already understood all the stuff around the first third of the book and I was wasting his time. So I jumped him directly to the second third. He was completely lost. I thought about cross-indexing the book to show how each part was used later, but what the heck would that accomplish, aside from reassuring myself that the text was needed? It is a frustrating problem from both sides.) 1. Shameless book plug: https://leanpub.com/info-ops https://leanpub.com/info-ops
- beat 8y agoThe Kindle Paperwhite helps a great deal with the e-book reader problem, and having distractions just a click away. It's useless as anything but a book.
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago> I don't think I could do it with an e-book reader. In those things, they put the distraction stuff just a click away. Hell, they'll sell you more distraction stuff you can play the millisecond you get bored with the text. I have owned some model of Kindle for six years now. For each device I have owned, I put it in airplane mode as soon as I took it out of the box and I kept it that way. (I generally download what I want to read from pirated ebook communities, so no need to deal with an online bookshop’s ecosystem.) It is not hard to avoid distractions of being sold more stuff.
- beat 8y agoI've recently regained the ability to do in-depth reading. I attribute the final loss of my old since-childhood book habit to the Kindle app on my iPad... it seemed "better" to buy electronic books instead. But that meant the Internet was there waiting for me, after every chapter or pause, I could just go check Facebook or email, or... yeah. So I started reading paper books again. The context switch into paper is relatively expensive, so I'd stay there, not cutting over to the internet. I started reading serious material again. From there, my spouse gave me her unused Kindle Paperwhite (she reads a ton on her iPad, so she doesn't use the Paperwhite), and I found the Paperwhite gave me most of the Kindle advantages without the multipurpose device disadvantages. Next, I cut back seriously on my social media. I went cold turkey on Facebook for a bit (and on Twitter shortly after), and I consciously avoid bad FB habits. Nonetheless, it's an addiction machine, and when I do use it again, I realize that cold turkey is probably better. Without social media apps on my phone, I find myself with a Kindle app instead. Much better! When I was 20 or so and reading very heavily (I had a job that gave me four hours of sitting time in half hour chunks, so I read a lot), I started a self-control process of reading one fiction and one non-fiction book simultaneously - at that time, to make sure I read plenty of non-fiction. Now, I have to make myself read fiction instead. I seem to have settled that divide by reading fiction on my phone, and non-fiction on my Kindle. Audiobooks and podcasts have been a change for me, too. I started with a serious audiobook on a road trip (The Order of Time, by Carlo Rovelli). From there, I blew through all 120 episodes of the Philosophize This! podcast. A new job has me on an ugly commute for the first time in years, so I'm filling that time in the car with Hardcore History (the monstrous six hour Celtic Holocaust episode about the Roman invasion of Gaul), and foreign language vocabulary study (Spanish). Having a proper reading habit of an hour or two a day on average has me back to reading heavy things. I've read a lot of history this year, and I'm currently back to reading philosophy (Simone de Beauvoir and Herbert Marcuse). Plus, I'm managing to dig through a backlog of software industry books, mostly DevOps things I'd missed out on before. It's so much better than social media.
- padraigf 8y ago> From there, I blew through all 120 episodes of the Philosophize This! podcast. Good recommendation (based on the first episode anyway).
- amelius 8y agoCan someone please provide a TL;DR? :)
- bradhoffman 8y agoSo what I am hearing here is that practicing reading will help develop that skill of deep reading? I remember in High School when I used to run through my History textbooks and loving the process, remembering most everything I encountered. Now (5 years later), I feel this block in my mind that prevents me from going deep on those topics. It's hard to describe, but it feels like the material isn't being absorbed... Somehow it's getting stuck in my short-term memory and not making it much further unless I really study the material.
- Udo_Schmitz 8y agoWhenever he tried to read anything substantial, Carr wrote, “I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. … The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” 100% describes me. Haven’t found a solution yet.
- Taylor_OD 8y agoI've gone from reading 10 books a year to reading 25+ books a year over the last few years. Mostly I've cut down on my screen time. I am on a computer all day for work but once I go home I try to spend as little time as possible on a computer. What do I do now? Come home, do yoga for 15-30 minutes, make tea, meditate for 10 minutes, read for 15 - 50 minutes. Then I'll allow myself to do other things that may occupy my time. I'll admit that as a single man without kids I have a lot more freedom over my schedule but this is very similar to my morning routine. At the minimum I've got 30 minutes of reading and 20 minutes of meditation in my day every day. This has done wonders for my ADD brain. The other big thing is focuses on books I know I'll enjoy. For me that means Sci-Fi fiction novels and Magical Realism books. Also if I find myself not wanting to pick up the book then I'll move on from it. Right now I'm reading alternating Murakami book, Vonnegut books, and books from The Sparrow (Mary Doria Russell) series. Are they all at the level or War and Peace? No. But I enjoy them and that's what maters. P.S. I've got a kindle paperwhite which is IMO the best e reading device I've ever used. It sits in my draw while paper stack up around my house and near my bedside. It just doesnt feel the same. It's great for when I'm going to be traveling and need a few novels but dont have the space in my travel bag.
- malloreon 8y agoIf I had to decide between keeping my iPhone and keeping ky paperwhite, I just might go paperwhite. And I write iOS apps for a living.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ByThyGrace 8y agoGetting an e-ink reader is the reason I've had a similar boost in reading hours, also over the last few years. The thing's fantastic. I don't even mind the low dpi, or the delayed responsiveness (it's not slower than turning a paper page). I bring it with me and read anywhere. It does not have the attention seeking alerts nor the eye-straining of a back-lighted smartphone. There's under a dozen simultaneous books I'm reading at any given time, spanning both fiction and non-fiction, and have already put 1500+ hours on it (the device has nifty time tracking stats!). To me it's about the niftiest piece of consumer tech the industry has put out the past two decades.
- lihaciudaniel 8y agoThe problem with reading on digital screen is maybe a generation one. Being a teenager i am very grateful that we have so many books on an electronic device. I read on a smartphones because 2 things: Spaced repetition. I can read anywhere, anytime. At school, at home, in the car etc. TTS Audiobooks on offline epub with speed changer. It took me a while but because of the technology improvement of TTS I don't see a difference. I can listen to the next pages where I last read on the way to the gym or school. Or I can listen to the introduction and then read when I have time where I bookmarked it. The modern problem with understanding is the need of recall and effort. There is a great video:https://youtu.be/V-UvSKe8jW4 https://youtu.be/V-UvSKe8jW4 Edit 1: I started taking productivity more serious after 6 months detox of my smartphone. (during my school time and during exams, I was successful because I broke it and my parents never give me gifts or have good income) Edit 2: off time is the best app. It basically doesn't allow to access only some apps that you choose for a period of time
- coldtea 8y ago>Wolf resolved to allot a set period every day to reread a novel she had loved as a young woman, Hermann Hesse’s Magister Ludi. It was exactly the sort of demanding text she’d once reveled in. But now she discovered to her dismay that she could not bear it. “I hated the book,” she writes. “I hated the whole so-called experiment.” She had to force herself to wrangle the novel’s “unnecessarily difficult words and sentences whose snakelike constructions obfuscated, rather than illuminated, meaning for me.” "Demanding text"? "unnecessarily difficult words and sentences"? "snakelike constructions"? Who described the book as such, Beavis and Butthead? Herman Hesse is at the young adult fiction level of difficulty (and in Europe has been traditionally read by adolescents).
- abootstrapper 8y agoSpeaking of unnecessarily difficult, the writing style of this article, by itself, seems to be trying to prove the author’s point.
- asdffdsa321 8y agoThe article was excellently written and worth the time to read & digest. Your comment is beautifully indicative of the shallow "garbage in, garbage out" point the author made at the end.
- samirm 8y agoI disagree with most of what she says. I know I spend too much time online, but at the same time I don't have any problems getting lost in books. Just last week I devoured Name of the Wind (600+ pages) in a matter of days, even though I ultimately didn't particularly like it. It seems like she has trained herself to read a certain way and then blames the world around her for her own actions. Spending time online doesn't have to affect your reading behaviour, especially if you practice self awareness.
- loriverkutya 8y agoAnd probably you are missing the fact, that way how you read is established when there were no internet around.
- samirm 8y agoI'm not sure if this is supposed to be directed at me or a general comment, but the internet was most certainly there when I started reading. In fact I hated reading when I was in middle school. It was only in my last couple years (of school) that I really started to enjoy it.
- gobblegobble2 8y agoIt's easy to blame the internet, but for me the biggest reason why my deep reading capacities suffered was college. If every semester you have to grind thousands of pages, the art of skimming and superficial reading is necessary survival tool. Writing papers with short deadlines quickly leads to fishing for quotes and references in source material. After few hard years of college it's difficult to get back to old reading habits, even if it's just fiction in leisure time.
- lev99 8y agoMy reading habits suspended during college for skim culture, and rebounded every break from school and fully recovered after graduation.
- seppin 8y agoFor me it was even earlier, forced to read absurd amounts of very boring textbook material for early school. Put me off reading for life, just like an abusive piano teacher would for music.
- decisionfiction 8y agoIn the digital world of brainless games, and binge watching media it is very hard to focus on reading as our minds are being trained to get most amount of information in as compressed way as possible. While commuting on trains of NYC I tend to look around and see 9/10 people are either playing some no brainer games or watching something while listening to music. Hardly would we find a reader involved in his/her kindle or a book or even reading on phone. I am guilty of binge watching a show endlessly sinking in my couch (even while working). I think rather than fighting whether we are reading a device or a physical book the important point is that we keep reading and promote reading to our next generation with all mediums available (book, kindle, mobile, messengers...) and whichever is the most convenient for them.
- hfdgiutdryg 8y agoI now read on the surface and very quickly; in fact, I read too fast to comprehend deeper levels, which forced me constantly to go back and reread the same sentence over and over with increasing frustration.” She had lost the “cognitive patience” that once sustained her in reading such books. I had a similar, but opposite problem most of my life since computers came along. In high school, I started reading technical books on programming. Along with my textbooks, of course. Around my junior year, I realized that I'd lost the ability to just smoothly flow through 'light' text. I'd obsessively rescan paragraphs if I'd missed a single word. About once a decade, I'd realize that I'd lost the ability to read fiction for pleasure and make it a point to redevelop the skill. My last bout was reading everything by Murakami. Maybe her mind is just wandering, because in my opinion the key to fiction is allowing yourself to skip minor details and let your brain figure it out as you go.
- alexhutcheson 8y agoI think most people are too committed to finishing books that they start. Changing my attitude about this has made a huge difference in how much book content I actually read. Until pretty recently, if I found myself reading a book that I found boring, or too dense, or hard to get into, I would just get "stuck". I wouldn't be able to pay attention for long enough to make real progress, but it would "block" me from starting any other books. Now I just abandon the book and move on to a different book that I haven't started reading yet. It makes a huge difference in my "book throughput", and reading books cover-to-cover is overrated in any case.
- gassiss 8y agoThe best way to read more books is reading books that you enjoy rather than just because you have the urge to finish it, no doubt.
- Ftuuky 8y agoSo much this. The wake call was Naval Ravikant on a podcast (Tim Ferriss I think?) that said something like "don't be afraid to stop reading a book if you're not enjoying it. If it's non-fiction it's okay to skip for the relevant chapters".
- finder83 8y agoI do wonder a lot about the root causes of this. Personally, I'm working on my Master's degree and am reading about 300-400 pages a week, and still enjoy reading novels if I have any spare time or during the summer. I don't have this issue, have no problem with deep focus, and am a computer programmer during the day so am constantly consuming computer-based media. What I DON'T do is watch TV. We don't own a TV, don't have a netflix subscription any longer, and I see movies about once every 3-4 months. I do watch Youtube, but not ads...I wonder how much of an attention problem while reading is actually internet related and how much is media related. This is completely non-scientific, but I feel like your body adjusts to what you train it to. Media and TV in particular train you to appreciate interruptions, shallower and half-hour to hour-long stories. The internet and mobile trains you to however you use it...if it's facebook, maybe reloading the feed every 30 seconds isn't the best thing to train your attention? But there is plenty of deep reading content on the web as well.
- watwut 8y agoThe biggest obstacle for my reading after I got older was to find books that I would find interesting. As I had less time, I did not enjoyed filler action/sci-fi/etx books anymore. And to this day, I did not found consistent source of interesting books for adult me. Some manga came close, but the rest I rarely cared to finish.
- Kagerjay 8y agoSame here, ive read between 100 to 200 fiction fantasy books it feels like I've seen every plot variation by now. It gets stale after awhile. Same applies to video games too. Also once you've read some of the best authors in the genre everything else is just less impressive
- itaintreddit 8y agoI blame math. In mathematical prose (proofs in particular) every word down to the articles (a/the) matters. Non-technical prose is usually (necessarily?) bloated with extraneous info and many irrelevant words/sentences (and often paragraphs). I don't have patience for that anymore. I skim an article to find the main point the author trying to make and if I can't find it by the mid point of the page, I simply leave the page/article/site.
- paganel 8y ago> In mathematical prose (proofs in particular) every word down to the articles (a/the) matters. You might like Flaubert, who was a perfectionist when it came to the words he had to put down on paper. From the wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Flaubert#Perfectionist_style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Flaubert#Perfectionist...): > Flaubert famously avoided the inexact, the abstract, the vaguely inapt expression, and scrupulously eschewed the cliché. (...) Flaubert believed in, and pursued, the principle of finding "le mot juste" ("the right word"), which he considered as the key means to achieve quality in literary art.
- dash2 8y agoIt's small point, and doesn't invalidate her overall argument, but Hermann Hesse probably just isn't a very good writer, and as an adult, Ms Wolf realised this.
- Pimpus 8y agoWhen you are a digital addict, it is no surprise that you cannot sustain focus and attention. "Deep reading" is going to seem like a chore when your brain is craving the dopamine hits it's used to. I've had a lot of success using apps to limit my computer usage, like Cold Turkey (no affiliation). I can block specific sites, apps, or freeze my whole computer on a schedule. Would recommend it, let me know if anyone knows of a libre alternative though.
- kashyapc 8y agoRecently I began reading the glorious P.G. Wodehouse (his books with the inimitable Jeeves and other characters) as a breather from the non-fiction work I read. After a serious day with dry technical work, it's incredibly pleasant to read Wodehouse and retire into the night. As the back cover of my current book, Thank You, Jeeves, says: "Wodehouse always lifts your spirits, no matter how high they happen to be already."
- forgottenpass 8y agoPerhaps ironically, it's pablum like this Slate article killing my ability to read. The onslaught of digital publishers cranking out vapid nonsense and pushing it far and wide means I only skim. This article is 2k words and I've got shit to do today. The only thing I can read cover-to-cover is fiction. Often documentation and emails if I'm convinced they're useful. Anything else my brain gets stuck in skimming mode and I have to concentrate harder on reading every word than the content itself.
- pnathan 8y agoI've never had a druthers to read the Big Novels. I've usually found them almost pointless. Which is probably more on me than any other thing. Always have preferred books with a bit of sparkle and imagination - great science fiction or fantasy - interesting in the worlds built and the characters in them. E.g., Jim Butcher and Seanan McGuire are nearly automatic buys right now. As I've gotten older, my tolerance for blather has dropped like a stone, though. And some authors blather and yammer. E.g., a certain popular author lovingly details the military details of his space ships, which is really irrelevant to pretty much the entire rest of the book. Wish he'd keep that stuff in his private notefiles. For non-fiction, I am, when I have the time, gripped by it to a great degree... although I confess I straight up fell asleep the other weekend. I also note that my attention tends to wander a lot more than it used to when I'm bored. Some of this I attribute to the US national mood; some of it I attribute to Sturgeon's law and my increased sensitivity. And some of it I attribute to the dopamine hits social media gives us. I also wonder about experience and pattern matching - I'm 34, not 14. I've seen a fair bit of stuff before. Another thing that I want to remark on - the non-fiction world is, simply put, a fascinating place that can be explored at will, to arbitrary depths, at this point. Fiction authors have to compete with, e.g., people on Twitter talking about their sessile spiny oysters and showing pictures of them off. If I was a hair less sleepy this morning, I might have spent 20 minutes learning about spiny oysters - where in 2004 I might have read a fiction paperback instead. So perhaps, in a certain subset of the population, we're all turning into the people who would have read the encyclopedia for fun, with its short articles on fascinating topics.
- Rainymood 8y ago>As I've gotten older, my tolerance for blather has dropped like a stone, though. And some authors blather and yammer. E.g., a certain popular author lovingly details the military details of his space ships, which is really irrelevant to pretty much the entire rest of the book. Wish he'd keep that stuff in his private notefiles. What blathering is to some, is worldbuilding for others. Personally, I read all 5 GoT books (the first three were the best, the last two were meh) and GRRM is really good in describing food ... man my mouth always started watering reading those passages of banquets and feasts.
- DubiousPusher 8y agoI have had a similar experience but I don't blame the internet. I blame my age and a growth of my own critical thinking. It used to be that anything an authority told me was "great writing" was great writing. This of course included a wide array of 18th and 19th century writing. But as I've read more I've come to the conclusion that while writing of that era is full of many woderful plots, observations, philosophies, etc, it mostly is not great writing. And a good portion of the ideas illuminated in that writing have been better presented in later writing. So I have a develop an extreme intolerance for 1) naval gazing in writing and 2) complexity. Your thoughts can be complex. Your use of the comma however should not be. This is not an intolerance for complex ideas or difficult subjects. It is the same reaction I have to a set of bad instructions. That is to thrust them away and try for myself or find another source. Edit: A little more succinctly, I trust authors less. I have less faith that because you've published a book you have something worth saying. I believe less that wrangling with your abstruse language will yield a reward worth struggling for. So when I encounter difficulty, I discard the coconut and seek an orange.
- fredsanford 8y agoAre you able to get through books by Tolkein, Robert Jordan or Terry Goodkind? I wonder because as I've aged I don't have the patience to sit through a description of every blade of grass in a meadow...
- DubiousPusher 8y agoNever read Goodkind. I don't think I could read Jordan anymore. Just kind of got over high fantasy a bit and don't find it all that rewarding. With Tolkien, I used to view "The Hobbit" as pretty good and TLOTR as his magnum opus. Now I'm convinced it's the other way round. Generally, I'm very much the same. Let's set the scene quick and get the characters doing stuff. I used to see intricate scene dressing as a skill now I see it as an indulgence. There are too many period films, mini-series and series with beautiful sets and costumes etc if I really want that. There I can marvel at them without much addition time cost.
- 8y ago
- eatonphil 8y agoAm in my twenties, hadn't read a book for fun since I was eight (nothing outside of school). Two things got me going reading books again: 1) not getting that much from blog posts and not learning enough from coworkers and 2) friends I looked up to who read much more than me. Three years ago I forced myself to read 2 technical books. Two years ago I read 8. Last year I read 40 and this year I'm on track for 50+ (33 so far). At first I could only make myself put in time to read advanced books on programming and architecture. But in time I was able to force myself to read (older) fiction as well as books on economics, finance, psychology, management, writing and history. These days it's easy enough to keep myself on track because I feel like I'm losing ground to myself if I don't keep reading. There's so much to learn and while I can never get it all, I've internalized the drive. I cannot recommend enough reading about psychology, history, finance and programming/architecture/management to fellows in tech. These topics apply so clearly and frequently in life/at work. If you're curious I'm on Goodreads with this username.
- creep 8y agoHey bud, I've never lost the drive to read and learn new things, but I definitely have trouble organizing everything I want to be learning/reading. Usually I have a fiction book going at all times. Keeps me sharp, interested, engaged, even if I don't feel like being "productive". But apart from that, there are so many things I'm working on, I feel a bit muddled. Do you have any advice for a dude like me? How to know when to read or do what? Especially when you don't have a preference at a particular moment in time?
- eatonphil 8y agoThe first few books I read were from lists I found online aggregating suggestions on HN and Reddit. After that I'd just make a note of any books referenced in ones I read that I liked and branched out. After a bit you have no end to books you want to follow up on.
- creep 8y agoThat appears to be my same problem.
- Svoka 8y agoReminds me of Bob Newhart's "Stop It" sketch. People with good self control don't have problems focusing.
- SZJX 8y agoI think the so-called effect of the digital age is totally overblown. It's easy to write headlines about it and make everybody panic, but I don't think people in ancient times were that much of avid readers either. In fact the general literacy and the average time spent on reading by the population definitely increased massively, if anything. The ancient populace didn't have computers or TV to occupy themselves with, but they had plenty of other games and entertainment activities all the same. Bear in mind that reading and writing was never natural to human beings until very, very recently. Also, it's true that reading whole books is one way to get information. But plenty of great writers/readers have used reading methods where they distill the essence of the work or actively search out portions to put their emphasis on, and it worked out great for them. I was guilty of reading plenty of newsletters too seriously or reading through whole articles from the beginning to the end, even though reading on might produce very little additional information whatsoever. Now I have learned to better focus my energy: sometimes I skim the headlines, sometimes I skim the first and last paragraphs of an article, and I've already got 70% of what they have to say. Of course one might say that reading books can be something different to reading lower-quality news articles, but in the end time is really limited and "actual work" is something that gets done with your own hands, your own exploration and experience, not by reading and talking. This holds especially true for engineering work. One can't conceivably read whole reference manuals end to end without having actually built something serious with the tools being discussed. That's just pure procrastination, not real learning. Of course there are really well written or foundational books that deserve to be read cover to cover, accompanied with practices, and if one is reading for leisure on their spare time it's also totally fine to enjoy every line of a fiction. But I guess in terms of "getting things done", emphasizing "complete reading" instead of "getting the essence and doing" can be a bit misleading. tl;dr: I think if there's anything worth emphasizing in this age of information explosion, that is "just get real shit done already" instead of "just read the book and lose yourself/procrastinate potentially endlessly". This is something that has cost me very dearly and I'll ensure in the future to avoid this trap as best as I can.