8 ms·
I've come to love books intensely. Not only because I enjoy learning--before I read books, I found blogs to be great educators. I love books because they create
by everythingswan 8y ago
I've come to love books intensely. Not only because I enjoy learning--before I read books, I found blogs to be great educators. I love books because they create time and space to be alone with a thought. It gives me time to consider things that I normally have no space for.
I remember Seth Godin saying once that every business book can be summarized in just a few pages but the book itself is a story. I think it goes beyond just that idea and is The Exercise in reinforcing ideas. Yes, you don't need to spend 10 hours to memorize an idea: _move fast and break things._ Yea, I get it.
But what does that actually mean? How do you actually implement that philosophy? How do you internalize it? How do you navigate situations where you will revert back to your old habit or philosophy? I think you have to spend 10 hours thinking about it and then taking actionable steps to implement it in order to make it useful. Teaching and writing are similar exercises that I have found helpful as a learning tool.
I only just stumbled upon why I like to read. It is likely very personal. But I have found that removing the distractions and habit of "horizontal reading" makes me happier. I'm looking forward to reading the referenced book by Birkerts.
(Aside: At times, I have found reading to be an excuse for not getting things done on my projects. _I just need to know more about x, y, and z before I start_. Ironically, the quest for knowledge can be distracting itself.)
- marvindanig 8y ago> I love books because they create time and space to be alone with a thought. Spot on and cue page turns! Fan open a book and read horizontally. Have intermediate stops between chunks of text on two well-formatted pages and then transition to next. A second to soak in the content in between with time and space makes for a huge difference! Scrolling animation can never achieve or serve this sort of efficiency! I recently wrote an essay on some of the underlying psychophysics and varying outcomes of user interfaces (UX/UI) and how pagination with page turns (codex) helps in reading and forming memories[1]. [1] https://bubblin.io/concerns https://bubblin.io/concerns
- lemoncucumber 8y agoI think you're confused about the meanings of the terms horizontal and vertical reading. The linked piece does not use the term "vertical reading" to mean reading on a vertically scrolling screen vs. reading printed pages in a book. Rather, the author uses "vertical reading" to mean deep reading as compared to shallow/broad reading: > Birkerts coins his own terms: the deep, devotional practice of “vertical” reading has been supplanted by “horizontal” reading, skimming along the surface.
- marvindanig 8y agoYes, it means the same thing: skimming vs. soaking in with "duration state" in between. Unless one set of labels appear more valuable to you than the other…
- Scarbutt 8y agoI think you should mention that you are talking about non novel non fiction stuff, like self improving and technical books, which is an entirely different world of reading (as in more learning than pleasure), at least that's what I understood from you.
- chki 8y agoI've recently been shown a lot of ads for a service called "blinkist" where the idea is to provide short summaries of non-fiction books and I think your comment captures why that is a very bad idea. Reading and capturing an idea takes time; it can't be properly substituted by a few minutes of "listening to crucial insights from leading thinkers while you’re on the go." Their business model is in a way the complete opposite of the ideas in the article (although there is admittedly a difference between fiction and non-fiction books): They show pictures of very busy business people that can't fit a book into their tight schedule; one of their ads said something along the lines of "80% of successful managers read at least 20 books per year" (which is probably just completely mixing up correlation and causation).
- criddell 8y agoI don't think fiction can be shrunk down, but I think lots of non-fiction books can. I'm thinking specifically of some books that I've read in the past couple of years that include: * Deep Work * Influence * Thinking Fast and Slow * Predictably Irrational * Getting Things Done * How to Win Friends and Influence People I think all of these books suffer from the common pattern of present an idea then a bunch of examples that demonstrate the idea. I don't think you lose anything by ditching the examples. The core ideas are usually well stated and don't need clarification or demonstration.
- adhipg 8y agoThat depends on how easy it's for you to learn and internalise a new idea. You can understand the basic premise of these books by just reading the summary, but you need a lot of reinforcement to internalise the idea and want to execute on it. That's just how learning works.
- lozenge 8y agoI believe Amazon found people tend to leave a non fiction book 100 pages from the end, so commissioned books 100 pages shorter than usual. A lot of it is about the books looking good and justifying its own price on the bookstore shelf.
- krishna2 8y agoI liked the way Ray Bradbury writes about this in Fahrenheit 451. When you read books, you have time to think about it, re-read it and question it. Whereas while watching video, things move so fast that the decision is made up for you.
- rgifford 8y ago> I liked the way Ray Bradbury writes about this in Fahrenheit 451. When you read books, you have time to think about it, re-read it and question it. Whereas while watching video, things move so fast that the decision is made up for you. You can literally watch a video at any pace you want. I don't get romanticism around books and I can't help but eye roll when someone a) gushes about reading or b) waxes poetic about the past. We have access to nearly every book, article, paper, video, song, etc. ever written or recorded within seconds. When I want to learn, the most efficient path is usually not through a single author. Why should it be? Why is it bad if we predominantly piece together information through multimedia? I don't get this article or the "reading club" mentality at all. Though I often hear it come out at parties as virtue signal.
- LamaOfRuin 8y agoYou need to read some literature. Information is not knowledge or understanding.
- rgifford 8y agoFunny you say that, I was an English major for a brief while in college. I switched to a creative writing minor before the end of my first year. For whatever it was my English professors had, it was my creative writing professors with real acclaim and ability.
- TuringTest 8y ago> You can literally watch a video at any pace you want. True in a literal sense, but irrelevant. In order to change the pace a video, you need to actively interact with the video player; it's hard or impossible to get into a state of flow[1] if you need to constantly press buttons to pause, skip or replay parts of the video, change its speed, or find the specific second you want to analyze. This affects the depth of reasoning about the concepts you're getting from the media. In a written text, you can naturally pause and reflect upon a paragraph, or re-read recent paragraphs only by moving the eyes up, slowing down at particularly difficult or interesting sections. This state of mind of "intense mental concentration" when reading is a good basis for learning and reflection, and can be combined a more powerful range of options when reading; with video you can also get into that state, but then the video moves forward uniformly, and the pace at which you're confronted with the concepts is defined by the media, not your mental processes. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
- kashyapc 8y agoThe great Roman emporer, Marcus Aurelius, says the following in the beginning of his book, Meditations: To read attentively—not to be satisfied with “just getting the gist of it.”
- agumonkey 8y ago"heh, marcus, we meet again" -- everybody since These days I take reading not as a data input but as a personal game. Authors ideas are mostly a way to let me have my own little intellectual creative game. It avoid reading from authority, passive absorption, weakening of thinking.
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- vinceguidry 8y agoWhat I want out of books is to be able to work them into a sequential feed workflow. I don't think it's likely to happen without hacks in my lifetime due to DRM. But it would be great to get chapters of books woven in between long and short form textual content whose sources are personally curated. If someone thinks they can either work out a deal with Amazon or otherwise get around the DRM issue in a commercial product, drop me a line, I'd love to build V1. Think about it, all text content, sliced and diced for maximum consumability. It just might make feed readers sexy again.
- Emma_Goldman 8y agoI have no idea what anything you wrote means. Can you explain in everyday language, assuming I'm your grandma? Why do you want to slice chapters from separate books together and insert 'textual content' inbetween them?
- vinceguidry 8y agoBooks, sliced by chapter, in an RSS feed reader. So I can read, say, a NYT article, then chapter one of a book, then maybe a blog post, then chapter one of a different book, then a long-form article, then chapter two of the first book.
- rsanheim 8y agoyou are missing the point of reading anything long form
- vinceguidry 8y agoAre you saying you never put a book down and pick it back up later?
- drinfinity 8y agoYeah you sound incredibly ADHD.
- ddeokbokki 8y agoHow do you learn from a book, genuinely? Do you sit down and try to read and understand as much as you can? Or do you just read during your downtime?
- dejawu 8y agoI found this experience to be very true while reading Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People". It was easy to just look at the table of contents and immediately know all the steps - but only by reading the whole chapter could I actually internalize how to put each tenet into practice and what it looked like in reality.
- Bijal13 8y agoI completely agree re: non-fiction. This is why I started creating 15 minute shorts that summarise the key concepts for busy, time-conscious readers for less. https://www.booktherapy.io/collections/15-minute-shorts https://www.booktherapy.io/collections/15-minute-shorts I also think there is a lot of therapeutic power embedded in literature (fiction and nonfiction) and I've created some 15 minute literary guides too for lots of different issues and interests: https://www.booktherapy.io/collections/literary-guides https://www.booktherapy.io/collections/literary-guides