11 ms·

How I Consume Books

105 points by mubaris 7y ago

Barrin92 7y ago
>his knowledge is small compared to non-fiction. Rest of the book is for your entertainment. And fiction does a good job of presenting the idea. To absorb the idea, it doesn’t require a thorough reading of the book (sometimes it does). For the same reason, I find audiobooks are a better medium for consuming fiction. By doing so, you also save your time. this is such a horrible take on fiction that I've seen popup in recent times. 'Consuming' fiction as a sort of pokemon card collection and to 'acquire knowledge'. Better read a few works of fiction deeply and genuinely for their own sake rather than trying to vacuum up books in the name of some shallow self improvement. This post reminds me of the guy with the lamborghini and the bookshelf in his garage.
- moab 7y ago
  Absolutely agree. Unfortunately this kind of "always optimizing" viewpoint seems to have spread like a virus over this past decade. It is sometimes difficult to remember that spending time to read/understand things slowly is not a waste of time, but an important way to appreciate the work of a master in a way that speeding through it at 1.5x on an audiobook simply will not provide. Do we speed-walk through the Louvre to see the masterpieces as quickly as possible?
  - alexhutcheson 7y ago
    > Do we speed-walk through the Louvre to see the masterpieces as quickly as possible? This cracked me up, because I actually did that. I only had a couple hours, and the size of the museum is almost overwhelming.
    - Rainymood 7y ago
      I too did this ... would not recommend trying to run through the louvre in 1 day. I was kind of "forced" to (only had 1 day and I guess a rare case of FOMO). Spend at least 2-3 days there. It's huge with so much masterpieces. The Mona Lisa was a disappointment.
      - Aromasin 7y ago
        I imagine the Mona Lisa is fantastic if you get to inspect it in close detail. Trying to poke your head over 100 flustered tourist, through a sea of arms, phones and cameras, is probably not the best way to appreciate it.
    - louhike 7y ago
      We often say in France that it's better to look at what part of the Louvre are of the most interest to you and only go to these ones. Even spending several hours in a row is no use as you will probably be tired in the end and won't appreciate what you'll see.
- ohaideredevs 7y ago
  I hate the 2-day book "Lambo guy", but this has nothing to do with him. Edit: "Hate" is giving him too much credit, but I do think he is profiting of fooling already confused and lost people. I learned some important lessons in life from fiction books, which quite literally changed my life. Good fiction reflects reality - that's why authors like Branden Sanderson will always be a complete joke, they don't understand anything meaningful "irl".
  - bryal 7y ago
    Right. God forbid you enjoy a book because of the characters and the story. Only philosophical, topical, and metaphorical works matter!
- nostalgk 7y ago
  Exactly. Reading any good book and fully understanding it takes a lot more than a simple once-through hearing. Sure, you might catch the themes and be able to have a water cooler conversation, but the best books are the ones that aren't page turners; ones that you spend all night on, and only make it through 20 pages. Besides, when I read something really good, like Hitchhiker's Guide, I usually flip it over and start it again!
  - Kiro 7y ago
    I'm pretty sure most fiction books I read don't have any deeper meaning. You make it sound like everything out there is some deep philosophical hard sci-fi. I would never want to read something where I spend the whole night just to make it through 20 pages. Sounds exhausting and not enjoyable at all.
    - jimhefferon 7y ago
      > most fiction books I read don't have any deeper meaning That's fine; keep doing what you enjoy. But there is life-changing fiction, so it is not as though there is nothing a person could choose to read that would be great.
      - Kiro 7y ago
        Both you and the post I replied to seem to imply that fiction books without any deeper meaning cannot be good or great.
        nostalgk 7y ago
        This is not what I meant to imply. While I prefer heavier reads, my point was that a cursory reading of any piece of literature pretty rarely results in a full consumption of it. The Great Gatsby is a pretty easy read, too, but it is steeped in symbolism that would be tough to fully interpret in a cursory read. Complexity != Quality
        Veen 7y ago
- latexr 7y ago
  > the guy with the lamborghini and the bookshelf in his garage. I wasn’t aware of this. Found it[1] and couldn’t last through the whole thing. Right next to it on the search results was a parody[2]. [1]: https://youtu.be/Cv1RJTHf5fk https://youtu.be/Cv1RJTHf5fk [2]: https://youtu.be/kWoAqhdmlxI https://youtu.be/kWoAqhdmlxI
  - C1sc0cat 7y ago
    Would you not just have your engineering manuals and the shop manuals (the real ones ) for your cars.
- thrower123 7y ago
  I have to disagree as strongly as I can. Vacuum up as much as you can, as quickly as you can. Breadth has a depth all it's own. If you narrow in on a handful of "great works" you're not going to get the references and implicit and explicit callbacks to other works, or understand the context of where it sits in relation to the rest of the canon. There are just too damned many good books out there not to sample as wide a selection of them as you can.
  - ThouYS 7y ago
    Exploration and Exploitation, as so often. If you explore much, you'll also learn more likely which books are worth diving into. (Or go for readers digest and similar stuff and then read the real book if the summary is any good)
    - jemorya 7y ago
      I was about to post the same view (though I hadn't bumped into Exploration vs Exploitation before). One year I decided to blow through as many books as I could, and the next year I took my time and re-read the interesting ones much more closely. If I hadn't spend the previous year getting through as many as I could, I wouldn't have found even half of the interesting ones. There is a middle ground between consuming as much as possible and carefully reading every book.
  - Juliate 7y ago
    Depends where you want to spend your time: on substance or on volume. Either way, your lifetime will never be enough to cover everything.
- signa11 7y ago
  indeed, there are some acquaintances who consume books 'filtered' via blinkist ^^). all in the hope of claiming in their conversation circles of how broadly read they are.
  - alphagrep12345 7y ago
    Actually, a friend asked me why don't people read/listen to good summaries (like blinkist) but read the whole book? I read the whole book, but I have no answer for him. Many non fiction books have a single idea with many pages of examples. Say if you want to read the 7 habits of highly effective people, why not just read what those habits are? Why do you have to read through all the examples?
- goblin89 7y ago
  > As Stephen Frears, the director of High Fidelity, worked to translate the best moments of the Nick Hornby novel on which the movie was based, he found to his surprise that the best moments were the voice-overs, especially the direct speeches of Rob Gordon (John Cusack) to the camera. > Frears said, “What we realized was that the novel was a machine to get to twelve crucial speeches in the book about romance and art and music and list-making and masculine distance and the masculine drive for art and the masculine difficulty with intimacy.” > This is the case for most novels: you have to read seven hundred pages to get the handful of insights that were the reason the book was written, and the apparatus of the novel is there as a huge, elaborate, overbuilt stage set.
  - jemorya 7y ago
    >>This is the case for most novels: you have to read seven hundred pages to get the handful of insights that were the reason the book was written, and the apparatus of the novel is there as a huge, elaborate, overbuilt stage set. This is a pet peeve of mine in any type of art, especially installation art or sculpture where a clear and simple point can be quite literally expanded into a elaborate and overbuilt set that doesn't add to the impact. Or worse, obfuscates the original idea. But then there's an explorative type of art where the method and the process is much more meaningful than the insight or punchline that the novel may have been built around. The Waves by Virginia Woolf, for example. (edited to use my words more good)
- aasasd 7y ago
  Except you won't even know what ‘own sake’ to look for if you don't have sizeable baggage accumulated. And most fiction doesn't need thorough reading, even that which is historically important. There were only a few Faulkners or Wallaces. I just finished Marquis de Sade's ‘Justine’—what's so difficult about that book that would require me to sit down to read it? The pornography and torture? Or the wading of the heroine from one misfortune to another? There are only a few philosophical sections in the book, and it's not hard to think about them while they're recounted. Guess what, Plato works fine as audiobooks. Because people were telling to each other arguments such as his, for ages—exactly the reason why you can't read or listen to Socrates, and probably part of the reason for the dialog format. There's always the pause button if you need a minute to mull over what you hear. On top, narrator performances are sometimes delights in their own right. And on the contrary, even Fry's excellent reading can't hide how in the Harry Potter series, topographical descriptions are often clumsy, confusing and claustrophobic, especially in dungeons or forests. Plenty of authors have this problem with places, doubly so with tight ones. Except for Vonnegut, who dances around physical descriptions like they barely concern him. Perhaps someone should've read those passages out loud to Rowling?
- umadon 7y ago
  My favorite instance of this was an Amazon review that rated a book in part based on cost per page of text.
polyvisual 7y ago
My mother was a librarian for 30 years and I gained a love of books from her; I just I wish I had more time to read. Between my day job in Fin Tech, my sideline business in my handmade leather goods and with two children at primary school, I basically have ten minutes before I fall asleep in bed at the end of the day to squeeze in a few pages.
- nostalgk 7y ago
  If you can ever work it in, I recommend making an event out of it. I try to, at least once a month, head down to a cafe I haven't been to yet and read something I've been putting off. It's really cathartic for me at least, and gets me out of the house; I find that what little free time I have at the house outside my busy schedule usually gets squandered doing ???.
- perfunctory 7y ago
  > I just I wish I had more time to read. When I started working two days a week a colleague of mine said he was jealous and wished he could do the same. While he agreed that objectively there was absolutely no reason he couldn't actually do the same. Isn't it about setting priorities? What stops you from for example spending less time on your side business and more time reading? Please don't take it as judgemental, I am really curious.
  - asark 7y ago
    > When I started working two days a week a colleague of mine said he was jealous and wished he could do the same. While he agreed that objectively there was absolutely no reason he couldn't actually do the same. Spoiler warning for a season 1 episode of Black Mirror: this is precisely the gut-punch realization delivered at the end of the "future" "sci-fi" episode Fifteen Million Merits. It is set in the future, and it is sci-fi, but it is not at all about the future or about sci-fi—it's entirely about now. A horrible, pointless, sterile existence—but where are the enforcers, if this is some kind of dystopia? Robot drones, cyborg lackeys of the system packing heat, sadistic future-cops? There are none. Not a single one. Perhaps the outside world was ruined so there's no escape? Oh, but no, it wasn't. It's right there. The episode's given us no reason to believe anyone who wanted to couldn't walk right out into it. But they don't. And neither do we (mostly).
EasyTiger_ 7y ago
I honestly detest the overuse of the word 'consume'
- harowitzblack 7y ago
  drink mango juice, it'll ease the pain
  - necovek 7y ago
    You probably meant "consume mango juice" :)
- fajarsiddiq 7y ago
  I love mango juice drink, i read it before consuming it
DecayingOrganic 7y ago
Nuttall notes that "speed, enjoyment and comprehension are closely linked with one another" (1996: 128). She describes "The vicious circle of the weak reader: Reads slowly; Doesn't enjoy reading; Doesn't read much; Doesn't understand; Reads slowly. . ." (p. 127) and so on. Extensive reading can help readers "enter instead the cycle of growth. . . . The virtuous circle of the good reader: Reads faster; Reads more; Understands better; Enjoys reading; Reads faster. . ." Thus, I would conclude that any activity, be it note taking or a similar endeavor, if proves to be disturbing the reading fluency of the agent, it could result in unintended secondary consequences, as such to foster an aversion to reading, supported by the deduction in reading pleasure and comprehension. At the end, the agent could find itself spending less time reading, the main culprit being the very methods which it sought to maximize reading productivity, as such methods proved to be destructive for its reading fluency.
misiti3780 7y ago
I do something similar to "incremental reading" when reading all books (minus fiction, which i tend not to read). I use kindle highlights and notes to keep track of important sections of the books as i am reading them. Every few days, I export all my current notes to Anki and review them every day. This allows me to retain almost everything I read in some form, and also allows me to read many books at one time, especially technical books, because the topics etc are fresh in my mind. I am not inherently anti-fiction, but there are way too many non-fiction books out there that I want to read that I cannot find them time.
- rshudson 7y ago
  Do you have an automated way to export your notes or is it manual?Would love to hear more about your workflow.
  - misiti3780 7y ago
    It's totally possible to automate the process using Anki Connect (Polar Bookshelf does this). But I tend to do it manually because I like to add context and pictures when appropriate. When Im using it to learn something like a new spoken language, pictures and sounds are very important. When I am using it to learn a new computer language, it is important to provide context and a good example/card to remember some specific programming syntax or feature.
fogus 7y ago
> I find audiobooks are a better medium for consuming fiction. By doing so, you also save your time. There should be a YMMV attached to this sentence because it's certainly not the case for me. The best that I get and retain comprehensibility of audio is 1.75x speed and that's still a lot slower than I can read the same text. Maybe the author meant that it saves time because you can do it in the car, whilst jogging/walking-dog, cleaning the house, etc. But in that case it's running on a background process (or at best time-sharing) which thwarts comprehensibility. YMMV
- Aromasin 7y ago
  I found that as I listened to more and more audio books, I ended up increasing and increasing the speed of playback. 50 or so books in and a 2x speed is quite leisurely listening, which I increase if I find the pace slowing. I don't agree that comprehensibility is a fixed variable with regards to playback speed.
Hemospectrum 7y ago
I was honestly looking forward to an explanation of what utensils to use, and what sort of wines to pair them with. As it turns out, lignin is not especially nutritious to human beings, so perhaps “read books” would be a more helpful choice of words. Obviously the implication is that you only read a book once, but I’m not sure I can get on board with that. I think I’ll go reread Red Dragon, which has a lot to say on the topic of consuming.
- Loughla 7y ago
  This may not be the best forum for this, but I actually have a (what I believe to be) really good story about consuming books. The first time I read Howl by Ginsberg, it was a copy given to me by someone who, as I look back now, was trying to guide my life away from its trajectory at the time. I was young, had, again as I look back now, an un-diagnosed mental illness, and was self-medicating through a combination of illicit drugs and terrible decisions. This man gave me his copy of Howl that was from 1958. It was one of his most prized possessions. The gift came with a lecture, as did most meetings with this man, about my life and the life of the Beat poets back then. He expressed several lessons that have stuck with me to today. He demanded that I read the book that night and consider its themes. There are times in your life when conscious decisions have an everlasting impact. I remember, I vividly remember sitting in my car - where I lived at the time - looking at that book after finishing a cold can of Dinty Moore beef stew. It was mid-October. The leaves were turning brown, but not fully brown yet. It was unseasonably warm, and the mosquitoes were bad enough that I had to use a t-shirt cut in half to cover the window opening, just so I could have some air movement without being eaten alive. And there on my passenger seat was this book. Again, conscious choices. I heard Jim's words, how desperately pleading, but still forceful they were. I think he could see that I was actively trying to burn myself out. So I picked up his, again, 1958 edition of Howl, and started reading. Jesus that poem. It's just the perfect thing that has ever existed. You can taste the sweat and shit and hate and love that Ginsberg poured into that poem. It's over 60 years old, but FUCK is it still so fresh. I remember sitting in that car, just devouring that poem (metaphorically). I, for an instant, saw myself dying, and for what? Some weird anger I couldn't let go of about how my parents treated me when I was a kid? About how my life was seemingly unable to straighten itself out? That book, and I cannot stress this enough, hit me so hard that I broke down. I cried. Ugly, snot faced, loud sobbing, just awful. And I knew, at that moment, that I needed to get help. I knew that I needed to seek out someone, probably Jim (it was Jim) to help me. And I knew that my life would never be the same from that moment. I knew that I had to remember this moment for when it got too hard to cope with 'straight' life. I knew that I needed to do something to be able to remind myself that change was now a part of me, not just something I was doing. I ate the cover of the book.
SolaceQuantum 7y ago
I disagree heavily with the author's understanding of fiction and absorption of ideas in fiction. Fiction IMO is best viewed as an exploration into a concept and not a presentation the way non-fiction is. In the way nonfiction describes the shape of a phenomenon, and is excellently riveting in its placement of the reader in the backdrop of whatever it describes- fiction walks the reader through edge cases and underbellies of the same world. As an avid reader of nonfiction and fiction equally, the two cannot be read with the same eye to gain the most. If one were to continue with the consuming metaphor- it's very possible to eat fried rice with a shallow, metal spoon- but some authenticity is lost in the experience of eating even when it still reaches your mouth and your gullet just the same.
- gibspaulding 7y ago
  I like the idea of fiction "as an exploration into a concept". I've seen a lot of people complain about Cixin Liu's Remembrances of Earth's Past trilogy because of plot holes or unrealistic elements, but I just appreciated the exploring how humanity might respond to an extra terrestrial threat, or what effects future technology, or disastrous climate change might have on human cultures. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and Neal Stephenson's Anathem also come to mind as unique "what if" explorations.
- hinkley 7y ago
  In college I let my roommate borrow a copy of a fairly long fantasy novel with a lot of scene building and heavy on foreshadowing. He returned it the next day and asked for the sequel, which is how I learned he was a speed reader. I was appalled. Part of the book was wondering what every obscure comment five hundred pages ago meant and whether it would come back to bite people. It was like a murder mystery without the murders. If not for the anticipation, other bits if the story arc were actually a bit weak (like many authors, they don’t want an editor but desperately need one). I never did figure out what he was getting from the story when he was getting through them in three or four hours.
rimher 7y ago
Any tips on how to handle reading through more technical books?
- mhh__ 7y ago
  I have a theory that I've made up for being not particularly quick by just throwing time and effort at the problem. Get the book on your phone, and just read it every now and again and if it doesn't make sense, try to use it as a detailed study plan e.g. Many compiler textbooks emphasize the importance of instruction scheduling without necessarily teaching it very well, but now you know that you need to understand instruction scheduling from somewhere. ^ If I'm learning a new topic I'll usually grab one famous book and two more modern one's and alternate between books if something is vague/confusing
- kthejoker2 7y ago
  The Feynman technique is very effective. At the end of each chapter/section, write a one page summary, in as simple language as possible, to teach a hypothetical new student what you just learned. Even better if you can then compare what you just learned to other things you know to clearly separate them in your mind.
- mesaframe 7y ago
  What exactly is your problem? Comprehension or remembering what you read? If it is comprehension then I would suggest picking up better book and/or a dictionary. For remembering what you learn. Practice!
  - playing_colours 7y ago
    what also helps with a technical book is to refresh what you learnt yesterday in the beginning on a session. You will remember things better and load the context.
- baron_harkonnen 7y ago
  I find a common error when reading technical books is to focus on understanding everything deeply the first pass and going through all the exercises. In my experience this quickly leads to burn out and you give up on a book half way through. Don't get me wrong, doing the exercises is important and (perhaps) essential for learning a subject, but the key is not to burn out too quickly. Very often some of the best and most important material is in the latter part of a technical book. So I recommend reading them like technical papers: in multiple passes. If you at least superficially read through the book cover to cover at the very least you'll have a map of the territory. Additionally, it's often the case that more advanced topics in a book give you insight into why the early topics are truly so important. And while exercises are good, you'll learn even faster if you find a practical problem you want to solve related to the material. Most people on HN will say that you must do all the exercises or you can't possibly learn. But I've found the best tactic is to read a technical book until you hit something that scratches a personal itch. For example, maybe you'll be reading a book on deep learning and then late in the book come across a section on latent factors, a problem that you're interested in and didn't know about. Even though you skimmed most of the book until this point, if you want to implement this model you have to go back and really learn all of the pieces you need to build what you want. What if you never find anything that really clicks with you? Then you're probably better off just skimming the book for now. The key part of that is "for now". Suppose you read through a stats book and nothing piques your interest, but you come across the idea that there is some way to run a test such that you control for variance between two groups. We'll perhaps in 5 years you'll come across a problem that requires you to do just this! Because you skimmed the book you'll at least know "statistics has a solution to this problem!" Then you can go back and really learn how this solution works. Personally I recommend against doing every exercise in a book until you need to understand that material to solve a larger, more practical problem. The best way to learn anything technical is to solve a problem with it, but you can't solve a problem with a technique if you don't even know the technique exists, so keep reading!
iserlohnmage 7y ago
The author tried to advocate a "practical view" of fiction books. When your sole aim is to extract some useful idea, why not read the abbreviated version or community reviews on Goodreads?
- Veen 7y ago
  Because fiction is (in part) an exploration of ideas through their expression in narratives, characters, lives, history, emotions, settings, language, and so on. It's not possible to reduce the richness of that exploration to a summary, because you lose everything that made the book worth writing and reading in the first place. The author of the article fundamentally misconstrues what fiction is.
  - latexr 7y ago
    > The author of the article fundamentally misconstrues what fiction is. Which, I believe, is the point the parent comment was making. They don’t seem to be advocating a read of the abbreviated version in general, just to the author of the post seeing as they seem to put fiction’s value on the idea.
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  Or just admit it your the sort of person that finds accountancy to racy for a career.
joppy 7y ago
> Most of the fiction books are based on the presentation of a concept or a group of concepts. This is quite a narrow view of fiction. Story, relationships, worldbuilding, emotion, and language are just some of the reasons I read fiction (and I imagine, just some of the reasons many authors write fiction).
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  And not forgetting the sensawunder - I got into new age SF after I had run through the kids library at around 13. Reading SRD, Ballard and so on
hedgedbycaveats 7y ago
The whole point of fiction books is actually reading them! And we utilize completely different brain functions to read and understand fiction books which is very important in today's world (imagination, creativity, etc.), and hard to replace with anythinig else. It is not about "I know what the book is about"..
te_chris 7y ago
Or just read reviews if you don't actually care about the book. The leading news papers and literary journals all publish reviews of most books. This is just sad, especially the emphasis on consume.
pcora 7y ago
> I like Fantasy and Young Adult stories. What are Young Adult stories? Anyone have any examples? I am genuinely curious.
- acoustep 7y ago
  Harry Potter is probably the most famous example of YA. Good Reads have a whole section for it: https://www.goodreads.com/genres/young-adult https://www.goodreads.com/genres/young-adult
- SolaceQuantum 7y ago
  Young Adult stories are stories that are often where the protagonists are coming-of-age, still dealing with school or part-time jobs, parents are significant in their lives, etc. The themes are often coming-of-age, finding suitable mentors (and avoiding villanous mentors), new love, etc. I'd suggest: The City Of Ember Akata Witch The Hate U Give The Sun Is Also A Star There's also the ones most people know: Silverwing (more children's literature), Harry Potter, Holes...
  - jemorya 7y ago
    Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin
    - merpnderp 7y ago
      One of the best works of fiction I've read as a child and still re-read today.
- badpun 7y ago
  Werewolves? Harry Potter?
polyterative 7y ago
So basically he takes notes
vcavallo 7y ago
how did this post even end up here? OP says he reads and takes notes. is this interesting or news to anyone?
FpUser 7y ago
I do not consume books. I read them
- fajarsiddiq 7y ago
  What you read you will forget, you need to consume it
majos 7y ago
My approach to fiction is different from the author's, but there is a point where we agree: taking notes on books greatly improves the experience. Before and during college I read a fair amount of fiction. Most of it I enjoyed in the moment, and sometimes I even experienced those deep-truth-feeling "whoa" moments. But even then they faded from memory within a few months. Eventually, I'd recommend the book to somebody but, when pressed for a reason why, struggle to produce much beyond "oh, it's just...really good...". This bothered me. If that book was so damn good, why couldn't I articulate even some of that goodness? Solution: now when I read a book, I keep a written list on the bookmark of page numbers for quotes I like. After I finish the book -- or decide to stop reading it -- I go back and type those quotes up in a Google doc. An OK book might have one or two, a book that "speaks to me" might have 20. Even if the book is amazing, a dozen quotes usually provides a reasonable-enough sketch to jog my memory. Finally, I write a few paragraphs of thoughts about the book. This sounds a little tedious, but keeping the list as you go is pretty easy. Typing up the quotes and writing some thoughts might take a half hour. And it seriously improves retention of why I liked or disliked the thing and makes the reading process more participatory. Now, when I recommend a book to someone, I can usually call back some of my notes and form a coherent reason. I'm also more likely to run into a situation and realize "oh, very smart author x wrote an illuminating paragraph about this in book y that makes a point way better than I could, let me ctrl-f my Google doc and fish that out". And this doubles by deepening my appreciation of what I've read. It's like keeping a journal: stepping back, collecting thoughts, and analyzing can be a lot of reward for comparatively small investment, especially next to the amount of time reading the book probably took.
- mxuribe 7y ago
  This is a really great idea; so simple but quite useful! Thanks for sharing!
- Aromasin 7y ago
  I do the same thing. My reasoning is, if you're going to put dozens of hours into a book, or hundreds into a good series, an extra 20 minutes at the end to file away any good memories from that really isn't too much of a time expense in comparison. Sometimes it's even fun. I basically wrote an essay on the Stormlight archive (probably my favourite ever series) which is something teenage me doing my English Literature GCSE's would have gagged at the thought of.
nohope 7y ago
This is like: you can double the number of songs you listen if you fast-forward the player 2x!
sciencewolf 7y ago
This article was a bit infuriating-- not because of what the techniques are, but why they were presented. Here's an analysis at https://algodaily.com/lessons/how-to-consume-books-in-whatever-way-you-want https://algodaily.com/lessons/how-to-consume-books-in-whatev...
spookybones 7y ago
Fiction, among other things, is about learning empathy, multiple viewpoints and moral frameworks, and interiority. Some say, by the end of a good fiction work, you will know the protagonist more than you know anyone in your life because you will never have that level of access to another person's consciousness. These points, of course, aren't exclusive to fiction. But, fiction is exceptionally good at them. When I hear someone say they read only non-fiction, more often than not, they reveal an impoverished imagination.
smacktoward 7y ago
> Most of the fiction books are based on the presentation of a concept or a group of concepts. The concept that presented by the book is the knowledge you’re gaining. This knowledge is small compared to non-fiction. Rest of the book is for your entertainment. What? Why would you think that the point of fiction is to coat a set of shallow ideas with a thick layer of empty-calorie entertainment? > I like Fantasy and Young Adult stories. Oh.
- asark 7y ago
  There are exceptions, but an awful lot of "I read so fast and just love reading and read like three books a week" stories end up at "oh, you mean YA and fantasy and slim, low-calorie business and self-help books. OK I guess." I read some of that stuff too, but I wouldn't dream of using my speed at reading them (or anything, in fact, but especially those) as a point of pride. I'm old enough not to be at all ashamed of them and I'd happily talk about reading them, but no way I'd brag about how many books I get through if that's most of what I've been reading. I mean I can go grab some Goosebumps books and read like 10 of those in a day if I want. They have chapters and everything so that counts, right? Then I can get some shirts and tote bags and pins and bumper stickers telling everyone what a reader I am. There are lots of sorts of books. And if you're using that as your basis for what fiction is then you've got some learning to do, to put it mildly. [EDIT] just to highlight a part you quoted again, this is so, so frustrating to read: > Most of the fiction books are based on the presentation of a concept or a group of concepts. The concept that presented by the book is the knowledge you’re gaining. This knowledge is small compared to non-fiction. Rest of the book is for your entertainment. No. There are certain kinds of fiction that, when done right, have you stopping at most every couple pages to think and absorb and reflect, if you're reading it in such a way that you'll get anything out of it. If you're reading it the way you read Terry Goodkind probably you won't, and you'll have a bad time, and maybe think it's "bad" and "boring" and so on. Just like listening to 80s top-40 pop music doesn't really prepare you to give a deep listen to Miles Davis, or Beethoven, or hell even Public Enemy, despite it all being music.
mubaris 7y ago
I'm trying to consume all these comments
- moab 7y ago
  I don't think anyone is trying to be mean/overly critical with their comments here. I hope you keep writing/submitting to HN.
rinze 7y ago
I just read them.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book https://www.worldcat.org/title/how-to-read-a-book/oclc/907377198 https://www.worldcat.org/title/how-to-read-a-book/oclc/90737...

105 points by mubaris 7y ago

>his knowledge is small compared to non-fiction. Rest of the book is for your entertainment. And fiction does a good job of presenting the idea. To absorb the idea, it doesn’t require a thorough reading of the book (sometimes it does). For the same reason, I find audiobooks are a better medium for consuming fiction. By doing so, you also save your time. this is such a horrible take on fiction that I've seen popup in recent times. 'Consuming' fiction as a sort of pokemon card collection and to 'acquire knowledge'. Better read a few works of fiction deeply and genuinely for their own sake rather than trying to vacuum up books in the name of some shallow self improvement. This post reminds me of the guy with the lamborghini and the bookshelf in his garage.

moab 7y ago
Absolutely agree. Unfortunately this kind of "always optimizing" viewpoint seems to have spread like a virus over this past decade. It is sometimes difficult to remember that spending time to read/understand things slowly is not a waste of time, but an important way to appreciate the work of a master in a way that speeding through it at 1.5x on an audiobook simply will not provide. Do we speed-walk through the Louvre to see the masterpieces as quickly as possible?
- alexhutcheson 7y ago
  > Do we speed-walk through the Louvre to see the masterpieces as quickly as possible? This cracked me up, because I actually did that. I only had a couple hours, and the size of the museum is almost overwhelming.
  - Rainymood 7y ago
    I too did this ... would not recommend trying to run through the louvre in 1 day. I was kind of "forced" to (only had 1 day and I guess a rare case of FOMO). Spend at least 2-3 days there. It's huge with so much masterpieces. The Mona Lisa was a disappointment.
    - Aromasin 7y ago
      I imagine the Mona Lisa is fantastic if you get to inspect it in close detail. Trying to poke your head over 100 flustered tourist, through a sea of arms, phones and cameras, is probably not the best way to appreciate it.
  - louhike 7y ago
    We often say in France that it's better to look at what part of the Louvre are of the most interest to you and only go to these ones. Even spending several hours in a row is no use as you will probably be tired in the end and won't appreciate what you'll see.
ohaideredevs 7y ago
I hate the 2-day book "Lambo guy", but this has nothing to do with him. Edit: "Hate" is giving him too much credit, but I do think he is profiting of fooling already confused and lost people. I learned some important lessons in life from fiction books, which quite literally changed my life. Good fiction reflects reality - that's why authors like Branden Sanderson will always be a complete joke, they don't understand anything meaningful "irl".
- bryal 7y ago
  Right. God forbid you enjoy a book because of the characters and the story. Only philosophical, topical, and metaphorical works matter!
nostalgk 7y ago
Exactly. Reading any good book and fully understanding it takes a lot more than a simple once-through hearing. Sure, you might catch the themes and be able to have a water cooler conversation, but the best books are the ones that aren't page turners; ones that you spend all night on, and only make it through 20 pages. Besides, when I read something really good, like Hitchhiker's Guide, I usually flip it over and start it again!
- Kiro 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure most fiction books I read don't have any deeper meaning. You make it sound like everything out there is some deep philosophical hard sci-fi. I would never want to read something where I spend the whole night just to make it through 20 pages. Sounds exhausting and not enjoyable at all.
  - jimhefferon 7y ago
    > most fiction books I read don't have any deeper meaning That's fine; keep doing what you enjoy. But there is life-changing fiction, so it is not as though there is nothing a person could choose to read that would be great.
    - Kiro 7y ago
      Both you and the post I replied to seem to imply that fiction books without any deeper meaning cannot be good or great.
      - nostalgk 7y ago
        This is not what I meant to imply. While I prefer heavier reads, my point was that a cursory reading of any piece of literature pretty rarely results in a full consumption of it. The Great Gatsby is a pretty easy read, too, but it is steeped in symbolism that would be tough to fully interpret in a cursory read. Complexity != Quality
      - Veen 7y ago
latexr 7y ago
> the guy with the lamborghini and the bookshelf in his garage. I wasn’t aware of this. Found it[1] and couldn’t last through the whole thing. Right next to it on the search results was a parody[2]. [1]: https://youtu.be/Cv1RJTHf5fk https://youtu.be/Cv1RJTHf5fk [2]: https://youtu.be/kWoAqhdmlxI https://youtu.be/kWoAqhdmlxI
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  Would you not just have your engineering manuals and the shop manuals (the real ones ) for your cars.
thrower123 7y ago
I have to disagree as strongly as I can. Vacuum up as much as you can, as quickly as you can. Breadth has a depth all it's own. If you narrow in on a handful of "great works" you're not going to get the references and implicit and explicit callbacks to other works, or understand the context of where it sits in relation to the rest of the canon. There are just too damned many good books out there not to sample as wide a selection of them as you can.
- ThouYS 7y ago
  Exploration and Exploitation, as so often. If you explore much, you'll also learn more likely which books are worth diving into. (Or go for readers digest and similar stuff and then read the real book if the summary is any good)
  - jemorya 7y ago
    I was about to post the same view (though I hadn't bumped into Exploration vs Exploitation before). One year I decided to blow through as many books as I could, and the next year I took my time and re-read the interesting ones much more closely. If I hadn't spend the previous year getting through as many as I could, I wouldn't have found even half of the interesting ones. There is a middle ground between consuming as much as possible and carefully reading every book.
- Juliate 7y ago
  Depends where you want to spend your time: on substance or on volume. Either way, your lifetime will never be enough to cover everything.
signa11 7y ago
indeed, there are some acquaintances who consume books 'filtered' via blinkist ^^). all in the hope of claiming in their conversation circles of how broadly read they are.
- alphagrep12345 7y ago
  Actually, a friend asked me why don't people read/listen to good summaries (like blinkist) but read the whole book? I read the whole book, but I have no answer for him. Many non fiction books have a single idea with many pages of examples. Say if you want to read the 7 habits of highly effective people, why not just read what those habits are? Why do you have to read through all the examples?
goblin89 7y ago
> As Stephen Frears, the director of High Fidelity, worked to translate the best moments of the Nick Hornby novel on which the movie was based, he found to his surprise that the best moments were the voice-overs, especially the direct speeches of Rob Gordon (John Cusack) to the camera. > Frears said, “What we realized was that the novel was a machine to get to twelve crucial speeches in the book about romance and art and music and list-making and masculine distance and the masculine drive for art and the masculine difficulty with intimacy.” > This is the case for most novels: you have to read seven hundred pages to get the handful of insights that were the reason the book was written, and the apparatus of the novel is there as a huge, elaborate, overbuilt stage set.
- jemorya 7y ago
  >>This is the case for most novels: you have to read seven hundred pages to get the handful of insights that were the reason the book was written, and the apparatus of the novel is there as a huge, elaborate, overbuilt stage set. This is a pet peeve of mine in any type of art, especially installation art or sculpture where a clear and simple point can be quite literally expanded into a elaborate and overbuilt set that doesn't add to the impact. Or worse, obfuscates the original idea. But then there's an explorative type of art where the method and the process is much more meaningful than the insight or punchline that the novel may have been built around. The Waves by Virginia Woolf, for example. (edited to use my words more good)
aasasd 7y ago
Except you won't even know what ‘own sake’ to look for if you don't have sizeable baggage accumulated. And most fiction doesn't need thorough reading, even that which is historically important. There were only a few Faulkners or Wallaces. I just finished Marquis de Sade's ‘Justine’—what's so difficult about that book that would require me to sit down to read it? The pornography and torture? Or the wading of the heroine from one misfortune to another? There are only a few philosophical sections in the book, and it's not hard to think about them while they're recounted. Guess what, Plato works fine as audiobooks. Because people were telling to each other arguments such as his, for ages—exactly the reason why you can't read or listen to Socrates, and probably part of the reason for the dialog format. There's always the pause button if you need a minute to mull over what you hear. On top, narrator performances are sometimes delights in their own right. And on the contrary, even Fry's excellent reading can't hide how in the Harry Potter series, topographical descriptions are often clumsy, confusing and claustrophobic, especially in dungeons or forests. Plenty of authors have this problem with places, doubly so with tight ones. Except for Vonnegut, who dances around physical descriptions like they barely concern him. Perhaps someone should've read those passages out loud to Rowling?
umadon 7y ago
My favorite instance of this was an Amazon review that rated a book in part based on cost per page of text.

polyvisual 7y ago

My mother was a librarian for 30 years and I gained a love of books from her; I just I wish I had more time to read. Between my day job in Fin Tech, my sideline business in my handmade leather goods and with two children at primary school, I basically have ten minutes before I fall asleep in bed at the end of the day to squeeze in a few pages.

nostalgk 7y ago
If you can ever work it in, I recommend making an event out of it. I try to, at least once a month, head down to a cafe I haven't been to yet and read something I've been putting off. It's really cathartic for me at least, and gets me out of the house; I find that what little free time I have at the house outside my busy schedule usually gets squandered doing ???.
perfunctory 7y ago
> I just I wish I had more time to read. When I started working two days a week a colleague of mine said he was jealous and wished he could do the same. While he agreed that objectively there was absolutely no reason he couldn't actually do the same. Isn't it about setting priorities? What stops you from for example spending less time on your side business and more time reading? Please don't take it as judgemental, I am really curious.
- asark 7y ago
  > When I started working two days a week a colleague of mine said he was jealous and wished he could do the same. While he agreed that objectively there was absolutely no reason he couldn't actually do the same. Spoiler warning for a season 1 episode of Black Mirror: this is precisely the gut-punch realization delivered at the end of the "future" "sci-fi" episode Fifteen Million Merits. It is set in the future, and it is sci-fi, but it is not at all about the future or about sci-fi—it's entirely about now. A horrible, pointless, sterile existence—but where are the enforcers, if this is some kind of dystopia? Robot drones, cyborg lackeys of the system packing heat, sadistic future-cops? There are none. Not a single one. Perhaps the outside world was ruined so there's no escape? Oh, but no, it wasn't. It's right there. The episode's given us no reason to believe anyone who wanted to couldn't walk right out into it. But they don't. And neither do we (mostly).

EasyTiger_ 7y ago

I honestly detest the overuse of the word 'consume'

harowitzblack 7y ago
drink mango juice, it'll ease the pain
- necovek 7y ago
  You probably meant "consume mango juice" :)
fajarsiddiq 7y ago
I love mango juice drink, i read it before consuming it

DecayingOrganic 7y ago

Nuttall notes that "speed, enjoyment and comprehension are closely linked with one another" (1996: 128). She describes "The vicious circle of the weak reader: Reads slowly; Doesn't enjoy reading; Doesn't read much; Doesn't understand; Reads slowly. . ." (p. 127) and so on. Extensive reading can help readers "enter instead the cycle of growth. . . . The virtuous circle of the good reader: Reads faster; Reads more; Understands better; Enjoys reading; Reads faster. . ." Thus, I would conclude that any activity, be it note taking or a similar endeavor, if proves to be disturbing the reading fluency of the agent, it could result in unintended secondary consequences, as such to foster an aversion to reading, supported by the deduction in reading pleasure and comprehension. At the end, the agent could find itself spending less time reading, the main culprit being the very methods which it sought to maximize reading productivity, as such methods proved to be destructive for its reading fluency.

misiti3780 7y ago

I do something similar to "incremental reading" when reading all books (minus fiction, which i tend not to read). I use kindle highlights and notes to keep track of important sections of the books as i am reading them. Every few days, I export all my current notes to Anki and review them every day. This allows me to retain almost everything I read in some form, and also allows me to read many books at one time, especially technical books, because the topics etc are fresh in my mind. I am not inherently anti-fiction, but there are way too many non-fiction books out there that I want to read that I cannot find them time.

rshudson 7y ago
Do you have an automated way to export your notes or is it manual?Would love to hear more about your workflow.
- misiti3780 7y ago
  It's totally possible to automate the process using Anki Connect (Polar Bookshelf does this). But I tend to do it manually because I like to add context and pictures when appropriate. When Im using it to learn something like a new spoken language, pictures and sounds are very important. When I am using it to learn a new computer language, it is important to provide context and a good example/card to remember some specific programming syntax or feature.

fogus 7y ago

> I find audiobooks are a better medium for consuming fiction. By doing so, you also save your time. There should be a YMMV attached to this sentence because it's certainly not the case for me. The best that I get and retain comprehensibility of audio is 1.75x speed and that's still a lot slower than I can read the same text. Maybe the author meant that it saves time because you can do it in the car, whilst jogging/walking-dog, cleaning the house, etc. But in that case it's running on a background process (or at best time-sharing) which thwarts comprehensibility. YMMV

Aromasin 7y ago
I found that as I listened to more and more audio books, I ended up increasing and increasing the speed of playback. 50 or so books in and a 2x speed is quite leisurely listening, which I increase if I find the pace slowing. I don't agree that comprehensibility is a fixed variable with regards to playback speed.

Hemospectrum 7y ago

I was honestly looking forward to an explanation of what utensils to use, and what sort of wines to pair them with. As it turns out, lignin is not especially nutritious to human beings, so perhaps “read books” would be a more helpful choice of words. Obviously the implication is that you only read a book once, but I’m not sure I can get on board with that. I think I’ll go reread Red Dragon, which has a lot to say on the topic of consuming.

Loughla 7y ago
This may not be the best forum for this, but I actually have a (what I believe to be) really good story about consuming books. The first time I read Howl by Ginsberg, it was a copy given to me by someone who, as I look back now, was trying to guide my life away from its trajectory at the time. I was young, had, again as I look back now, an un-diagnosed mental illness, and was self-medicating through a combination of illicit drugs and terrible decisions. This man gave me his copy of Howl that was from 1958. It was one of his most prized possessions. The gift came with a lecture, as did most meetings with this man, about my life and the life of the Beat poets back then. He expressed several lessons that have stuck with me to today. He demanded that I read the book that night and consider its themes. There are times in your life when conscious decisions have an everlasting impact. I remember, I vividly remember sitting in my car - where I lived at the time - looking at that book after finishing a cold can of Dinty Moore beef stew. It was mid-October. The leaves were turning brown, but not fully brown yet. It was unseasonably warm, and the mosquitoes were bad enough that I had to use a t-shirt cut in half to cover the window opening, just so I could have some air movement without being eaten alive. And there on my passenger seat was this book. Again, conscious choices. I heard Jim's words, how desperately pleading, but still forceful they were. I think he could see that I was actively trying to burn myself out. So I picked up his, again, 1958 edition of Howl, and started reading. Jesus that poem. It's just the perfect thing that has ever existed. You can taste the sweat and shit and hate and love that Ginsberg poured into that poem. It's over 60 years old, but FUCK is it still so fresh. I remember sitting in that car, just devouring that poem (metaphorically). I, for an instant, saw myself dying, and for what? Some weird anger I couldn't let go of about how my parents treated me when I was a kid? About how my life was seemingly unable to straighten itself out? That book, and I cannot stress this enough, hit me so hard that I broke down. I cried. Ugly, snot faced, loud sobbing, just awful. And I knew, at that moment, that I needed to get help. I knew that I needed to seek out someone, probably Jim (it was Jim) to help me. And I knew that my life would never be the same from that moment. I knew that I had to remember this moment for when it got too hard to cope with 'straight' life. I knew that I needed to do something to be able to remind myself that change was now a part of me, not just something I was doing. I ate the cover of the book.

SolaceQuantum 7y ago

I disagree heavily with the author's understanding of fiction and absorption of ideas in fiction. Fiction IMO is best viewed as an exploration into a concept and not a presentation the way non-fiction is. In the way nonfiction describes the shape of a phenomenon, and is excellently riveting in its placement of the reader in the backdrop of whatever it describes- fiction walks the reader through edge cases and underbellies of the same world. As an avid reader of nonfiction and fiction equally, the two cannot be read with the same eye to gain the most. If one were to continue with the consuming metaphor- it's very possible to eat fried rice with a shallow, metal spoon- but some authenticity is lost in the experience of eating even when it still reaches your mouth and your gullet just the same.

gibspaulding 7y ago
I like the idea of fiction "as an exploration into a concept". I've seen a lot of people complain about Cixin Liu's Remembrances of Earth's Past trilogy because of plot holes or unrealistic elements, but I just appreciated the exploring how humanity might respond to an extra terrestrial threat, or what effects future technology, or disastrous climate change might have on human cultures. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and Neal Stephenson's Anathem also come to mind as unique "what if" explorations.
hinkley 7y ago
In college I let my roommate borrow a copy of a fairly long fantasy novel with a lot of scene building and heavy on foreshadowing. He returned it the next day and asked for the sequel, which is how I learned he was a speed reader. I was appalled. Part of the book was wondering what every obscure comment five hundred pages ago meant and whether it would come back to bite people. It was like a murder mystery without the murders. If not for the anticipation, other bits if the story arc were actually a bit weak (like many authors, they don’t want an editor but desperately need one). I never did figure out what he was getting from the story when he was getting through them in three or four hours.

rimher 7y ago

Any tips on how to handle reading through more technical books?

mhh__ 7y ago
I have a theory that I've made up for being not particularly quick by just throwing time and effort at the problem. Get the book on your phone, and just read it every now and again and if it doesn't make sense, try to use it as a detailed study plan e.g. Many compiler textbooks emphasize the importance of instruction scheduling without necessarily teaching it very well, but now you know that you need to understand instruction scheduling from somewhere. ^ If I'm learning a new topic I'll usually grab one famous book and two more modern one's and alternate between books if something is vague/confusing
kthejoker2 7y ago
The Feynman technique is very effective. At the end of each chapter/section, write a one page summary, in as simple language as possible, to teach a hypothetical new student what you just learned. Even better if you can then compare what you just learned to other things you know to clearly separate them in your mind.
mesaframe 7y ago
What exactly is your problem? Comprehension or remembering what you read? If it is comprehension then I would suggest picking up better book and/or a dictionary. For remembering what you learn. Practice!
- playing_colours 7y ago
  what also helps with a technical book is to refresh what you learnt yesterday in the beginning on a session. You will remember things better and load the context.
baron_harkonnen 7y ago
I find a common error when reading technical books is to focus on understanding everything deeply the first pass and going through all the exercises. In my experience this quickly leads to burn out and you give up on a book half way through. Don't get me wrong, doing the exercises is important and (perhaps) essential for learning a subject, but the key is not to burn out too quickly. Very often some of the best and most important material is in the latter part of a technical book. So I recommend reading them like technical papers: in multiple passes. If you at least superficially read through the book cover to cover at the very least you'll have a map of the territory. Additionally, it's often the case that more advanced topics in a book give you insight into why the early topics are truly so important. And while exercises are good, you'll learn even faster if you find a practical problem you want to solve related to the material. Most people on HN will say that you must do all the exercises or you can't possibly learn. But I've found the best tactic is to read a technical book until you hit something that scratches a personal itch. For example, maybe you'll be reading a book on deep learning and then late in the book come across a section on latent factors, a problem that you're interested in and didn't know about. Even though you skimmed most of the book until this point, if you want to implement this model you have to go back and really learn all of the pieces you need to build what you want. What if you never find anything that really clicks with you? Then you're probably better off just skimming the book for now. The key part of that is "for now". Suppose you read through a stats book and nothing piques your interest, but you come across the idea that there is some way to run a test such that you control for variance between two groups. We'll perhaps in 5 years you'll come across a problem that requires you to do just this! Because you skimmed the book you'll at least know "statistics has a solution to this problem!" Then you can go back and really learn how this solution works. Personally I recommend against doing every exercise in a book until you need to understand that material to solve a larger, more practical problem. The best way to learn anything technical is to solve a problem with it, but you can't solve a problem with a technique if you don't even know the technique exists, so keep reading!

iserlohnmage 7y ago

The author tried to advocate a "practical view" of fiction books. When your sole aim is to extract some useful idea, why not read the abbreviated version or community reviews on Goodreads?

Veen 7y ago
Because fiction is (in part) an exploration of ideas through their expression in narratives, characters, lives, history, emotions, settings, language, and so on. It's not possible to reduce the richness of that exploration to a summary, because you lose everything that made the book worth writing and reading in the first place. The author of the article fundamentally misconstrues what fiction is.
- latexr 7y ago
  > The author of the article fundamentally misconstrues what fiction is. Which, I believe, is the point the parent comment was making. They don’t seem to be advocating a read of the abbreviated version in general, just to the author of the post seeing as they seem to put fiction’s value on the idea.
C1sc0cat 7y ago
Or just admit it your the sort of person that finds accountancy to racy for a career.

joppy 7y ago

> Most of the fiction books are based on the presentation of a concept or a group of concepts. This is quite a narrow view of fiction. Story, relationships, worldbuilding, emotion, and language are just some of the reasons I read fiction (and I imagine, just some of the reasons many authors write fiction).

C1sc0cat 7y ago
And not forgetting the sensawunder - I got into new age SF after I had run through the kids library at around 13. Reading SRD, Ballard and so on

hedgedbycaveats 7y ago

The whole point of fiction books is actually reading them! And we utilize completely different brain functions to read and understand fiction books which is very important in today's world (imagination, creativity, etc.), and hard to replace with anythinig else. It is not about "I know what the book is about"..

te_chris 7y ago

Or just read reviews if you don't actually care about the book. The leading news papers and literary journals all publish reviews of most books. This is just sad, especially the emphasis on consume.

pcora 7y ago

> I like Fantasy and Young Adult stories. What are Young Adult stories? Anyone have any examples? I am genuinely curious.

acoustep 7y ago
Harry Potter is probably the most famous example of YA. Good Reads have a whole section for it: https://www.goodreads.com/genres/young-adult https://www.goodreads.com/genres/young-adult
SolaceQuantum 7y ago
Young Adult stories are stories that are often where the protagonists are coming-of-age, still dealing with school or part-time jobs, parents are significant in their lives, etc. The themes are often coming-of-age, finding suitable mentors (and avoiding villanous mentors), new love, etc. I'd suggest: The City Of Ember Akata Witch The Hate U Give The Sun Is Also A Star There's also the ones most people know: Silverwing (more children's literature), Harry Potter, Holes...
- jemorya 7y ago
  Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin
  - merpnderp 7y ago
    One of the best works of fiction I've read as a child and still re-read today.
badpun 7y ago
Werewolves? Harry Potter?

polyterative 7y ago

So basically he takes notes

vcavallo 7y ago

how did this post even end up here? OP says he reads and takes notes. is this interesting or news to anyone?

FpUser 7y ago

I do not consume books. I read them

fajarsiddiq 7y ago
What you read you will forget, you need to consume it

majos 7y ago

My approach to fiction is different from the author's, but there is a point where we agree: taking notes on books greatly improves the experience. Before and during college I read a fair amount of fiction. Most of it I enjoyed in the moment, and sometimes I even experienced those deep-truth-feeling "whoa" moments. But even then they faded from memory within a few months. Eventually, I'd recommend the book to somebody but, when pressed for a reason why, struggle to produce much beyond "oh, it's just...really good...". This bothered me. If that book was so damn good, why couldn't I articulate even some of that goodness? Solution: now when I read a book, I keep a written list on the bookmark of page numbers for quotes I like. After I finish the book -- or decide to stop reading it -- I go back and type those quotes up in a Google doc. An OK book might have one or two, a book that "speaks to me" might have 20. Even if the book is amazing, a dozen quotes usually provides a reasonable-enough sketch to jog my memory. Finally, I write a few paragraphs of thoughts about the book. This sounds a little tedious, but keeping the list as you go is pretty easy. Typing up the quotes and writing some thoughts might take a half hour. And it seriously improves retention of why I liked or disliked the thing and makes the reading process more participatory. Now, when I recommend a book to someone, I can usually call back some of my notes and form a coherent reason. I'm also more likely to run into a situation and realize "oh, very smart author x wrote an illuminating paragraph about this in book y that makes a point way better than I could, let me ctrl-f my Google doc and fish that out". And this doubles by deepening my appreciation of what I've read. It's like keeping a journal: stepping back, collecting thoughts, and analyzing can be a lot of reward for comparatively small investment, especially next to the amount of time reading the book probably took.

mxuribe 7y ago
This is a really great idea; so simple but quite useful! Thanks for sharing!
Aromasin 7y ago
I do the same thing. My reasoning is, if you're going to put dozens of hours into a book, or hundreds into a good series, an extra 20 minutes at the end to file away any good memories from that really isn't too much of a time expense in comparison. Sometimes it's even fun. I basically wrote an essay on the Stormlight archive (probably my favourite ever series) which is something teenage me doing my English Literature GCSE's would have gagged at the thought of.

nohope 7y ago

This is like: you can double the number of songs you listen if you fast-forward the player 2x!

sciencewolf 7y ago

This article was a bit infuriating-- not because of what the techniques are, but why they were presented. Here's an analysis at https://algodaily.com/lessons/how-to-consume-books-in-whatever-way-you-want https://algodaily.com/lessons/how-to-consume-books-in-whatev...

spookybones 7y ago

Fiction, among other things, is about learning empathy, multiple viewpoints and moral frameworks, and interiority. Some say, by the end of a good fiction work, you will know the protagonist more than you know anyone in your life because you will never have that level of access to another person's consciousness. These points, of course, aren't exclusive to fiction. But, fiction is exceptionally good at them. When I hear someone say they read only non-fiction, more often than not, they reveal an impoverished imagination.

smacktoward 7y ago

> Most of the fiction books are based on the presentation of a concept or a group of concepts. The concept that presented by the book is the knowledge you’re gaining. This knowledge is small compared to non-fiction. Rest of the book is for your entertainment. What? Why would you think that the point of fiction is to coat a set of shallow ideas with a thick layer of empty-calorie entertainment? > I like Fantasy and Young Adult stories. Oh.

asark 7y ago
There are exceptions, but an awful lot of "I read so fast and just love reading and read like three books a week" stories end up at "oh, you mean YA and fantasy and slim, low-calorie business and self-help books. OK I guess." I read some of that stuff too, but I wouldn't dream of using my speed at reading them (or anything, in fact, but especially those) as a point of pride. I'm old enough not to be at all ashamed of them and I'd happily talk about reading them, but no way I'd brag about how many books I get through if that's most of what I've been reading. I mean I can go grab some Goosebumps books and read like 10 of those in a day if I want. They have chapters and everything so that counts, right? Then I can get some shirts and tote bags and pins and bumper stickers telling everyone what a reader I am. There are lots of sorts of books. And if you're using that as your basis for what fiction is then you've got some learning to do, to put it mildly. [EDIT] just to highlight a part you quoted again, this is so, so frustrating to read: > Most of the fiction books are based on the presentation of a concept or a group of concepts. The concept that presented by the book is the knowledge you’re gaining. This knowledge is small compared to non-fiction. Rest of the book is for your entertainment. No. There are certain kinds of fiction that, when done right, have you stopping at most every couple pages to think and absorb and reflect, if you're reading it in such a way that you'll get anything out of it. If you're reading it the way you read Terry Goodkind probably you won't, and you'll have a bad time, and maybe think it's "bad" and "boring" and so on. Just like listening to 80s top-40 pop music doesn't really prepare you to give a deep listen to Miles Davis, or Beethoven, or hell even Public Enemy, despite it all being music.

mubaris 7y ago

I'm trying to consume all these comments

moab 7y ago
I don't think anyone is trying to be mean/overly critical with their comments here. I hope you keep writing/submitting to HN.

rinze 7y ago

I just read them.

dredmorbius 7y ago

Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book https://www.worldcat.org/title/how-to-read-a-book/oclc/907377198 https://www.worldcat.org/title/how-to-read-a-book/oclc/90737...