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I took a ten year break from reading books. Instead I programmed, read blog posts, followed the news, and had a few good talks with friends here and there. Whe
by tibbar 5y ago
I took a ten year break from reading books. Instead I programmed, read blog posts, followed the news, and had a few good talks with friends here and there.
When I started reading again my world caught on fire. A good book is vastly, unimaginably better than doom scrolling, and the wealth of ideas and history and inspiration that starts to accumulate as you read more is life changing. For example, I learned how to properly build habits, how my childhood in a cult came about and what other people who left have done to come to terms with it, and endless interesting facts about lifelong hobbies and interests. Reading is great.
- lostmsu 5y agoGood books are hard to come by after you read quite a few. To me most now read like rehashes of what I read before.
- tibbar 5y agoThat’s interesting! I have interests in history and fiction as well so the surface area probably feels much larger to me. I’m also a slow reader — sadly, though my siblings can read hundreds of pages an hour, I’m more like ‘hours per hundred page.’
- dgfitz 5y agoAh but how do you know if a book is good until you’ve read it? I’m an avid reader and I’ve yet to run out of new books to read, going on 25 years of reading novels at this point.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 5y agoSame way that you won’t know whether drugs are really that bad unless you’ve personally tried them, which doesn’t mean you must try them. You build a taste for books, skim through it, read reviews from people you trust... I suppose everyone has their own way of measuring a book before diving into it, and one can of course quit in the middle of it should one make the wrong decision.
- filoleg 5y agoBad analogy. The entire premise of that hypothetical situation with trying drugs is that the potential risk of trying the bad ones is high (potentially your health or life). In contrast, what’s the price of reading a book and realizing it is awful? Literally nothing except the time you spent reading it. Hardly life-ruining.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 5y agoIf your problem is just the metaphor, just replace it with someone's momma's cooking that everyone raves about. You can taste a bit of it and you don't have to eat the whole thing, neither do you have to try it. The point stands. And honestly the concern is rather petty.
- dudeman13 5y agoIt's seriously annoying how people get pedantic with metaphors. It's a damn metaphor - if we wanted to be precise we'd roll with the whole damn explanation without metaphors.
- WalterBright 5y ago> do you know if a book is good Usually by the cover.
- WalterBright 5y agoNo, I'm not kidding. Publishers aren't stupid, they're going to put their best foot forward on the front & back covers. For example, for scifi, the following lines on the back cover are cause for putting it back on the shelf: 1. journey to the end of the universe 2. journey to the end of time 3. the fate of the galaxy hangs in the balance Those novels always turn out to be bad :-/
- Jensson 5y agoHitchhikers guide to the galaxy does all of those and is worth a read. Mostly you want to read each story template roughly once, hitchhikers guide to the galaxy is pretty unique and touches on a lot of story templates so is efficient.
- WalterBright 5y agoHHG is satire, which is judged differently.
- Jensson 5y agoBut I do think that simple stories are also worth a read if you haven't read those kinds yet. There is a reason for kids to read simple stories, if you didn't read them before it might be worth to read them even as an adult to fill a hole. So basically if it looks like you have already read the story then there is no need to read it again. Btw, I didn't downvote you, I never up/downvote people. I do like responding to downvoted people though.
- Izkata 5y agoThe back cover of that book begins: > Seconds before Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who, for the last fifteen years, has been posing as an out-of-work actor. The second paragraph back there does start "Together, this dynamic pair begin a journey through space aided by...", but IMO the Hitchhiker's Guide doesn't really fit the proposed pattern very well: There's a lot more to it than just the bland stock phrases.
- scruple 5y agoI put down at least 1/4 to 1/3 of the books that I start. I have very limited time to read (3 kids under 3 years, etc.). I won't spend that resource doing something that I am not enjoying. How do you do it?
- dgfitz 5y agoAbout to have our 3rd so I can relate. I have a backlog of books and I just slowly chip away at them. Nights, nap time on the weekends sometimes.
- hnthrowaway0315 5y agoOne thing I found out a few days ago was that I was extremely easy to be distracted when learning from computer resources (pdf, online videos). I wish I could revert to my university learning style (late 1990s~early 2000s) which has zero internet and we had to figure out things from books even for experimental classes (e.g. back then no one had the luxury to have one's own electronics lab for introductory electronics classes, so we had to cherish the time in lan sections and read books for questions we couldn't solve in lab). It was a bit like learning programming in 60/70s -- you submit a program to mainframe and get the result next morning.
- jjtheblunt 5y ago> doom scrolling that made me think "what a great term"
- WalterBright 5y agoReading the right books is great. 95% of published books are garbage (much like 95% of TV). I've read an awful lot of books, and finally realized that very few books are worth the time to read.
- mlyle 5y agoI have started to find a perverse pleasure in reading bad books. At least this is why I tell myself when I am wringing reading out of something awful I've bought. "Oh my god, they're not going to do predictable thing __X__ are they? Bwahaha" "Hahahaha, this dialog is completely unbelievable" "Welp, that unwinds all the interesting things happening in that character's arc." A couple things that laughter can't even redeem: - Incessant deus ex machina. The prose can be good, the dialog believable, the world interesting, and the characters likable... but if all the problems just get waved away in some random unpredictable way, that's infuriating. - Even worse: when a POV character has an ace up their sleeve the entire time that could have been played at any point to avoid all the conflict, and the only reason why we're in suspense is that POV character didn't share that with us.
- gokdisjtrdcvv5 5y agoI’ve done the same but with TV! My all time favorite TV show is “The 100”. It’s incredibly dumb and has so many plot holes it’s honestly amazing. However it never gets boring! Really would recommend it if you like that kind of stuff.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- porker 5y agoSame, but my genre has become terrible historical romance. I get many groans of enjoyment from the terrible similes (no, you can't compare what she's experiencing to that; it wasn't invented for another 150 years), the inaccuracies, and being able to plot the whole thing within the first 10 pages mostly accurately. These books give me hope I could write a book.
- smurda 5y ago“When you’re through learning, you’re through.” -John Wooden
- edge17 5y agoThere's a lot of talk about good books, but I do think when I was younger I challenged myself more by reading difficult books at the edge of my reading abilities. That stuff was rewarding but also exhausting. These days I'm exhausted by plenty of other stuff so easy books are more satisfying.
- watwut 5y agoI had opposite experience. I attempted to start reading fiction again multiple times. Most books were boring. That includes classics - they were much less great then I remembered. It includes also pure "for fun" books. Some did interested me, but they were rare. When I have to try 15 books to find 1 I like, it becomes frustrating and expensive.