8 ms·
Books I’ve read
- newaccount2021 4y agoDerek seems like a great guy but this seems to be mostly "success for midwits" airport bookstore fare
- xcambar 4y agoI'm going to be totally subjective and please accspt I'm not being judgmental. I have not read through all the list but by skimming, there's a really huge majority of nonfiction books. I love nonfiction and I'm reading quite a lot myself, but I can't imagine to not have a novel or any fiction book to balance it out. The lack of fiction in this list also makes it indigestible to me. Why would you spare yourself from the epic,from the beautiful or from the tragic of a fiction book? This is beyond me, but this is just me as well, so thanks for sharing the list, I'll read some of these :)
- ezsmi 4y agoI wondered why someone would publish such a list, and happily there is a FAQ which answers that. https://sive.rs/bfaq https://sive.rs/bfaq Your comment was also addressed. “Why don’t I see __(some book)___?” I do read fiction, but I don’t take notes on it. For fiction, I prefer audiobook. I also read hundreds of books before 2007, but didn’t start taking notes until I realized I was forgetting what I had read. And ultimately, I only read things that apply to my life or current interests right now. I say no to all requests, and publishers asking me to do reviews.
- loloquwowndueo 4y agoWell “I do read fiction” and “I prefer audiobook” are mutually exclusive. Listening to someone reading a book is not reading a book.
- mattl 4y agoSeems a bit like gatekeeping. Some people rely on audiobooks.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- coldtea 4y ago>Seems a bit like gatekeeping So? This seems like a thought-stopping word: "Oh, gatekeeping! Awful". I'd say we could use some more gatekeeping. >Some people rely on audiobooks Well, if you mean the blind, or even people with no time outside car commuting, etc, well for them it's another matter. I might rely on a walker to go around, but that doesn't mean that it's just an altertive for walking that I prefer, as opposed to a remedy for a health issue.
- downriver 4y agoI think it’s reasonable to distinguish reading a book and listening to a book. I don’t particularly think one is better or worse, but certainly they are objectively different. My sense is that when people talk about gate keeping there’s necessarily an emotional component. In this case I’d guess perhaps there’s a sense that “reading a book” is valuable or prestigious and they don’t want to exclude someone from it. But to me it’s just an observation of how you consumed content, free of emotional charge.
- AlbertCory 4y agoI have an audiobook of my book, "Inventing the Future." You can see me and my narrator talking about it at [1]. I auditioned about 25 narrators before picking him. If you have a lot of dialog, like I do, I think a narrator can bring it to life, by inhabiting the characters. If you're reading the book, you might well be imagining the author talking to you, so an audiobook narrator becomes the voice of the author. So no, they're not mutually exclusive. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGchbES0DhU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGchbES0DhU
- Ishmaeli 4y ago
- pitched 4y agoI agree and do read 3x more fiction than not but it is an interest axis to balance on. Like, how did it get to be that everyone is expected to read more fake stories than real ones? The negative tense of the name “non-fiction” is interesting too. The original categorizers must also not have thought too highly of it.
- corrral 4y ago> Like, how did it get to be that everyone is expected to read more fake stories than real ones? Real stories have a tendency not to be as real as one might hope. Fake stories have a way of being more real than the "fake" label might imply.
- AlbertCory 4y agoFor a deeper example of this boundary, read "Startup" by Jerry Kaplan: the story of GO Corp. He has these "conversations" between people 35 years ago, with wildly unrealistic dialog that no human would ever speak. And yet this qualifies as "non-fiction"? Having done this reconstruction myself, I can tell you that absolutely NO ONE remembers what they said 40 years ago. No one remembers when meetings happened or who was there. Take, for example, the famous Steve Jobs visits to Xerox PARC. I wasn't there so I didn't include them. But a podcast host told me he's talked to three people who were, and they have three different stories. There are, in fact, some writers who manage to bring history to life without inventing dialog and scenes that maybe never happened. I salute them.
- xcambar 4y agoI personally do not think one is better than the other. I stand by the saying "S.he who has read 1000 books has lived 1000 lives". When fiction, the life of the characters. When "nonfiction", share the life and thoughts of the author(s).
- elorant 4y agoI used to read a lot of sci-fi books in the past. Nowadays hardly one in ten books I read is sf. I just find most of what’s written these days boring. So I’d rather stick with non-fiction where I can learn shit. For fiction I prefer movies where I find the general quality better.
- pavlov 4y agoHave you tried reading fiction that’s not SF?
- elorant 4y agoLiterature is nice. My dad has a big collection of literature books that number in the thousands. I've read probably 20% of them.
- xcambar 4y agoWhy on earth did you get downvoted? O_O
- FranzFerdiNaN 4y agoBecause it’s some weird flex to explicitly say things like “my dad owns thousands of books” and “I read hundreds of those”.
- uwagar 4y agosilicon valley types wont read fiction cos they cant monetise that reading.
- donthellbanme 4y ago
- anotherevan 4y agoI'm probably the other extreme in that I read 40-60 fiction books a year, and only one or two non-fiction. I do read a lot of articles on various topics though. (Grateful for the integration of Pocket on my Kobo reader.)
- serjester 4y agoI read about 50ish books a year and all of them are non-fiction. It’s not because I look down on fiction but mostly because I can’t seem to finish any fiction book I ever pick up. Just this year I tried to read Musashi, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and some classic Russian novels and I can’t do it. I’m not sure why and I’m well aware of the benefits. So to an extent I imagine Sivers is similar.
- throwoutway 4y agoNot all books are written the same and I cant finish some fiction books either. But there’s some fiction that I read through very quickly
- xosset 4y agoSame here. I can't even get through Dostevsky's The Double even knowing the story sounds amazing and it isn't that long. I don't think the images play in my head as well as other people and that is not really an issue with non-fiction. With non-fiction I am just parsing the content in a sense.
- apricot13 4y agoI picked up a YA book (the skullduggery pleasant series) at my friend's house a while ago and read practically the whole thing. It was a nice fun easy read! I wasn't trying to widen my knowledge I was just reading that's my new trick to reading more non fiction! (That and stopping if I'm fed up!)
- jackblemming 4y agoI see a lot of fluff books and little, if any, technical books. Fluff books feel good and can be good to unwind, but you're going to learn little while falsely rewarding yourself.
- kristopolous 4y agoI've read many and not to throw sand but I'd venture to say the ones I read are hazardously incorrect. It's a thematically coherent list though so if some of these are up your alley, others likely will be.
- yakshaving_jgt 4y agoHave you read Sapiens? I’ve encountered fluff books, but this wasn’t one of them.
- BeetleB 4y agoI agree with the skepticism of fluff books. Regarding technical books, I'll repeat a stance of mine: I spent over a decade in university, and learned a ton. The majority of which I never used. The majority of engineering/technical courses I took as an undergrad? Never once utilized for my job. When you start including grad level courses, the ratio looks much worse! Reading just a few books on communication and negotiations has proved more useful than the majority of technical courses/books I've read - easily! Reading psychology and understanding what motivates people and how they behave was more effective at understanding dysfunction in the work place and did more for my career than the majority of technical books I've read. Tech folks are addicted to tech, but sit down and start enumerating: How many technical books that you've read were of actual use to you? When you read your next technical book, are you doing it because you enjoy it (entertainment), or because it'll be useful to you? If the former (which is the case for most tech people), it's no better than reading a fluff book is for others.
- kej 4y agoTangentially interesting, Art Garfunkel (of Simon and Garfunkel and a much less successful solo career) has kept a list of books he has read since the late 1960s: https://www.artgarfunkel.com/library/list1.html https://www.artgarfunkel.com/library/list1.html
- ty87888989 4y agoA much more interesting list! I note that in July 2018 he read Paul Simon, The Life by Robert Hilburn
- racl101 4y ago
- sanderjd 4y agoSo I just went and searched for The Lean Startup, which I'm currently reading, and there's a huge amount of notes. So my question for this audience: do you read books this way where you take huge amounts of notes? I often lament not taking notes while reading a book, but at the same time, I'm certain that if I tried to take good notes, certainly at the level of detail I see here, I just wouldn't read many books at all. I have young children and it already feels like a huge time commitment to me to read any particular thing, which often sends me into an analysis paralysis loop trying to figure out what book to read next that is worth that commitment. I mostly just try accept that I just won't be able to read as much as I'd like for a bunch of years, and certainly not with good notes. But I'm curious how other people square this circle.
- pm215 4y agoI don't take notes because I read primarily for entertainment, in both fiction and non-fiction -- I have no need to recall in detail the contents of a book or to tie them into some overarching system, because I'm not an author or academic or even somebody who writes blog posts, and very little of what I read is related to my work. If I really need to I can always go back and dip into a book again if I want to look something up.
- elorant 4y agoI do take a lot of notes. I wouldn't characterize it as huge, but one of the perks of reading e-books is that you can highlight without damaging the book itself. I take anywhere from 15 to 80 notes per book, and then transfer them to a word document for further research. Ninety percent of my notes are about things I want to research further, rather than quotes. The one exception where I literally took like hundred of notes was from the book "This is how they tell me the world ends" which has a 50 page word file that you can download from the author's site that contains all the bibliography and online resources she used to write the book. I've gone through each and every one of the references. There are thousands of them in there.
- uwagar 4y agoi underline/mark with graphite pencil (12b) on the book itself. can quickly go thru the interesting passages anytime. erase the marks when u want.
- rammy1234 4y agoLove the notes. But Why Note taking is an important aspect of reading ? I would like to know. If you have already assimilated the information, do we need notes. Is it for others to read or oneself ?
- RheingoldRiver 4y agoI sometimes take notes on books I read. I love having notes; usually, I forget a lot of the details within 6 months (though most of the nonfiction I read is technical learn-about-a-subject from this rather than "here's life advice," as another commenter pointed out, the latter is only useful up to a point). However, the compulsory need to have notes itself makes me read less, because I don't like doing it, so often I don't take notes. Instead I write a lot of commentary in the margins, underline things, etc, as a compromise. That way I can easily skim back through my annotations at a later date if I want to. But really, electronic notes are ideal.
- BeetleB 4y agoSee my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31615147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31615147 To add to that, here's a story. Back in Feb of 2014, I was reading the book Willpower. While reading it, I kept saying to myself "Wow! I need to note this stuff down somewhere!" It was one of the first books I started taking notes for. Right after that, I decided to revisit Thinking, Fast and Slow (TFS), which I had read less than a year before. Lo and behold, I found that 90% of the stuff I said "Wow" to in Willpower was in that book, and I had no memory of having encountered the material. And it hadn't even been a year. What was the point of reading such a good book as TFS if I didn't retain stuff that was a clear "Wow!" to me? I don't know if note taking is necessarily the solution - I still don't retain much unless I revisit my notes, which I almost never do. But I do know that for me, reading such books in a manner where I'm almost guaranteed to forget most of it - it's just passing time and giving me a false notion that this book is useful for me past the time of reading.
- andrekandre 4y agoi generally only write a note if im struck with some strong realization or something clicks, then ill write it down in some doc to not forget (in that case writing it down helps to keep it in my mind better... probably because there are fewer of them) otherwise excessive note-taking just distracts from the reading experience and makes it harder for me to remember anything (its the same way for me in lectures btw)
- molbioguy 4y agoI highly recommend SUM. Interesting and imaginative short stories on (sometimes wild) possibilities for the afterlife. Entertaining and thought provoking, but a very easy read.
- yesenadam 4y agoNote these are by default sorted by his rating. I really like his rating system, which he explains: "My 0-10 rating is not just how much I liked the book. It’s how strongly I would recommend it to almost anyone. So I would give a little lower rating to a book I loved about an obscure subject, like the culture of Switzerland, because I wouldn’t recommend it to most people." i.e. the rating is, roughly, how much it's likely to help you.
- SnowHill9902 4y agoI’ve read many of these and generally agree with their sorting. However, this list feels too “modern” and applied pop-sci. I would recommend balancing it with way more older and not-immediately applicable books: Unamuno, Eco, Borges, Montaigne, Sartre, Nietzsche, Maimonides, Proust, … … If it’s been in print for more than 100 years at least see what it is about.
- chegra 4y agoHmm...I got a similar thing going here: https://www.chestergrant.com/ https://www.chestergrant.com/
- paulpauper 4y agowhy is this guy so famous/popular. he sold some website 20 years ago and hasn't done anything since. not to mention, his advice is often just bad or wrong. it's like Seth Godin..someone who is hugely successful and famous despite being so mediocre.
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y agoThat's your opinion. Obviously people are getting a lot of value from both of them and hence they remain popular.
- rramadass 4y agoBecause our World runs on "Self-Mythologizing" and "Self-Marketing" with the Internet being the amplifier. I swear hardly anybody thinks for themselves anymore much less engage in critical thinking. People are just Parrots.
- totallymike 4y agoThe presence and high score of Jordan Peterson’s book on this list makes me think I’d disagree quite a lot with this person’s reading material.
- stevenwoo 4y agoI browsed the list a bit and I recognized a few misogynists on there and he rated them all highly, take it for what you will. :) Even if I read a little of those just to sample them I would definitely disagree with their viewpoints.
- crossroadsguy 4y agoI see entrepreneur types reading (or at least recommending) books which are visibly “beneficial”. As in the premise of the book is that you’ll get some kind of immediate “profit” out of it. Those books are always on the lines of “Do X in Y way”, or “Best X” or something that’s just typical self-help book but dressed in philosophy and that “deep thinking” thingie (whateverthat means; as if fiction writers wrote thinking shallow). Anyway such lists are very depressing to look at. Feels like you were expecting a diverse spread at the meal table and all you got was make believe chips, and biscuits made of pure plastic which you’re maybe just supposed to chew on for sometime and then spit out — you do that because others do that and well it’s the fashion. Most of this list just feels like that. It could have been just one shelf at an airport bookshop listed top to bottom with few exceptions.
- jmeister 4y agoYes, because that's what one looks for when reading Sivers. And Sivers knows his audience. If I want culture I'll consult Harold Bloom, thank you very much.
- crossroadsguy 4y agoWho are Bloom like contemporaries? I know few in India. Wouldn’t mind knowing some in US and UK.
- jmeister 4y agoSorry I don’t really know any very well. I used “Bloom” as a metonym for elite culture critics. HB was also an institution in himself. I do like the reviews and recommendations I’ve read from Michael Dirda and Christian Lorentzen.
- leobg 4y agoVery true. It’s the compensatory principle in action. Like when you come to a city and see all the billboards that promise a feeling of freedom by drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, a career by doing remote studies, and finding love through an online dating service. You then know exactly that most of the people there feel insecure, incompetent and lonely.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]