I've definitely noticed my mind wander once I start reading a book. It seems like we can all benefit from training our attention span.
My usual habit is to check out 5 books at a time from the library, and I end up finishing one. The other 4 I skim through. There's simply not that many books that are worth reading in their entirety. Many books have useful nuggets of knowledge, but there is generally a lot of filler.
I have read at least 1000 academic papers in CS and other fields in the last 5 years. And by read I mean mostly skimmed. A good paper will get 3 or 4 re-readings; most papers remain skimmed until something else reminds me of them (a paper or a problem in real life). I think that is the norm.
I do find that paper is better for comprehension. I get my books from the library and I print out PDFs of publications.
tl;dr The goal is comprehension, not "finishing books"
At university, certain professors (aka one really naughty chemistry professor) expected complete mastery of the subject and would have several questions in the examination that were not even covered by the assigned reading. (He expected us to read the entire textbook anyway)
I also prefer technical manuals in PDFs and just CTRL+ F through them as needed.
Now if only we could convince the rest of the world to make abstracts the norm for books, internet articles, and the like...
I'm not a scholar or a student, but I read a lot of "non-fiction." Some of it is professional, but mostly it's because of an urge to understand the world and people. This fascination has a limitless quality that makes it almost painful. I feel massively ignorant, and that's reinforced every time I find a new subject of which I am clueless. The mass of knowledge and thought is so enormous.
I recently learned about von Humboldt's late 1800s masterwork, the multi-volume "Kosmos," a guide to the known world of natural science, with a 1000-paged index. And now that knowledge is outdated, except that "Kosmos" dedicates itself to the history of science, and now that work itself is a part of that very history. And so it goes on and on.
One of my Kindle reads at the moment is "The Practice of Everyday Life" by Miche de Certeau. It might be disappointing to announce up front that I haven't read much of it yet, but that itself is part of my point. Sensing a relevant connection, I looked at the Table of Contents and found that Chapter XII is "Reading as Poaching." I turn to it and skim a few pages of stuff about French politics and find a servicable quote:
> In the eighteenth century, the ideology of the Enlightenment claimed that the book was capable of reforming society, that educational popularization could transform manners and customs, that an elite's products could, if they were sufficiently widespread, remodel a whole nation. This myth of Education inscribed a theory of consumption in the structures of cultural politics.
That goes along nicely with the book's theme of refuting an implicit "productivist" bias and highlighting the way "users" and "consumers" are always themselves creative, tactical, and in some sense subversive with regard to the stuff presented to them as "finished products."
When reading the book, I sometimes feel aversion to the countercultural eagerness to demonize the systems of power, but I also don't disagree -- it's just a vague feeling of "yes, yes, sure, get on with it..." Still, I find the author's perspective very interesting and useful, and I'm enjoying "poaching" from the book.
A few pages later:
> To write is to produce the text; to read is to receive it from someone else without putting one's own mark on it, without remaking it. In that regard, the reading of the catechism or of the Scriptures that the clergy used to recommend to girls and mothers, by forbidding these vestals of an untouchable sacred text to write continues today in the "reading" of the television programs offered to "consumers" who cannot trace their own writing on the screen where the production of the Other -- of "culture" -- appears.
Yes, yes... I agree! The vague feeling is still present, and I start to understand that it's related to a rather uncharitable tiredness with "postmodernism" or "poststructuralism," references to "the death of the author," and so on. I can't identify anything specifically wrong with any of this. There is a looming sense that if I were forced to explain to someone in this restaurant what I am reading and writing about, I might come across as some kind of flakey weirdo. They don't even know the other book I'm working on is about Heidegger... But I digress.
I'm not interested in all this because of a moral preference for the downtrodden over the elite and powerful, though I do have some of that. What interests me more is just simply what it is to be reading; what to actually do with books; how they function and circulate and affect people; and why they are, despite often being too long and dreary and just boring, irresistible.
In "The Rebel Sell," another one of those books that I continue to think about and reference many years later, the authors make the provoking claim that, contrary to the self-images of most tourists, backpackers, and lovers of foreign culture, the only authentic way to travel is on business trips. With a tangible reason to go abroad, a plausible desire for mutual exchange, instead of the usual leering and viewing and aimless wandering, the business traveller is authentically engaged and directed by a real project.
I would propose some other equally authentic modes. Someone who loves to take photos is also guided on their travels by a skillful project, a context of self-actualization and learning, and so on. Likewise someone who is researching for a story, or just someone who likes to get laid. It strikes me that "The Rebel Sell" might be attacking a straw-man idea of a person who travels only to gaze, to enjoy consumptively, to "appreciate." In fact we all seem to make up projects even if only as surrogate activities. Taking a front-lit snapshot of every single attraction one finds listed in the Lonely Planet might not be very sophisticated, but mostly we just need something, anything, to do.
Of course I am metaphorically equating books with places to make a point about the activities involved in reading. A scholar researching the literature to find a good reference is on a kind of business trip. Chapters that fail to support her argument she walks past like trinkets on a market promenade when searching for a particular kind of hat. She doesn't demand that the text be superbly beautiful or worthy of an appreciative gaze. She's not enjoying the book like you enjoy the wine on a countryside vineyard vacation; she's critical, practical, and absorbed in an activity for the sake of a project.
That seems to be to be the reason why she can study large amounts of literature without becoming "bored" or "distracted" or being very concerned about "attention span." She's working; she doesn't get paid to merely enjoy; she might often enter states of flow even while hopping wildly from book to book, scribbling furiously, underlining, making mental connections. She may use various tactics, including skimming, only reading a preface, or going straight to the index. If she is studying a work of fiction to comment on its narrative structure, she might want to read it cover to cover to get the usual effect, but she might also want to obtain a gist of the plot and then engage in some other ways of reading, even ways as far removed from conventional reading as plotting word frequencies.
As for me, writing bloated comments on internet forums is, perhaps unfortunately, a driving force in my whole practice of reading. I submit these ramblings because I need a question and an audience in order to write anything; otherwise I just sit and stare at the empty screen, pondering my own useless vacuity, feeling not just bored but confused in a metaphysical sense: why ever do anything, really? What is "thinking"? Who am I? If I desire to discuss, though, that gives me real motivation, and reading too acquires a new role.
That all said, I remain curious about other peoples' "practice of everyday life" and their ways of engaging with books. Also about how we could make books more fun. A new kind of book club? Come up with something, please.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that reading for comprehension, or travelling for business are the ONLY way of doing those things. That would be a bit presumptuous. But they resonate with me.
What I'm trying to avoid is the ailment of unproductive information addiction. Many people are complaining about this these days. It happens with fiction too -- there was a piece in the NY Times Book Review awhile back, where the author was questioning why he was such a voracious reader, when he could seldom remember things he read. He felt guilt at not remembering. It's even the case that some people forget THAT they read a book, not just the contents of the book...
To elaborate on reading, I feel like some good tests of whether reading was worthwhile are:
1) If I can build something that I couldn't build before (usually programming, but sometimes other things). This often requires concentrated reading from many difference sources, and following citations.
2) If the material comes up in a conversation, or an Internet forum like HN. Being able to explain something in your own words, in a different context, means you actually understood it, rather than just passively consuming words.
3) If I'm reminded of it while reading something else, and especially if I'm compelled to make notes about it. I have a wiki with 2300 HTML pages of notes, accumulated over 11 years. Each page has dozens of links... if I manage to keep all this information relatively accessible, then I feel good. I like when I make a link to a page/idea that hasn't been touched in 2 years, 6 years, 10 years. That means I'm adding some value over the long term.
Basically it boils down to connecting it to other things, so you are consuming ideas rather than just words. I'm reminded of Paul Graham's idea of "forgetting who said something" -- you are learning some truth, rather than just what one author happened to believe and happened to argue persuasively.
On travel, I always feel like a curmudgeon when I'm not excited about vacations. In the "social circles" I seem to be in, vacations are somehow a mark of status. People like to talk about vacations.
I feel like it's a lot of sitting in planes and cars, walking, and eating and drinking. That's fun for part of the day, but I don't want to do it all day for a week or more? It just sounds boring. I would rather be engaged somehow. Consumption is not engagement IMO. Consuming should hopefully aid in production, and business is a good example of production.
Some people are good at making lifelong friends abroad, and I would say that is a worthy pursuit. But most people are not, (In any case I feel like the dynamics of this kind of friendship have changed a lot with the Internet -- its value has been reduced for better or worse.)
Anyway, I'm just saying what I am trying to get out of things. It's just one way of looking at things, but people seem to appreciate the idea of having some focus rather than chasing gratification. To be clear, I don't really consider myself a "productive" person, in that I spend a lot of time laying in bed too. But if I'm going to get out of bed, IMO that energy should be well spent :)
The main thing that people have to give themselves is time. Reading takes time, and a lot of people think 15 minutes before bedtime is enough.
I don't think it is effective to read scientific literature from cover to cover. I think the best scientists skim.