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Comment by quinndupont | Hacker News Reader

This person is either reading the lightest self-help type of books, or not really "reading" these books. I'm an academic, and my only job is to read books (and articles, etc), and I do my job at least 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and I don't even read this many books.

My advice for getting genuinely intelligent about a topic: read hard books, intensively, and leave the buffet-stats-counter stuff to those who just want to impress.

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One book every five days is both fairly remarkable yet not overly demanding for an intellectual. If books were my only source of reading, I would read that much too. But I read journals, newspapers and blogs too.

I agree that reading a book a week is not impossible. However, the author mentions reading ~1 hour per day. That's also doable for books that can be consumed at ~60 pages per hour, and for some topics (and some fiction) that's also not impossible. But for challenging books, particularly technical books and 'literature', 60 pages per hour is probably 2x-5x too optimistic.

After reading ~10 different authors on self-help, you realize they're all saying the same thing. So no, your assumption is not true.

Yes, I did read a lot of light self-help books in the beginning, but their number in total is less than ~40.

It's totally not important how many books you read, but their quality, we agree about that :) That's why I mentioned it's better to read more times the same book, than more books on the same topic once.

So over 10% is self-help books.

My advice would be that if you really want to learn something then you have to do it. The book is a reference but there is no substitute for on hands training. Unless all you want to learn is facts like an encyclopedia, which I guess is ok but I find it hard to see as a good method to learn something deeply.

True - doing is an important part. But good (and hard) books are not like encyclopedias - they're not a collection of facts, they're also a way to discover and internalize author's mental model. You get to learn the connection between the facts and their relative importance. I feel it's something that later greatly aids you in the "doing" phase.

What would you have to do in order to learn what was in Crime and Punishment if you didn't read it?

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