Books I've read in the third quarter of 2017 | Hacker News Reader

Books I've read in the third quarter of 2017

mijailovic.net

89 pointsMetalnem64 comments

Is this a wishlist or are these books the author has actually read in the last three months?

The Art of Software Security Assessment is 1200 pages long. Hitler: A Biography is 1000 pages long. Ordinary Men is shorter at around 400 pages, Ordinary Injustice is about 300, Blood in the Water is 750, Reversing is 600, The Box is 550. Combined those are about 5,000 pages.

I'm even ignoring the programming-specific books because they may not be read cover-to-cover (even though they're likely read at a slower pace in order to try their concepts), but that still seems like too many pages to read and absorb in a three-month period.

I would assume it is actual books read, during the winter when I read regularly in the evenings I average a little over 100 pages a day across time. That is a mixture of fiction and non fiction. That would be 9000 pages in a quarter. Back when I was a more serious reader, for several years I averaged about 50K pages a year. I read fast, but I am by no means the fastest reader I know.

I've been tracking just my entertainment reading (fiction and nonfiction/history/biography etc) (not my tech book reading) on Goodreads the last four years, and I'm averaging just over 16,000 pages a year on entertainment reading... (the high point was over 18,000 a couple years ago, but I've decided to take some of my reading time and use that time to write music now) -- ~8000 pages every six months.

I usually read another 1000-1500 pages of tech reading on top of that every six months.

Certainly doable.

I think the important question is, how much of that do you retain?

How do you "retain" things read for entertainment?

If you can't remember what happened on the last page, you're not retaining. If you can't remember the flow of the plot or why a chapter was important, you're not retaining. At that point you're just reading an outline of the plot.

There's plenty of things to retain in books read for entertainment.

Quite a lot -- I actually take notes after each read to remind myself what I thought of the book -- the very act of doing so strengthens recall very well, even if the notes are just a few sentences.

The point of reading for entertainment is to:

1. Have fun.

If you don't like the book you're reading, put it down. Life is too short for bad books.

2. Leave a general impression on you.

For example, some books just change your outlook on life. Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy, or Pierce Brown's Red Rising trilogy, or Scott Lynch's Gentlemen Bastard's trilogy are all great series that take you on emotional roller-coasters, make you change you perspective on life, etc.

Reading makes people more empathic, and kinder. It helps give you different points of view. (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315838511_Turner_R_...)

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.” ― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”

Presumably you can also get this from film and television?

there are not 40+ episodes or even multipart movies of discworld, sadly. And while there are a few adaptions, I don't see how spending less time absorbed into the fantasy would be desirable ;)

Discworld just could not be adapted to the screen... you'd lose the puns, the outrageous descriptions and the hilarity of it all. I mean... maybe if it was stylistically something like A Series of Unfortunate Events with the over-the-top costumes, make up, and set pieces... but it still wouldn't quite capture Pratchett's little piece of un-reality.

The study seems to indicate that reading is more effective / engaging.

My gut tells me that film and television is to reading as a snack is to a meal.

attributed often to Emmerson: ‘I cannot remember the dinners I have eaten, nor the books I have read, but all have helped to make me.’

I used to beat myself up about not remembering details of books, even ones I read only a few months ago. I still try to take notes and revisit those often, but PG's take on this help ed reduced my anxiety about it:

> Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but you don't know why.

http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html

How much of what you see in your browser do you retain?

I read a fair whack. It feels like I've forgotten more than I learned but then there's a situation every now and then that reminds me about something from one of those many books that turns out to work well.

It's almost like placing the dots and then they'll connect themselves later. It's probably inefficient but I enjoy reading and those situations make it worth it.

Is there a way to get goodreads to give back page number information like that? I track my reading there just like you and have been meaning for ages to get something going to give a page-count for each month / year.

There's a stats view under My Books with both a book and page view. In order for it be accurate you need to include a read date for every book you read though.

I listen to audiobooks when I’m walking to work and back—that’s an hour a day on average. That counts for at least 2000 pages in each quarter. I also read anything between 10 and 40 pages of technical books every day, which adds up a lot after three months.

That makes a lot of sense. I was trying to do the math between a normal commute to work, actually working, any other hobbies plus a life outside of work, and then trying to cram that much reading into the day, but audiobooks while commuting helps make that math a lot easier.

Reading at around a page a minute, that's 5000 minutes, or 83 hours. Plenty of people have 83 hours of free time a quarter. I could read that much if I wasted less time online.

A minute has only 60 seconds in it, which gives you around 1 second/line. That's pretty fast!

Let's say you only read Monday through Friday. 5000 pages in one quarter is about 75 pages a day. (If you read weekends too, 55 pages a day.)

For a period of time I was commuting 50 minutes by train in each direction. It was quite easy to maintain a pace like that.

How much TV do you watch?

Personally I watch very little, maybe one episode every couple of weeks. I have tons of hobbies that occupy my time, and I didn't realize we were counting audiobooks (it didn't click in my mind that you would "read" an audiobook).

I think I read a lot, which means about one 300-400 page book per month. I'd say 1500 pages per month is definitely on the higher end of the scale.

I just finished a 700 page book. It took me 3 evenings. If I did that continually for 3 months I would read 21,000 pages. So... I would say 5,000 is easily doable. My wife reads much much faster than I do so her numbers would be even higher.

From a 4-star Amazon user review of The Art of Software Security Assessment:

This book was like a blow to the head for me. I'm not a security person, I'm not coveting ever more arcane vulnerabilities. Rather, I'm the poor guy at the other end of things: I'm a programmer. It's my job to avoid all the known and imaginable vulnerabilities while at the same time providing some useful functionality to my customers.

You bet I wouldn't like some self-styled security "researcher" tear apart my poor little programs and expose all their failings. What's troubling me, after reading this book, is that it looks very much like I hardly stand a chance. Security would be hard with the best of tools, unfortunately, at least when it comes to systems programming, the tools -- C, low-level APIs -- are dubious at best and introduce lots and lots of problems of their own. These tools hail from a happier time long ago when we were still trusting trust. I was overcome by a mixture of horror and chagrin when I saw proof in this book that not even the people writing sensitive security software (such as OpenSSH) wield these tools artfully enough to avoid vulnerabilities.

TOASSA is indeed a book every responsible software engineer has to read these days. Apart from finding bugs, this book is extremely helpful in understanding how bugs come to be, and hints on ways to avoid them.

It blows my mind that it's possible for anyone to read books - plural - in a quarter. I've always been a slow reader; I can't digest information when speed-reading, and I tend to want to backtrack quite a bit to really absorb what's going on in a book. A single book would therefore take months for me, meaning that it'd have to be a really good book for me to want to commit to reading it front-to-back.

As a fellow slow reader, you should give ebooks a try. The speed is about the same as I would read them anyway (which is why I think I read slow, I'm vocalizing in my head) and you can "read" at a lot of otherwise inconvenient times.

Just a thought: would be great to see a "What Books is HN Reading" once a month, similar to the "Who's Hiring" thread.

close, but no cigar

http://hackernewsbooks.com/

http://lobste.rs has that

Edging off topic, but... thx for the link to lobste.rs. That's new to me and I really like the look of it, but it's too tech for my daily consumption. Can anyone suggest other similar sites with more in the non-tech topics direction? A list of them somewhere? I feel like I've gotten in a bit of a rut, plus lethargic since Imzy went down (/k).

Edit: Answered my own question - https://www.quora.com/Are-there-news-aggregators-like-YC-Hac...

Edit2: Answered it again, even better - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14020313

I usually set a goal to read 20 books every year. They can be any mix of fiction/non-fiction/tech/etc genres. That allows me the flexibility to focus on learning something new in some of my free time or reading for fun in my free time. Comes out to a finishing a book every ~2.5 weeks. Setting a yearly goal also allows for flexibility for busy seasons of the year. Maybe March is just super busy and I get very little reading done, I can make up for it over the remaining 9 months.

No required length to qualify as a 'book'. A 100 page novella counts and so does a 1000 page reference book.

"Never before in history has such destruction been caused by a single person."

That bothered me too. Stalin and Mao have him beat by a long shot.

Perhaps this is a good time to share my progress so far :-) https://kirubakaran.com/bookshelf/

The Hitler biography should be very interesting, but I've still need to read William Shirer's iconic Rise and Fall or the 3rd Reich. Will look into Ordinary Men as well now.

Off topic, but how'd you get HTTPS working for GitHub pages?

You can’t do it with GitHub pages only (if you want to use a custom domain). I’m actually using free Cloudflare plan for terminating TLS connections.

Yeah that's what I thought. Well, thanks for the idea! :)

every now and then try to read something you hate. it builds character and patience, something everyone finds moreish.

What’s the view on tmux? In general on HN.

It's great, once you remap CTRL-B to CTRL-A.

and Ctrl to Caps Lock :)

But CTRL-A is muscle memory beginning of line for me.

I've thought about switching to tmux for all the nice features it has but to be honest I stick with GNU Screen because it's built in. I rarely spend much time on the same server, I tend to hop machine to machine a lot in my job. So installing and configuring new software starts to take up a lot of time, and most of the servers I use are client servers, not mine.

Same thing with vim customizations or bashrc files. I learn to love the defaults and fit my workflow around them because in two months I'll be on another server and would have to reconfigure everything to fit my workflow otherwise.

That was my take away after my first really deep bash customization. I didn’t bother to drag any of it along to my next install.

I love it, after a few remaps (am far too used to ctrl+a to move around). Combined with Powerline[1] it's one of the first things I open. I have two aliases for convenience so that I can easily name and attach to sessions.

    ta='tmux attach -t'
    tc='tmux new -s'

[1] https://github.com/powerline/powerline

I used to use Screen due to the argument that it's always installed but instead I just install a few things by default on systems I work on and haven't looked back (same with zsh vs bash).

I personally only really use it to tile, and navigate between, 3 or 4 shells when developing, but it's delightful for that (much better than using e.g. Ctrl-Tab to flip between terminals for me). I also second the recommendation of switching to use Ctrl-A.

the session saver plugin is great. combine that with vim sessions and it basically saves all my context across reboots.

I may have misused or misunderstood tmux in the past.

Honestly I'd rather just open another cygwin/terminal window. Every OS already does windowing really well. If I have a long running process, then ctrl-z, bg, fg work perfectly fine too. tmux seemed too complicated to be worth the effort to learn.

I tried it, but I didn't see the point, since I was already using a tiling WM. And I can configure the shortcuts for my WM whereas with tmux I have to learn all the specific shorcuts.

I use tmux regularly, especially on headless servers to which I am SSHing over an unreliable channel (meaning any given SSH app on my iPad that is likely to time out if I switch away from it for too long, or the Doctor's assistant calls my name and I have to lock the screen).

It's extra useful when I am doing something that takes a long time, like upgrading from Debian 8 to 9 with apt-get, and losing the connection would be a real pain.

I used to use GNU screen, but tmux - for me - proved more reliable, and much easier to set up for sharing a screen with a different user to help debug or learn something.

The keystroke mappings don't bother me, and as a hard-core command-line user, I totally appreciate the switch from Ctrl-a (aka "go to start of line") to Ctrl-b. Hitting Ctrl-a while trying to edit a command line and nothing - or worse - happening can be super frustrating, and not all term types support Home and End.

I also just use a small subset of the commands and use 'Ctrl-b ?' if I forget.

So a big thumbs up for tmux from me.

It's brilliant. Unlike the others I only use it for my local development, but tmux + vim (or any editor) + scripts and tools makes for the best IDE available.

Add more fiction.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com