A woman who went to the library and read every book on the shelf (2014)

"The livelihood of an ancient indian tribe was buffalo hunting. If the hunters came back with a small amount of kill or, unimaginable, empty-handed, from their Springtime hunts, the village would go mostly hungry for the next four months and many people would die. Luckily, before each hunt the village's shaman gave the head of the hunters a map with lines drawn on a hide that will guide the group to where the buffalo is. Without this map, the hunters wouldn't find where the buffalo gathered on the Great Plains.

A young hunter was curious about how the shaman always knew where the buffalo gathered, so before the Springtime Hunting Festival, he hid in the shaman's tipi and secretly watched jim as he prepared the map. There were many steps involved but in essence the shaman did the following: After calling on divine powers he crumpled a large raw piece of hide that was softened with oils. That was it! Then the lines to guide the hunters appeared correctly drawn by gods' will every time the map was created."

I usually employ a similar random search strategy (e.g. http://www.jmlr.org/papers/volume13/bergstra12a/bergstra12a....) to select a book when I'm at a library, though not as extensive as the method described in the article.

Competing demands for my time cured me of this list, and I came to view reading not as something indisputably virtuous (as my schooling had trained me to do), but as just another form of consumption.

There is such a thing as too much consumption. Junk books are no better than junk food, and even a diet of classics might be no better for your head than constant fine dining is for your gut.

I now take more care in choosing to give my time and energy to reading.

The result was he found some interesting books (and some turds too). I could not argue with his logic that 20 years later none of the information I got sitting through an hour of the "Six Million Dollar Man" would be useful but something he got from one of the books might be.

I am probably a "dinosaur" reader. I have, and use a Kindle, but given the choice of reading a physical book or same book on Kindle, I will choose physical book 99% of the time.

There is just something about a real book that is deeply satisfying to read.