Comment by junkscience2017 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by junkscience2017 | Hacker News Reader

junkscience2017

these are so contrived...the correspondence of highbrow book <-> endorsement is just too well-aligned...I would find these lists more amusing and insightful if they included trashy sci-fi fantasy pulp, The Far Side compendiums purchased in an airport bookstore just to lighten a day, biographies of total idiots, etc etc. you know, things people ACTUALLY enjoyed

I also get suspicious of any high-intensity CEO telling me about 1000+ pages books they read within a short period of time after publishing. "Grant" (which I will soon start) is over 1000 pages and was published in October. No, no Lloyd Blankfein, you have not read this to completion yet while simultaneously running a huge bank, sorry. No one with ANY day job is going to have that book finished any time soon, let alone a Fortune 100 CEO

Going back to my MAD magazine backlog....

No, no Lloyd Blankfein, you have not read this to completion yet while simultaneously running a huge bank, sorry. No one with ANY day job is going to have that book finished any time soon, let alone a Fortune 100 CEO.

Why? Reading 1000 pages takes what, 12 hours, if you're not particularly fast. If you just read for 30m a day, that's less than a month. What's so unbelievable about that?

Is ~80 pages per hour an average reading speed? That sounds fast to me!

It is absolutely not average. 200wpm would give ~22 hours. In this crowd, I can imagine 10-12 hours would be feasible (especially if you skip/skim the occasional boring paragraph). Anyway, who needs retention when you get to announce you read a 1000+page book?

When I said particularly fast, I meant for a regular book reader, not an average person. I'd compare it to touching your toes: being able to do it doesn't make you an athlete, even if the average fat slob like me can't do it.

There's certainly a social incentive to choose highbrow books, but saying that people can't enjoy those is weird. Besides, what would be the point of recommending trashy pulp? They're entertaining, but there's plenty of them, no need to recommend. And generally I can't even remember the titles a week after reading them - easily read, easily forgotten.

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