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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

>You also realize there is no trade off between depth and breadth. It's a false dichotomy.

It's a tradeoff because of the finite time for reading.

One can reread Shakespeare's 4 tragedies (Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Macbeth) again for the 10th time (about 8 hours of reading) -- or -- read E.L. James "50 Shades of Grey" for the 1st time (also about ~8 hours of reading).

Some writers may suggest that you read E.L. James because that way, you can mark the checkbox of "read some BDSM material" and hence satisfy the "read more widely" advice. (The "widely" as the blog author interprets it). The blog and his quote of Seamus Heaney disagrees with that and advises to read what one enjoys. It's also ok if one is re-reading an old favorite again instead of unfamiliar writing that's often low quality.

And yes, choosing what to read is a zero-sum game. Mathematically, how could it not be?

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No, I'm not literally suggesting people have infinite time on their hands. Rather, what I'm suggesting is that time compresses when you're reading for pleasure. When you reach a certain "level," shall we say, you read so naturally and so widely and so frequently that it is truly astonishing how much you can read in a day.

Then again, I'll continue to caveat all of this by saying that my subjective experience seems increasingly abnormal every time I read someone's advice on how to read (or write). The idea of deliberately practicing a style or a voice is weird to me. I've always written by ear, and I've never thought about it. I've thought about structure, and character, and perspective, and logic, and all of the other elements that go into writing well. But when it comes to voice and style, well, shit, man. You pick it up as you go along, and you learn to trust it. It strengthens, not weakens, with exposure to breadth.

One last time: I'm going to go out on a limb and say that my experience is probably weird.

It's the same with computer science, or any other field. The best, most motivated people will naturally have breadth and depth due to their own voracious curiosity, without thinking about the distinction at all.

What kinds of material do you read? Any recommendations? I'm particularly interested in engrossing fiction, and also non-fiction work with "sticky" ideas that have changed the way you see the world.

For any individual, there must be a breadth vs. depth tradeoff.

However, across individuals, there certainly need not be (and I think that is the intuition). Saying someone "reads for breadth" or "reads for depth" doesn't seem as justified if they read 10x as much as anyone else - relative to others, they "read for both."

>"read some BDSM material"

Emphasis on quotes. Most of that novel is an abusive relationship, from what I hear.

See, what's interesting to me is that the grandparent comment describes "50 Shades" as ~8 hours of reading. The zero-sum argument assumes that reading time is some fixed value for all people. I don't remember how long it took me to read "50 Shades," but it was significantly less than 8 hours, and couldn't have been more than an hour. (I'm not saying that to brag. It takes me a lot longer to do many other things than many other people. My only point is that the author of the article completely ignores throughput variability in his calculus.)

> I don't remember how long it took me to read "50 Shades," [...], and couldn't have been more than an hour.

Based on ~155,000 words[1], that would be reading ~2500 words-per-minute.

Most everyone else reads around ~200wpm to ~400wpm. Reading at 300wpm is considered "fast" for a college-educated adult.

[1] https://novelwordcount.com/2015/04/11/fifty-shades-of-grey-w...

Perhaps the hour mark is hyperbole - I haven’t read these books and have no desire to. But different books have different levels of linguistic complexity, and with simplistic writing I find myself reading at much, much faster rates.

In addition I find that when reading “bad writing” I have a natural tendency to (automatically) skip over long, tortured sentences that seem to be going nowhere. From reputation, “50 Shades” may qualify for that category.

It’s also possible to be both categories at once.

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