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Comment by dpark | Hacker News Reader

> “My grafted, spasmodic, online style, while appropriate for much of my day’s ordinary reading, had been transferred indiscriminately to all of my reading, rending my former immersion in more difficult texts less and less satisfying,” she writes. Wolf soon tried again, forcing herself to start with 20-minute intervals, and managed to recover her “former reading self.”

Translation: I stopped reading novels and then found it difficult to start again.

The problem isn’t the fluff we read online. The problem is that when you go long periods without reading novels, it’s harder to pick up a novel and enjoy it. Reading fluff online doesn’t make you stop reading novels, though, any more than watching TV makes you stop reading novels. It’s entirely possible to do both, with the caveat that everyone’s time is limited. But there’s nothing about browsing online that intrinsically makes it hard to read novels.

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This. I consume books endlessly and almost always have... Unless I stop. A few times in my life I've started reading a book and when it didnt hold my interest I stopped picking it up. 3 months to a year later I would come across an interesting book and then it was back to constantly reading.

To help avoid this situation I've made it part of my morning routine to read for 15 minutes every morning (keeps the world/story alive in my head) and if I don't pick up a book for 7 days I move on to another book.

Using this method I'm at 27 books for the year and I've moved on from 2.

I actually limit my exposure to novels because I find it extremely hard to stop reading once I start. I'll stay up way too late, and sneak reading in throughout the day, basically doing whatever I have to to continue and finish the story. I enjoy this process, as it keeps me immersed, but it's not healthy.

Someone should create a book that helps us manage this harmful technology! We should, at least, keep novels out of the reach of children.

Indeed "Is It a Book That You Would Even Wish Your Wife or Your Servants to Read?"

This is a Quote from the LadyChatterley’sLover Trial in the 60's

This has always been the thing for me - I hate reading a novel and not going cover-to-cover. I get so immersed and coming out of it feels like ruining the experience.

I got in trouble in high school for reading the Dragon Reborn novels during class. Mostly band class.

Carai an Ellisande! Tai'shar Manetheren! Tai'shar Malkier!

Tai'shar Cualquier!

Binge reading was serious problem with the Stieg Larsson Millenium novels, starting with 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo'. I didn't sleep much until I finished them.

I remember that. Nothing else was done while I was reading them.

Seriously, that's why I read so few books - it's like jumping on a long-haul express train, when I really need to get off in 30 minutes to do all that I need to do. But nooooooooo.

I'm very thankful to authors that have chapters with a small sense of closure, it somewhat alleviates the problem.

The last book I read was "To Say Nothing Of The Dog" by Connie Willis - a great sci-fi - and it had this property, along with a brief summary of the chapter preceding it (a summary that somehow was not a spoiler!), in the style of "Three Men In A Boat (to say nothing of the dog)" -- yet another great brook that inspired this one.

It really helped me to put it down and go to bed at night, and I wish other authors followed suit.

Oh wow I have exactly the same problem. I really dislike putting down a novel half read I usually won't start reading until I know I'll be able to spend a large amount of uninterupted time on it. Which typically means a weekend. Long distance flights are good too.

It also does mean a lot of late nights.

Perhaps as a result of this I am a very fast reader. My former housemate would lend me novels to read sometimes and would be astonished when I'd return them to him a few hours later read.

You may find webserials interesting. They're novels (generally multiple novels in length) published a couple/few chapters a week. You may get into the binge mood if you're reading one already completed or catching up with one currently publishing but once you're at the point waiting it's really nice to be forced to stop and wait.

I actually deleted my second paragraph before posting, which was about how recently a couple webserials have made this even worse. According to their estimated page counts, I've read something like 10,000 pages in less than 3 months.

Now I went to law school more than 15 years ago, so the web was a little different then than today. However, I went three years without reading a single novel or any other significant piece of non-legal anything, for fun or not, for that whole three years. So it wasn't the web keeping me away from reading.

As soon as I was done, I read Les Miserables, then Player of Games by Ian Banks, then few (2-3) other sci fi novels that I don't specifically remember, and then a bunch of random stuff.

I loved it all. I will grant that this is possibly because I had been denying myself that pleasure in order to focus on the grueling pursuit of law school, and that I had wanted to be reading novels the whole time.

I am not convinced that the problem is only going long periods of time without. I have done that. My wife did the same when she went to law school. Maybe that's part of it, but I would guess that training your brain on fluff for that period of time is not an insignificant part of it.

> The problem isn’t the fluff we read online. The problem is that when you go long periods without reading novels, it’s harder to pick up a novel and enjoy it. Reading fluff online doesn’t make you stop reading novels, though, any more than watching TV makes you stop reading novels. It’s entirely possible to do both, with the caveat that everyone’s time is limited. But there’s nothing about browsing online that intrinsically makes it hard to read novels.

First, the issue isn't that what's being read is "fluff", but rather that online reading promotes that "grafted, spasmodic" style of attention.

Second, you're completely wrong that the media formats we consume don't affect the other media formats we consume.

> Second, you're completely wrong that the media formats we consume don't affect the other media formats we consume.

Provide some evidence for this claim. People have been decrying the short attention span that “new media” creates for as long as there has been anything that could be described as “new media”.

>Provide some evidence for this claim.

This is exactly what Reader, Come Home, by Maryanne Wolf (i.e., the book being reviewed here) does.

Does it? I don’t have the book, but it sounds from the review that this is a pet theory with no scientific backing.

> The problem isn’t the fluff we read online.

There are some alternative theories linking deep immersive reading and short sporadic reading to different parts of the brain. Spending significant time online does seem to lead to shorter attention spans.

https://www.wired.com/2010/05/ff-nicholas-carr/

>The problem isn’t the fluff we read online. The problem is that when you go long periods without reading novels, it’s harder to pick up a novel and enjoy it.

Can't it be both? If our brains adapt based on the way we consume information, wouldn't it make sense that both abstinence from reading novels and reading through a drastically different medium would potentially degrade performance in reading novels?

Maybe, but many people read tweets and novels, just as many people watch short clips on YouTube but also watch 3-hour films and binge watch entire drama series on Netflix.

I don’t see much evidence that consuming fluff significantly impacts our ability to consume material with depth. With the exception that they are competing for time.

It's less about depth vs fluff than sustained focus and engagement vs scattered, rapid micro-doses of information. Yes, many people read both tweets and novels, but they have different demands and the brain adapts. Somebody who exclusively reads tweets could be less adapted to effectively engaging with a novel than somebody who reads both novels and tweets, and both people would be less effective than somebody who exclusively reads novels. That hierarchy would in turn be inverted with respect to effectiveness at consuming rapid, scattered chunks of information.

I'm not a neuroscientist, I just don't think it makes sense to say "well that can't be true because not reading novels for a while also makes you worse at reading novels". Identifying an additional cause for a given symptom doesn't disprove the validity of all other causes.

The problem is the utter lack of evidence for the claim. The assertion that reading tweets makes it harder to read novels is not supported by any evidence I’m aware of.

You can find plenty of people saying “I stopped reading books because of [X,Y, or Z] and now it’s harder to read books”. But the common thread there is not X, Y, or Z. It’s “I stopped reading books”.

The idea that “adaptation” to one type of reading makes other types of reading harder doesn’t sound unreasonable but that doesn’t mean it’s actually true. Adaptation to running doesn’t exactly make walking harder.

> The idea that “adaptation” to one type of reading makes other types of reading harder doesn’t sound unreasonable

This is all I'm saying. Neuroplasticity is fairly well-documented and the author's theory seems plausible based on what we know about it.

> You can find plenty of people saying “I stopped reading books because of [X,Y, or Z] and now it’s harder to read books”.

Unless those people are all living off the grid, they were also reading through different mediums during the time that they weren't reading books. Again, seems reasonable that both have an impact, but you can hardly claim this as evidence for your theory and reject it as evidence for the author's theory given that both suggested factors were imposed simultaneously.

Stepping back for a second, do you agree with the statement “Not reading books for an extended period of time makes it harder to start read books again”?

If so, how do you establish causal effect for some other action coupled with no longer reading books? Literally any action coupled with “I don’t read books anymore” will lead to “its hard to read books now”. The secondary action could be “I read Twitter” or “I got married” or “I lost 50 pounds”. It doesn’t matter because the condition for “hard to read books” is already met. This “X and Y implies Z” is a common pattern for falsely attributing effect Z of X to Y.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say “I still read books an hour every night, but it’s really hard now that I also read Twitter.“ I have heard plenty of people say “it’s hard to read books now that I stopped actually reading them consistently for reason X.”

Maybe reading fluff online is a factor, but it’s probably a pretty small factor relative to the fact that you’re allowing a skill to atrophy when you don’t use it.

You didn't provide any evidence for your claim either: "The problem is that when you go long periods without reading novels, it’s harder to pick up a novel and enjoy it. "

Also, even if correct, you didn't address the risk factors involved that may cause "go long periods without reading novels".

It's intuitively attractive (but I'm not going to research the research right now) to presume that "junk" content -- stuff that provides immediate stimulatio (be they pictures, sounds, foods, or text) that are highly stimulating in a small package have a tendency to crowd out slower-stimulating content.

I think it’s generally agreed (and supported by endless research) that no longer using a skill (in this case “deep reading” or whatever you like to call it) will result in the atrophy of that skill.

But you’re right that I didn’t present evidence. I don’t think this subject has been meaningfully studied. So what I presented was an argument for why concentrating on “sporadic reading” is missing the forest for the trees. People used to say that TV resulted in a decline in reading. Now they say that reading crap results in a decline in ability to read books. If you want to be good at reading books, then read books and stop worrying about the other stuff. Reading crap on Twitter might make you a worse book reader, or a worse runner, or a worse painter, or a worse whatever. Practicing the skill you supposedly care about will do a lot more than giving up Twitter, regardless.

> It's intuitively attractive...

Intuition is the road to junk science. Don’t rely on intuition if you cannot support it with data or logic.

There's something ironic here about how you felt the need to do a "translation" of two perfectly intelligible English sentences...

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