The Bookish Life: How to Read and Why | Hacker News Reader

The Bookish Life: How to Read and Why

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160 pointsdiodorus67 comments

As I read this piece I was able to predict the direction it would go and the evidence that would be presented for each opinion. By the end I had been neither surprised nor enlightened by anything presented in it.

The author likes old books, dislikes digital reading devices and audiobooks, dislikes most things written since his own birth unless they were written about the western canon or by people trained entirely in the canon, is uninterested in reading books from other cultural traditions, and is completely self-satisfied with his extensive and erudite form of intellectual provincialism.

It is an infuriating piece that describes a small mind that looks large to the consciousness inside it. I would propose this alternate subtitle: "How Reading the Western Canon Allowed Me to Achieve an Entirely Unremarkable Relationship with Culture and Thought"

If you haven't read the article yet I'd recommend you not bother.

While I agree with you generally, that you take such offense to the article is bizarre. Infuriating? Really?

You sound far more motivated by bias than the author. At least he makes it pretty clear that his is an opinion.

The parent comment seems pretty clearly an opinion as well. But this is why I often end up writing "I think" and "I believe" even though people often say to avoid doing so: I'm always afraid that if I don't someone will accuse me of stating fact without evidence when I only mean to be expressing opinion.

I believe the rule is to avoid it when you're trying to persuade because by default it makes you sound less convincing.nif you're just discussing, then to hell with the rule.

I like the bitter passion. Who would u recommend to read outside the unremarkable western canon?

A few tips: ”One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ”Things fall apart” by Chinua Achebe, ”Wide Sargasso sea” by Jean Rhys, poetry by Anna Achmatova, ”My life in the bush of ghosts” by Amos Tutuola, ”A personal matter” by Kenzaburo Oe, ”Woman in the dunes” by Kobo Abe, ”The grass is singing" by Doris Lessing.

Most of these are contemporary works in, or in response to, western literature.

Similar thoughts here. Furthermore, the author's writing style is annoyingly old fashioned and unnecessarily long.

>Like the man—the fellow with the name Solomon, writing under the pen name Ecclesiastes—said, “Of the making of many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh

Why not just "Solomon, writing under the pen name 'Ecclesiastes', said..."?

> I recall some years ago a politician whose name is now as lost to me as it is to history who listed reading among his hobbies, along with fly-fishing and jogging.

What was the point of this? Why not just "reading is my hobby"?

> But for the road to acquiring the body of unspecialized knowledge that sometimes goes by the name of general culture, sometimes known as the pursuit of wisdom, no map, no blueprint, no plan, no shortcut exists, nor, as I hope to make plain, could it.

Had to read this 3 times to parse the grammar.

> > I recall some years ago a politician whose name is now as lost to me as it is to history who listed reading among his hobbies, along with fly-fishing and jogging.

> What was the point of this? Why not just "reading is my hobby"?

The point was that he considered reading a "hobby" as much as breathing for himself. You have to include the rest of that paragraph though to see it:

> I recall some years ago a politician whose name is now as lost to me as it is to history who listed reading among his hobbies, along with fly-fishing and jogging. Reading happens to be my hobby, too, along with peristalsis and respiration.

I don't really want to pile on, but the irritating part is "whose name is now as lost to me as it is to history". It's still irritating in the context of the paragraph you quoted.

> “I may be a man of fairly wide reading, but I retain nothing.” Retention of everything one reads, along with being mentally impossible, would only crowd and ultimately cramp one’s mind.

From later in the article. I took the "whose name is now as lost" as a forward reference to the later concept. Reading so much that specific facts are lost (like who he was quoting) while retaining the understanding of the quote itself.

How so? It's clearly linking the idea that the person's name being lost to history is connected to being the type of person who lists reading on the same level as other incidental hobbies.

It reads as haughty, overwrought, and cliche to me. To each their own I suppose.

He is making the point that in your lifetime you experience a long procession of politicians and other celebrities who are thought important for a while and are then forgotten. That is why, as he says later (twice), he is not interested in reading thick biographies of formerly famous politicians.

I think some commenters here are missing the intended tone of the article. It's supposed to be a confection, an amusing and self-deprecating defense of his old-fangled preferences, with a melancholy tinge about running out of time (the author is in his eighties).

There always seems to be someone on HN willing to bemoan any prose style that aspires above the perfect perfunctoriness of API documentation.

Orwell would have written superb API documentation.

(Even if every deprecated end-point was described having a faint smell of boiled cabbage.)

Come on, this is not Joycean or Faulknerian stuff.

Not quite. Many authors hot the mark for me. Neil gaiman, Stephenson, Peter Watts, doctorow, all write prose eloquently without getting obtuse.

> Why not just "Solomon, writing under the pen name 'Ecclesiastes', said..."?

Talk about annoyingly old fashioned and unnecessarily long. Let’s try:

“Solomon aka Ecclesiastes said...”

In reply to both yours and the original post, the writer does that because he is slyly signalling to you feigned humbleness with a little wink to his readers with respect to the personage of Solomon.

You know, using language for subtle humor rather than just brevity, which, if i recall correctly, he actually discussed this topic and dismisses the speed readers and those always looking for efficiency and speed: like speed eating or speed sex I believe the analogy was.

I was poking fun at the guy I was replying to – not making a modest proposal that fewer words is always the ideal.

The comment you're replying to is sarcastic.

A good rule of thumb is to assume all of my posts are sarcastic.

That's funny; none of mine are.

At least you thought I was funny.

A good rule of thumb is to write your posts so they convey sarcasm to a reader who doesn't know you personally.

Great advice!

How was that?

Why not just "Solomon, writing under the pen name 'Ecclesiastes', said..."?

Saying "the man" and then following up with "the fellow with the name" emphasies that who he was is less important than what he said; the fact that it's Solomon, writing Ecclesiastes (two names widely recognised in the Western canon) serve to emphasise this. EVEN THOUGH it's written by someone famous in a famous book, what he wrote is STILL more important than who he was. That is part of the meaning here. There's another level to it, as well; the author is well aware that he's out on a limb here and his jovial tone makes it clear that he's not taking himself too seriously.

Stripping it down to just "Solomon, writing under the pen name 'Ecclesiastes', said..." changes the meaning.

I suppose he could have explicitly said "Here are some words written by the famous person Solomon in the famous book Ecclesiastes, but the words are more important than who he was and the book he wrote, and I'm telling you this because it makes it clear how much more important the words are than the origin of them, but don't take me too seriously on this folks!" but that seems clunky.

If the goal was to make the fact that the man who said those words is not important while the words are, why not just not mention Solomon or Ecclesiastes in the first place.

Stating that the person who said it is Solomon, and then making it clear that the speaker is less important that the words, serves to emphasise what is important.

The man who wrote it DOES matter, it DOES alter the effect. Solomon wrote it, in the book Ecclesiastes! Of course that makes a difference, and the writer here deliberately drew our attention to that. Dismissing a famous writer as unimportant carries more weigh than dismissing a complete unknown as unimportant.

This isn't some kind of simple logical operator statement that one can apply Boolean algebra to and simplify. This is already massively simplified; the writer expressed a lot of meaning in very few words. So much meaning, so compressed, that many readers think it's just the opposite - little information in too many words! People asking why this wasn't short are missing the fact that this IS the short version!

I for one read the whole thing and find it enjoyable. I do not agree with his position on western literature, and he is clearly deliberately writing for people who already have some level of understanding of western literature and his Jewish heritage, but style wise I found it quite respectable, if not moderately haughty...

I don't know how restricting yourself to the western canon makes you small minded. The western canon is, of course, huge and enormously varied.

In any case, I didn't get the impression he was restricting himself. He describes going into book shops picking up any book he happened to light upon. My feeling was that he had decided not to beat himself up if these books did not encompass everything in the entire world. After all, isn't that the central premise - life is short?

Your alternative subtitle is unnecessarily mean-spirited. I don't believe he was claiming to be in any way remarkable, in the end he was simply describing how he loves books.

Conceits creep in if you only read one perspective. Think about all the people who think Western culture is the source of all civilization because they only read things that affirm that view.

Any given culture's canon is big in volume, but small in context.

Still, I imagine it's better to read your culture's canon of thought only than none at all. Obviously you're not going to get a diverse perspective on life that way, but you might get a perspective that isn't totally informed by id or media.

Not only that, but the “Western Canon”, is most certainly not written by one culture.

Oo la la, someone’s getting laid in college

Exactly my thoughts. The article is nothing but pretentious.

You missed the point of the article entirely.

The Bookish Life--obviously this will discuss a life built around books. Yeah, yeah, anyone could guess how it would end, i.e. there's little fortune in it.

How to Read and Why--interest. Purely so. You read slow because of your interest, you read because of your interest. Just as a foodie eats a dessert slowly because of his interest, he eats because of his interest. That a book-ie and a foodie would prefer one set of books or foods over another or over all others doesn't make the person less of a lover of their books or foods. That a foodie might prefer chopsticks over silverware, fingers or tortillas doesn't make their palate any less exquisite.

Tell me--would you consider Isaac Newton and Fyoder Dostoevsky small-minded because they tended to keep their reading Euro-centric as well?

And would I be right to charge anyone who hasn't the faintest interest in the Dalit literature of India or Japan, or in Mariama Bâ's So Long a Letter, or in the depths of Borges' poetry, etc., to be merely provincial? Or am I just being smug regarding my reading habits?

I recommend you re-read the piece with a little less hostility.

1) There is plenty of evidence to suggest that people find it easier to navigate and remember from the printed page.

2) Yes we should all seek to learn about other cultures and expand our horizons. But that hardly makes all of Western thought 'small' and 'provincial'. You are simply aping the view you are complaining about, only in the diametrically opposite direction.

Seriously learning about how the great minds of the past understood their world is, often, just as good a way of expanding our horizons, as reading from other cultures in the present. We are stretched by space and time.

Finally, I don't think you're taking seriously the limits that language places on our breadth of reading. Very few professional intellectual historians - let alone everyone else - know enough of the European languages to engage with anything but a small part of 'Western' thought.

I agree that we should strive to read more in non-Western languages, but it's very tough going.

And your comment, instead, is incredibly helpful for me, because it saved me a few minutes of my life.

Thanks for this.

It reminds me that years ago I tried (unsuccessfully) to launch a "TL;DR" service for Hacker News articles. This is a small test I ran: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11193792

Western education drills into us the mantra that reading books is virtuous. It certainly is something that children need to learn how to do, like eating and sleeping. But like eating and sleeping there are limits to the benefit you will get from reading books, and I don’t think this is widely recognised. The prevailing opinion still seems to be that reading is unreservedly Good For You.

Why do I say that? Because reading is ultimately a form of consumption. The quality and quantity of that reading matters, just like it does for eating and sleeping. Someone who spends all day reading isn’t necessarily in any better position than someone who spends all day playing video games.

Don’t get me wrong, I do love and recommend reading books - but the right amount of the right stuff.

"Nietzsche said that life without music is a mistake. I would agree, adding that it is no less a mistake without books." Oh, how I agree. And also with you jl6. It is some kind of consumption and the quality of it matter, for sure and timing. Reading the "right" books for you age or understanding of the world.

This is something I really agree with. Both myself and my father read very often, but we read utter schlock. We are no more intellectually improving ourselves than someone watching an action movie. To think otherwise is empty self-flattering of the worst sort.

Also, at least for academic subjects, I've found doing problems is much more informative than spending the same amount of time reading the text. You can study as much python as you want, but until you sit down to write a program - you have on idea where you are.

There is a big difference between 'reading for pleasure and self-education', and 'reading for a specific purpose'. I agree that one can do too much of the former but I'm not so sure about the latter. There's plenty of academics and writers, of all stripes, who would not be able to do what they do if they did not spend most of their time reading.

The best reading breakthrough I had was to eliminate my need to complete a book.

If I've lost the plot, I throw the book away. If I've got the advice author's gist, I move on.

It's allowed me to enjoy reading fiction again, get to the books I need in the moment, and move faster through my reading list.

I learned to do that not too long ago, I started reading Asimov’s Fundation trilogy, but I struggled picking the book from my desk every single time, I was supposed to love it, everyone loves Asimov, so I had to love it too, but I just couldn’t, I felt guilty. Then I realized that the point of reading a novel was to enjoy it, if I was not enjoying it then I was just reading in a pretentious way. Since then I only keep reading if I like what I’m reading or if it will help me in any way.

Honestly... I grew up reading Asimov, but I didn't read Foundation until my 20s, and I was... underwhelmed. I still adore his short stories (I often re-read them and discover something new), and I have fond memories of his Robot Detective novels and the standalone book "The Gods Themselves". But I also didn't love Foundation. So, don't feel bad.

Some of the ideas in Asimov are compelling. But he's not a great prose stylist.

Me too, it took me a long time to realize that not all books were good for me or to my liking. When I realized it was ok to put a book down and pick up another I was released from a weird guilt.

I also think we teach literature and history in the wrong direction. I’d start a literature course with contemporary works and work back in time. Same with history

OK.. .shameless self plug.

https://getpolarized.io/

We announced it here the other day but we specifically designed it for people very very serious about reading.

For me I put all my books in it and everything is manageable, I can go back to them, see what I've read, keep all my notes in one place, etc.

Perhaps I missed it, but i didn't see anything about physical copies, i.e. it seems this is focused (exclusively?) for the ditigal reader. Is that the case?

I wrote (what I consider to be) a slightly more accessible post last month on the same topic after I really picked up reading books four years ago.

My argument is that reading is a must for profressionals to learn and remember the ability to distinguish biases, trends, novelty, etc.

Furthermore, I don't recommend "literature" as a starting point but must-read books in your field. It can be easier to start because the material is closer and because it doesn't feel like reading was a waste of time.

Afterward diversifying to economics, psychology, domestic and foreign history, management, etc. and fiction become easier to make time for and easier to see the benefits.

http://notes.eatonphil.com/why-and-how-to-read-books.html

That was a pretty good essay but some of the words were too big and I didn’t know them

> How can one know if a book is interesting until one has read it; memorable until time has or has not lodged it in one’s memory; rereadable until the decades pass and one feels the need to read it again and enjoys it all the more on doing so?

Well, 'interesting' is an opinion that an individual forms after having experienced something. In other words, there is no way for someone to not ever read an 'uninteresting' book. They must first read, to find out.

“If an interesting book exists but there is no one to read it, is it interesting at all?”

I think the premise that you can’t obtain a list to be cultivated is extremely wrong.

That’s exactly what happens in a danish gymnasium, where the content is meant to enlighten as much as educate, and the difference between choosing the “regular” humanism route takes you so much further than one of the technical routes.

I know because I took the technical route and I married into a family who took the humanities. I’ve spent years catching up on philosophy, art, history, psychology and culturally important fiction, and I’m still not really part of the cultivated conversation when they really go at it.

I don’t mind, they can’t talk math or engineering or even business management, but they’re all very similar because they followed a list.

I’ve often wondered why there aren’t any easily available lists on the internet, because it’s really just the works you’d go through in your four-five year path, that’s shared among all humanities.

Obviously there is a difference between reading platon on your own and reading it in a curated environment where you can discuss its meaning with your teacher and your peers, but don’t tell me those teachers couldn’t compile you a list.

I think the real issue is that we killed blogs. A route to cultivation isn’t going to pop-up in a Facebook discussion, and if it is, then it won’t be searchable. And teachers or members of the humanities in general, seem to be much less likely to have an online jourbal which covers their professional life than people in tech. I read a news paper with a books section, and you’ll see this exact issue covered often in regards to new works, but those articles are only available on print or in an online archive you have to pay to access or even search in.

So the lists are absolutely there, we just can’t access them outside of our educational system or closed discussions had by the people who wouldn’t need the list.

If you were to create a list based on your readings, I'd be very interested in having a copy.

With my rant, maybe I should, though the majority of it would be Danish works as I’m Danish.

Until that I can recommend Bill Gates lists, it’s a really great resource for modern international works. Some of the recommendations in gates notes are very humanitarian, but others, like Sapiens, have made it into the book shelf of most cultivated people I know and I only read it because it was recommended in gates notes.

I'm not a big reader but I've read a fair few books I saw on Gates Notes and they've all been right up my street ("Sapiens" included). Great recommendation.

I read A Splendid Exchange which I believe was also on his list and it was one of the best books I have ever read.

He has a good taste in books.

Adler and Hutchings published such a book in the 1930's. As for the humanities that style of education is distinctly old fashioned. Even my alma mater of Chicago is falling away from the tradition, and Shriner and St. John's might be the only places still reading the Great Works. Instead we have more vocationalism and less humanism.

"This is the first of your three free articles for the month.

"READ WITHOUT LIMITS"

Irony, thy name is this website.

Is there a way to quantify the positive benefits of reading? I would like to track it just like any other variable (body fat, resting heart rate, etc.)

The benefit of many things is neither well understood nor objectively measurable.

How do you track the value of friends? The value of meditation?

Heck, how do you track the value (negative or positive) you get from reading this site?

Each of those things affects your mental state in some way, but we have no good way to directly track mental state.

We can track the effect of a good mental state by observing that one is more productive, or marks higher on a happiness scale, but those are second-order effects and there will always be many confounding factors.

We still can't evaluate intelligence nor longevity well enough to track any changes in those regards, and that is likely the area you would need to evaluate for tracking the impact of reading.

If reading makes you feel more content or more knowledgeable about subjects, or if anecdotally things you read seem helpful in conversation or in life, that's probably as good as you'll get.

I personally think that attempting to track and optimize even the most minute details of life is ultimately detrimental, but that's a rant for another time.

Tracking mental state - that's a good idea!

Crudely, I guess you could sort of track the "Bayesian surprise" you get by reading a book by measuring changes in skin conductance --essentially tracking how many "frissons" you get while reading maybe? (I really don't know tho...)

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