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Comment by StrictDabbler | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

Exactly my thoughts. The article is nothing but pretentious.

Oo la la, someone’s getting laid in college

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

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