If only I had discovered this earlier in my life who knows where I'd be now, but better late than never I suppose.
At-least the libraries in Washington are pretty cool.
Not going to happen, bookstores will keep dying.
It's like wading through a swamp!
I think if you watch an interview with DFW you will realize just how much he has thought of just about every facet of modern, entertainment-centric western society - all coming together in Infinite Jest which is the most depressing book I've ever read (he later committed suicide, so it might have been the most depressing contemporary book ever written either). Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness models an entire planetary civilization with no fixed sex (written in 1969, mind you), which I found very eye-opening. Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (as well as Crime and Punishment) are extraordinarily psychological and philosophical - ethics, free will, and God are centric. Both Steinbeck and Vonnegut have multiple books I'd recommend, but East of Eden by Steinbeck is an all-time favorite tackling good and evil (honestly Nietzsche in novel); Slaughterhouse 5 by Vonnegut (just a notch above Heller's Catch-22) is the embodiment of darkness and absurdity. Take an anti-war sentiment and an author willing to tiptoe to the border of sanity and insanity and the result is SH5. It is truly brilliant, and as someone who is fortunate enough to not have ever been impacted greatly by wartime, it is equally eye-opening.
Honorable mention (a book I have read more recently) goes to Tom Wolfe with The Bonfire of the Vanities. This book combines the legal system (police and prosecutors), personal greed and ambition (Wall Street bond salesman), racism (Media biases), and class structures and privilege in a hard hitting social critique on 80s New York City. Everything between its covers is key to understanding how the world actually works.
This turned out to be a lot longer than I anticipated. Hopefully it is helpful!
High concept sci-fi:. Three body problem by Liu cixin, or A deepness in the sky by Vernor vinge
Character drama: 11/22/63 Stephen king, or really almost anything by him
Don't underestimate lit-trash -- it's worlds better than Twitter -- Lee child jack reacher novels are fun, so were the original Tom Clancy run. Altered carbon on the cuberpunk front.
And of course the classics if you're willing to invest -- most of them are worth it, otherwise they wouldn't be classics
That said, I'd recommend reading Les Misérables to everyone. Definitely an amazing book.
I'd add that reading the whole Three Body Problem trilogy is highly recommended since it gets higher concept every book. And personally I enjoyed A Fire Upon The Deep just as much as A Deepness In The Sky.
1. Increased vocabulary
2. Practice and improvement of skills I'm specifically reading about (as many of the books I'm reading are for acquiring skills related to my job)
3. Simply reading about new topics encourages me to read books further exploring on that peripheral knowledge
The intangibles:
1. The momentum for reading begets more reading, which makes me feel good about spending my time reading over watching TV/movies/surfing the net.
2. I feel more knowledgeable and empathetic. In this past year I read stories about impoverished refugees from North Korea, American politics, and stories of overcoming seemingly impossible odds. These are topics I never get to explore in my day job, and it helps me feel more well-rounded.
Seriously though, I jumped back into reading by picking a genre I loved, but was very behind on. In my case it was science fiction and started with the rather famous Dune. There have been some books I started and did not like so I stopped. When I find a stack of books for free I try to seek out if anything looks interesting (and check for quality) and grab 1 or 2. Worst case scenario you can just returneth the book from whence it came.
There's always Gnod[0].
Finally getting into reading will be like picking up any other activity. You need to fully commit for a while before it becomes something that you really need to do (rather something you only want to do).
Don't judge a book by a cover, but do have some curiosity.
1. If I'm not into a book, I wont force it, I can just jump to a new one.
2. 1-click downloads, if something sounds good I can just send a sample to the kindle. If it really sounds good I'll just buy it.
3. Portability, it's always in my bag and the charge lasts weeks.
I get book recommendations from Hacker News reading lists, podcasts, and friends. Then just download the sample.
For starting, you could still use Goodreads to possibly find something interesting, or take a recommendation from someone who has similar taste in other things as you.
Then I started reading books on skills I wanted to acquire (i.e. Traction for marketing and SPIN Selling for sales).
All of those books lead to recommendations into other books.
Listening to podcasts that recommend books increase the breadth of books I'm reading.
My wife brings home books from the library and I read whatever she reads (i.e. Hillbilly Elegy and The People vs Democracy), and those lead to other nonfiction books I become interested in. And then there are the "classic" novels I interleave from time to time (i.e. Siddhartha and Meditations).
It just starts with maybe a handful of books you are dying to read, try to read for 15 min before bed, and before you know it, you're 50 books into the year!
Find small/independent presses that do cool things; even independent presses as large as New Directions will have a certain culture you can base opinions off of and figure out if its worth your time. Note that if its an imprint of one of the Big 5 theres no way to know if the book is gonna be worth it based on that.
And read books in translation. By virtue of being translated you already know its worth somebody's time, bad books arent often translated. And often they are hella good.
Here's Reddit's top 200: https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/reddit-top-200. Pick one that sounds interesting.
- If you're looking for easy-entry, entertaining contemporary scifi, start with Red Rising, Hyperion, Old Man's War, Children of Time, or We Are Legion - We Are Bob.
- Classic Scifi is harder since some of it has not aged well. Easy-entry here would be I Robot, Moon is a Harsh Mistress, I am Legend, Dune, or Flowers for Algernon.
- Fantasy genre also suffers from repeated/common tropes, but some of the more inventive or engaging ones are Blood Song, Prince of Thorns (dark), The Blade Itself, or Sabriel (Audiobook by Tim Curry).
- The Lord of The Rings
- The Hobbit
- Dracula
- The Little Prince
- Animal Farm
- Asterix and Obelix comicbooks
- Siddhartha
For the next time, I'm going to try "Necronmicon" (H. P. Lovecraft!)
(EDIT: Formatting and added "Siddhartha")
I'm reading Greer's "Less" today, the most recent winner, and it is really pretty great.
If you haven't read Hemingway, "The Old Man and the Sea" is a pretty good starting point.
If you are into post-apocalyptic fiction at all, you need to read McCarthy's "The Road"
(Note, if you want Steinbeck - personally, I liked 'Of Mice and Men' a lot more than "The Grapes of Wrath" but both are good. Just saying I don't always side with the committee)
I mean, we can argue all day about what the best book is, but everything on that list is going to be both very good and usually quite accessible; you will note that Joyce is conspicuously absent, and a few of these are assigned reading in high school.
If you want to read stuff before that (and get free books from gutenberg!) I recommend you check out Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad. Both are excellent. "The end of his tether" is my favorite Conrad. "Roughing it" is my favorite Twain.
Do you not get tired from this?
Books I read 3 years ago are typically purged from memory by now. What remains are understandings and intuitions on a topic, which have value, but sometimes I wonder if the time is always well spent.
I don't know if I agree. It just seemed relevant.
The log might mention how I came to the book, what the big themes were, and for non-fiction, I write down the page number of important points that I might care to reference later.
This might be really weird but when I have a tough question, I like to think about what my favorite authors in my library might say, and I'll take the book out and flip through the pages, looking for their thoughts on the subject. When I spend hours reading a book, I internalize that author's voice, beliefs, and thought process. I don't need to remember all the tiny details but I remember their thought process which I consider priceless. I was going through a book called Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger and they have pages of questions to ask in the back and I realized I was automatically asking all of them on a daily basis. I had internalized that thinking.
Just because the density is better doesn't mean every book is dense.
In terms of memory, I keep notes and titles in Goodreads. Over time I may use a more durable store but I enjoy Goodreads.
My hardest challenge is getting the same attention span for reading that I had before the current internet.
As for fiction, I like mostly fantasy, so will browse the shelves and look at hyped books on /r/fantasy, as well as other, lesser-known ones that sound/look interesting (I'm a proponent of looking at covers and titles to see if it seems interesting to look into deeper). I also used to follow some reviewers. For more "literary" fiction, I look mostly at what mainstream reviewers say. I found All the Light we Cannot See that way, and loved it (except for one scene I felt was just completely unnecessary to the novel). Then, perhaps, look for major authors. Umberto Eco is one that comes to mind that I'm fixing to start.
Usually I pick books by the following:
- If I haven't read a single book for fun, I would pick a popular fiction or nonfiction book. Its a good starting point. Things like "Top 10 books in X category" from goodreads are good examples, or "r/askreddit favorite books"
- After reading 5-10 different books, I'll get a feel for what I like and don't like. I'll search "site:reddit.com similar books to X" and grab recommendations. Compare these to amazon's bestsellers and goodreads.
- For nonfiction books, I generally am more picky. I usually have a list of people I follow, some write reviews on books they read. I have had a few people I respect read "Ego is the Enemy" so I picked that up recently, and its something I struggle with sometimes so it's ideal for me. Nonfiction books are most powerful when you read it at the right time
- For nonfiction more textbook-like books, or something more informational, I usually let reddit / goodreads /hackernews decide what's good and what's not.
I started to read less fiction now, I've seen the same plot rehashed too many times. Nonfiction books are interesting to me at the moment.
I guess it really depends what you want to get out of your book. Do you want escapism, inspiration, or change?
No, it would not. This is a good way to look extremely creepy and make everyone around you uncomfortable.
Smile replaced with head bobble :)
It sounds like you're stuck in the mindset that every moment not spent actively achieving something is time wasted. That can be a stressful way to live. Maybe if you're really looking to "get past the existential crisis" as you say, and you want to read books but feel like you shouldn't, it might be worth thinking about what you really want out of life as a whole. But I understand that it can be hard to rationalize, because our time on Earth is so limited.
Maybe you could compromise and only read books that teach something. Even good fiction teaches you about people and different ways of thinking.