Ask HN: What are you reading?

Interesting. Reminds me of the life story of a safety inspector that was born and lived in Okinawa. He basically went through a period where rice was mostly for the rich and then through WWII as a child to which americans prescribed a ration of milk and cheese to kids to improve nutritian. He was fairly short in stature and said he regretted not taking the milk and cheese as he though it would have helped him grow taller. Okinawans were famed for living a really long time though. I think the running theory at the time was due to pork and that pickle looking vegetable (can't think of the name).

I just finished Can't Hurt Me, it was a solid read though not quite the kind of thing I usually go for. I can't say I want to follow Goggins-level suffering by his example, but reading about his commitment to self-improvement and accomplishment really drove home just how far one can push on sheer willpower and hard work. I've certainly taken some actionable learnings. I hope you're enjoying the book.

Which volume of Programming on Purpose are you reading?

Ironically I started that one but never managed to finish it.

I still got something out of it though, so I suppose that's one way to read a book.

The basic advice I took from it is to treat a book like it's an artifact that you're investigating, almost like a city. You start by looking at the map to get an overview, then you can visit some of the major attractions, and then you can start to spend more time really getting to know some neighborhoods.

So with a book you familiarize yourself with the table of contents to know roughly how the argument or presentation proceeds; then you might for example skim the conclusion to see more clearly what the author is trying to accomplish; then you can pick a particular chapter or section that's of definite interest to you; and so on.

(This is all centered on reading for learning, not for pleasure.)

It's a lot like how to read a program. A book is presented much more linearly than a program, but actually nothing is really linear. Narrative plots may be, but you don't have to follow the plot of a monograph.

It makes me weirdly excited to think about book-length arguments as being programs, or functions in a kind of stoner misreading of the Curry-Howard isomorphism. So maybe you can even make an analysis of the "data structures" and "algorithms" used by a certain book. You might see one book as resembling a compiler, another as resembling a compression program. This may stretch the analogy too far.

But certainly books refer in a similar way that programs do. They make calls out to external sources, hopefully unambiguously declared and semantically versioned. Sometimes it's crucial to actually check those references. Truly reading a book might be a larger project than just reading one particular book.

I think there could be a deeper argument about relating the freedom of thought in the public sphere of literacy to the free software movement, which you can see a glimpse of in Richard Stallman's essay The Right to Read...