Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

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I get stuck in the middle of a lot of non-fiction works. When I started buying more non-fiction because it was 'good for me', this got particularly bad.

In fiction, the conclusion is always at the end of the book. With non-fiction you sometimes know the conclusion by chapter 4. How would you keep going if you knew who the murderer was in chapter 4 of a mystery?

For some non-fiction, authors rely on a lot of repetition, but they don't always make it clear where the next new topic will begin. In a lecture once you get it you can check out. In a video you can skip to the next one. In a book? I don't possess the right coping mechanisms for books, and I wonder if they even exist.

I'm still learning to give myself permission to stop reading a non-fiction book halfway through when I 'get it'. I have a couple shelf-feet of books in my queue because of it. I think I expect there to be some profound observations they've saved until the end, like the little scenes after the credits in movies, and like movies, the random reinforcement keeps me coming back for more.

I've tried a bit of speed reading, skimming, and only reading the first sentence of every paragraph, but it all feels like I'm short-changing myself (and then truly short-changing myself in the process).

Maybe I should just read summaries and skip these books entirely.

I’ve found that the real value I get out of a nonfiction book is rarely the conclusion or any particular fact found within its pages. Instead, it’s a guide map for how to look at the sorts of things that the book is about and draw the sorts of conclusions that the author finds.

The act of reading a book permanently alters how you think a little bit, so the most important factor in deciding whether to abandon a book is whether or not you want to think more like the author does.

Like any other skill, the sort of thinking that any given book is training you to do benefits from repetition. The variation in the different scenarios also helps make this skill more robust so that you can apply it correctly to more diverse situations.

Fortunately, all this means you don’t need to make much of an effort to actually remember anything the book says— the book’s real value comes from subtlety altering the way you think which will happen so long as you’re attending to what you read. The later chapters should be easier and more relaxing to read because you’re familiar with the pattern of the author’s argument and they act more like a mental exercise than anything else.

yes, this. : )

I make a habit of finishing everything I read, to exercise my ability to maintain focus. But that only works by being extremely selective of the material I begin, particularly books.

If a book is skimmable, why bother? Presuming the author has something genuinely interesting and substantive to say, there are often better alternatives. For example, books written by scholars are often preceded by long-form journal articles which more concisely present the material. And if you were mistaken in your belief they had something interesting to say, then you've only wasted 20 pages of your time, not 400; yet you can still say you gave them the full measure of your attention and a fair chance to persuade you.

In a lot of ways, I find myself initially trusting a tech writer whose book is 250 pages over one whose book is 400.

The courage to stop at a couple hundred pages when you've said everything that needs to be said is not something everyone has.

I think this may be one aspect of why I love 'Refactoring' and hate 'Design Patterns'. It has so much more information in a book half the size.

I don't think it's fair to compare 'Refactoring' and 'Design Patterns' based on their respective number of pages. They are both catalogs, but they are cataloguing different things. A design pattern IMO is harder to explain and understand than a refactoring, it needs to provide some context, and by definition you need to prove that it qualifies as a pattern by showing a few examples found "in the wild".

Also, the authors had to show how these patterns can be implemented in different programming languages (Smalltalk and C++). Fowler could get away with one simple example of a refactoring in Java each time.

Having said that, Fowler's prose is super clear, something that cannot be necessarily said about GoF, (IMO of course)...

Would you extend your reasoning to TAOCP as well? Not trying to put you in a spot: I would, and I agree. I wonder how much of the praise devoted to TAOCP is from people who have actually read the books.

Re: Fiction.

The really good fiction doesn't always have the conclusion at the end -- you just think that that's the conclusion. Of course this presupposes that there's a sequel that the reader is not aware of just quite yet. (The sequel may not even exist yet, but if the author's narrative extends far enough into the future then you can get that feel.)

I think a decent example of this is the Three-Body Problem, although the first one does have a sort of abrupt ending. A weaker example would be Banks' Culture novels, but that was more about there being a whole world out there -- the actual narrative did usually just end at the end of the book.

> The really good fiction doesn't always have the conclusion at the end

I was going to say that for the opposite reason -- I don't think that something being a series or part of a larger whole makes it inherently better (sometimes it hurts; many a great book has been ruined by a sequel).

Some of the best books, however, have the conclusion right at the beginning and all the rest is "how we got there". C.F. much Vonnegut.

Oh, yes, Vonnegut, source of one of my favorite ever quotes.

However, I do think the "unfinished series" idea has some merit to it.

(Pointedly avoiding the meta:)

The quote was:

> We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

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