The myth of the golden age of reading | Hacker News Reader

The myth of the golden age of reading

prospectmagazine.co.uk

53 pointspepys27 comments

My personal experience: I no longer get absorbed for hours reading a book, as was the case when I was younger. The free time available is no excuse, because I spend a lot of time in HN and the like. Before, reading was almost inevitable, I did need to make an effort to put the books apart, nowadays I need a lot of will to put away the phone to grab the same books that I adored some years ago.

This is also true for me, except that I still put in the hours reading books by authors that I like. So to a large degree what's been lost is the willingness to go ahead and read iffy books.

It makes a large difference, but I think focusing on the presence of "additional distractions" misses something about what's going on.

(I'm not claiming that I spend the freed-up time doing valuable things, or that reading mediocre books wouldn't be valuable - I'm just saying that the fall in reading doesn't apply to the activity itself so much as to the majority of content to which it would apply.)

I have experienced a similar dip in the level of, uh, retention and engagement that books can elicit from me. Recently I kind of feel it turning around, and there seem to be two main causes: using time on airplanes to get deep into a book, and intentionally seeking out books that would suit my taste.

The airplane thing is a small one and may or may not suit your lifestyle. But the bigger thing is that as a child or a teen, everything is new to you. There are some books that are just about guaranteed to suck you in and expand your worldview if you've never encountered them before. They are the low-hanging-fruit curriculum books that just about anyone will benefit from. Once you've exhausted the Catch-22s, the Mark Twains, the Tolkiens or Austens or Heinleins of the world, you'll have to spend more effort to find books that really resonate with you.

For me, this meant following sites like The Baffler and Electric Literature. I hope if you figure out where online people are reviewing and promoting the books you enjoy, you'll find yourself funneled toward books that are capable of drawing you in again.

As a concrete recommendation, I just finished The Overstory by Richard Wright, which won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction this year, and absolutely could not put it down.

Books not so much, maybe because there are many hundreds of years of output from which to choose. But, man, movies and TVs are that way for me (ignoring the obvious reboots from my childhood or teen years). A little from column A, a sprinkling of column B, and...yeah, I've seen this before, it just had a different title. What's the saying, nothing new has been written since Shakespeare?

I'll give the sites you recommend a whirl, thanks.

Part of it is just working the muscle. I've basically killed everything in my phone that notifies except for text messages and phone calls. And even those go quiet when I set it to Do Not Disturb.

From there it's about training. It's almost like meditation where the more you do it, the longer your stretches of focus can become and the more quickly you can click your brain into "reading more." To ease back in I found graphic novels were a great start. They accustom you to sitting still and getting absorbed into things.

I am unapologetic about my embracing of digital reading. I read a lot of history books and find that access to wikipedia and google earth enhance the experience. Not only can I enjoy the book, but I can enrich the experience by taking up extra context from easily available online sources.

If you haven't tried it, pick up the ebook of "Voyage of the Beagle" and trace Darwin's travels with google earth and wiki. I assure you that the time you spend "distracted" looking at pictures of Patagonia will be a great time.

Your comment illustrates the vast range of reading experiences available now unlike any time before. The important part is the reading, regardless of the medium. No apologies needed for those who would question the form. Leah Price alludes to this in the interview: “Personally, I’m not concerned about the survival of the object; I am very concerned about the survival of those human practices or activities.” I try to do as much as possible across all available reading formats. My requirements are to read, enjoy, and learn.

A few years ago I made a plan that I didn't even start: to use Wikipedia and Google Earth to read along Foucault's Pendulum. Now I have taken up the idea again, with the excuse of carrying a "reading book", to illustrate and anotate my reading of long-form works, for which I bought a 200-page notebook and some fine drawing markers.

I am sure that one page of Umberto Eco's book will take me hours, but my hope is to inherit the (maybe unfinished) work to my sons.

A, this favorite trope, about how critique of the future, is always based on some invalid romanticized aspect of the past. Sorry, but this is BS:

"Even before the digital age, book-lovers were always prone to distraction"

Yeah, they were, but not in "the whole world reachable and available for distraction 24/7 , reading on a web-surfing capable device, in the social-media era", way...

You might get away with presenting this view 20-30 years into the future, but as of now, there are lots of us who have lived through both times as adults and can do the comparison...

Yeah this whole article seemed a bit too keen on overcorrecting. Most of the people I've seen complaining about not reading enough anymore aren't comparing their current reading habits to an imagined history, it's their observations of how their own habits have changed over time. It's personal experience.

Now part of that might just be that 10 years ago we had fewer stresses and responsibilities so this is more of an age cohort thing, but I don't think so. I read and hear the same concern from people in their 30s (who were in their early 20s when smartphones happened) to people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. The always online, notifications pinging in your pocket all day world seems to be the common denominator.

I completely agree with this. Having spent the first half of my professional life without the always on-internet in my pocket, I couldn't agree more. And even now, I have to force myslef to distraction free time to try and read, and it's so much more difficult than it used to be.

In fact, I'm going back to traditional paper books, so that I don't have a simple swipe to distract me. I started digital reading on a Kindle, but don't plan on replacing my 6 year old one. And then I tried transitioning to Kindle on the iPad and my Android phone. Too easy to get distracted.

I don't know which kindle you have, but I wanted to say, that I finally bought a kindle (paper white) and it has been a breath of fresh air. It's possibly my best purchase this year. I use it when I want escapism without the noise that is my phone. For me it's turned into a good medium ground even though I prefer a book's aesthetics. The last book I tried to read, I literally could only make it 2/3 of the way before it was impractical to hold one handed, a limitation of reading while holding twins until they fall asleep. Also the backlight. I can read a book without having to turn on a light when dealing with said twins in the middle of the night.

I have a five year old Kindle White, which I really like. I'm a little nervous about the white/blue light affecting my sleep, though....

> If you asked people in Britain or in the US a generation ago what book they had in their house, the most common answers would have been a Bible and a telephone book. So when we blame the absence of printed books for the distraction and the impatience and superficiality of the digital world, it’s unfair. We’re comparing an ideal scenario of print reading with a more realistic assessment of digital reading.

Sure, those might have been the most common answer to the question of "what books do you have in your home?", but that does not mean that people didn't also have/read other books. It just means that the n-dimensional venn diagram of book ownership centered around the Bible and the phone book. It's obvious that most of the books that I own are not the same as most of the books that my neighbors own, so those (more traditional) "books" wouldn't be the most common answers to this particular question.

No doubt today we have more tools at our disposal to distract ourselves but regardless reading is still the highest bandwidth method of transmitting and retaining information and its not going away until a better method is found.

The proposition I disagree with is the idea that people don't read as much or to the same extent as the "good ol days", which I think is false. There are a lot more people now, maybe the frequency as a percent of the total population is lower, but in aggregate numbers there are more people reading to a greater extent than ever before living right now and the demand for books/reading material has never been higher in the history of mankind.

My reading-related startup recently did a study to assess the current status of the digital-versus-print debate. Even though our respondents were pretty tech savvy (they use our Chrome extension), the preference in favor of paper over screen was surprising. I did not expect it to be so much of a landslide, especially given how tech savvy the respondents were.

https://medium.com/@BeeLineReader/even-for-ebook-readers-the...

My experience is that the internet has drastically increased my use of the library, since now they are all networked (in my region) and affiliated with combined catalogs into a mega-library.

It is easier than ever before to borrow. I see a book recommendation e.g. on HN and I can immediately find it and request it to be delivered to the closest branch.

Since it is just as easy to request several, I'll order an assortment of books on the same topic from as many libraries and they show up in roughly the same time if they are available. Perfect for "syntopical reading" as Mortimer Adler calls it.

Having a Kindle and the associated apps is wild for reading. Now I do it way more than I used to. I remember one of the downsides of switching to a fifteen minute commute for me was that I couldn't reasonably get into a book before I got to work and so the overhead of physical management dominated the reading experience. With Kindle, no overhead, I have it on my phone and it integrates with my other devices (Voyage, iPad) to keep my position synced.

I find this romanticism of reading a little odd. When I was a kid and teenager I was a voracious fiction reader, finishing a couple fantasy or sci-fi novels a week. My parents always thought I was involved in some virtious activity that was a clear sign of how “gifted” and mature I was. In reality, all I was doing was passively consuming. Reading books like that is most certainly a vice, and while not especially bad for you, isn’t especially worthwhile either.

That may be how you tell yourself the story of your old reading habit, but as a fellow voracious childhood reader I would disagree completely. I think reading is a very active process of imagination, analyzing characters and plots, and forming opinions for oneself. My reading habit I picked up as a child is one of my most cherished possessions and an essential part of who I am.

As vices go, reading is surely not a bad one to get caught up in :)

That's interesting point of view. We are probably different, but as as a kid and young teen I didn't really analyze characters and plots much (different education system) and although I noticed some references and allusions, I didn't think about it deeper. When I later discovered "Tv Tropes" it opened my eyes and in way sucked lot of enjoyment from reading. I started noticing various plot devices much more and realized how much of what I read is derivative. Really ignorance is bliss.

I can't even say it has significantly benefited me. Most of what I read was rather trivial literature and even though it gave me good reading comprehension, I can't stop to wonder if it wouldn't have been better to for instance play sports and cultivate interpersonal skills, teamwork, discipline and hard work.

IDK that "reading things for fun" is a bad habit. I mean, what do you consider good habits? What IS worthwhile and fun? Why can't "doing something fun but of no benefit to the world at large" not be worthwhile?

Even as someone who loves moral philosophy and everything that comes along with it, I feel like that's a pretty cynical take on reading for fun.

A very hardline protestant one (back in the day playing chess was considered sinful) and in my opinion an unhealthy view.

Maybe the way you read scifi could be described as 'passively consuming'. Me, I engaged actively in whatever I was reading as a kid especially the genre stuff. We really could use some romanticism of some things from the past. While not always correct, I certainly prefer and enjoy those memories to this barren seeming 'reality' typical of these revisitations of the past for 'enlightened' deconstruction.

I still prefer paper books over digital reading. As a CTO I have to finde some digital and online free time. That gives me the freedom to not be distracted and read.

Simple: don't allow yourself to be distracted. Even with a paper book, distractions abound if you allow them.

Thanks for your comment. Fair enough. Maybe I should have said "gives me the freedom to be offline". To not be distracted is requiring a big amount of self discipline.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com