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>Which one do you think is going to be more productive for your life?

I think it's better to carefully select which books you read, and really get everything that you can out of them. For example, you could read 10 self help books or you could read The Republic and really understand it. And you could probably quickly read 100 self help books and books on leadership in the time it would take you to go through the relevant Plato->Aristotle->Kant->Schopenhauer->Nietzsche books that build on each other. I think you'd be far better off reading the philosophy than the self help books, but that's just me. Those self help books are a garbage use of language relative to works held up as being pillars of modern thought, there is enough extremely high quality literature from human history and text books from the modern era to keep me busy reading carefully and learning a lot for the rest of my life if its all I did, I'm fairly certain.

>You shouldn't generally feel guilty that you don't remember enough from a book. You're not supposed to.

Completely disagree, this might hurt some feelings, but if you can't remember much from a book you read, you wasted your time reading it if you weren't reading it just for pleasure. Either the book wasn't worth reading in the first place or you didn't pay close enough attention.

You say "that's just me" but immediately follow with

>Those self help books are a garbage use of language relative to works held up as being pillars of modern thought

A "garbage use of language"? Why? Maybe people have in mind different books to what I have in mind, which is all the ones I loved and am indebted to. I'm not sure why there's so many comments on HN bagging self-help books. Because 90% are crud? 90% of everything is crud, so what. Maybe you are just comparing the 90% crud self-help to the 0.001% classic philosophy.

I don't think most books have an "objective" value, but a value relative to particular people, at their different levels, abilities, stages, etc etc. Lichtenberg: “When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?” Not to be able to appreciate something is not an ability!

I've gotten an enormous amount from self-help books. Many dozens of them. I owe them my happiness and much else. I read a lot of self-help in my late teens and 20s, healing myself psychologically in many ways, learning to love myself, communicate better, stop the negative self-talk, recover self-esteem etc etc. To name a few: Tony Robbins, early Wayne Dyer, Joanna Field, SARK, New Guide to Rational Living, Emerson, Ben Zander, Peace Pilgrim ... and a lot of self-helpish books from various religious traditions. (Zen, Thai forest monk Buddhism, Sufi, Christian mystic, Hindu gurus etc) Then the psychological/mythical school too. Even New Age and channelled books, some helped me a lot, like dear friends.

I'm also a huge philosophy/essayist/aphorism fan, e.g. I've read everything Nietzsche wrote half a dozen times, my copies of him have pencil/pen markings and comments thick on every page. And have spent many years with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Schopenhauer etc. And the vast majority of my university studies were in philosophy. Yet it doesn't seem to me that self-help is an inferior "use of language" or that everyone is "far better off reading" philosophy classics. Far from it, really. The percentage of the field which is of no good use to anyone is probably much higher in philosophy!

If you remember the main ideas of a book or the justifications you can just return to the book when you need more detail than whatever you remember. If you read enough to realize that something is true then it's not always necessary to remember why X is true, you can just rely on your past self, who, while doing the reading, reached a conclusion on X.

Also, I'm curious, what would I be able to do, think, or be after spending 100 hours studying The Republic?

I'm sorry, but I just can't disagree enough.

As someone who has read not just The Republic, but much of philosophy from Aristotle through Rawls and beyond... it's been tremendously useful to me academically and utterly fascinating, but of relatively little value in my personal life (with the sole exception of Aristotle). I mean, the Republic is valuable principally as a historical work, not because any idea within it whatsoever is going to change your life. Its ideas are... quirky, to say the least. Also, most philosophy classics are completely inaccessible to the average reader, and make little sense on their own -- only making sense in a much wider context that you really need to dedicate extensive study to.

In contrast, there are "self-help" books that can fundamentally alter the way you look at and lead your life at a personal level -- your actual day-to-day behavior and the relationships you have with people. Just like any genre, there are plenty of garbage ones, but plenty of invaluable ones as well, written by psychiatrists (e.g. "Too Perfect" or "Present Perfect") and artists (e.g. "The Artist's Way") and literary/philosophy types (e.g. anything by Alain de Botton).

Your thinking seems very black-and-white -- in that philosophy classics are overwhelmingly better than self-help for people today, or that a book must either be worth intense study or else is worthless. In reality, most books are somewhere in between, kind of like a bell curve.

I think human nature/marketing is at work here.

If someone wrote the core concepts of a big idea on one sheet of paper, nobody would pay $14.95 to read it.

But if it is wrapped in a 400 page book, it would be reasonable, or even a bargain to charge $14.95.

Same reason meals at US restaurants are getting bigger and bigger. People don't need meals that huge, but...

I don't think this is quite fair, explanatory examples can be very helpful at cementing the point or persuading the doubtful.

What does shit me is the amount of 300+ page books that have at least 50-100 pages of unnecessary fluff. Giving 1 story or example to illustrate your point is one thing, but stacking 4-5 dull dull DULL stories is just a chore to get through.

I wasn't saying that 1 page was the preferred outcome, but I think publishers push authors to a quota of words.

Its interesting how online media might get us away from this. For example, youtube videos can be 30 seconds or 10 minutes, or 8 minutes and 37 seconds.

I am not sure this is true. Meals in other countries are not getting bigger and bigger, and so the reason is likely to be something particular to the US and not universal human nature. So we have no reason to think that human nature incentivises needlessly large meals/books.

Also if you sell a 400 page book, you can sell the condensed version for even more! Value added because someone did the condensing, right...?

This -> 'most books, for most people, don't need to be absorbed or understood in their entirety.'

>For most books, the reality is that you only need to know the Big Idea and its main justifications.

I'm not sure what genre/sort of books you have in mind; I can't offhand think of any books I like that have a Big Idea that alone should be retained. Maybe business books or something?

Sure, you can put a book in a nutshell, but everything worth reading about it will be lost.