Ask HN: Have you stopped reading books? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Have you stopped reading books?

31 pointsanm8945 comments

Reading has always been a big part of my life but I was out with friends the other day and they asked what I was reading and I said that I feel like I'm reading more than ever but that I haven't bought or read a book for over a year. In their place is a mix of podcasts, blogs, other articles, YouTube videos, and HN (a lot of which aren't reading at all but scratch the same itch for me)

I honestly hadn't even noticed the shift but now that I have I'm going to make an effort to mix in some hardcopy reading material. Was just curious how common this was though.

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I read books very rarely because embarrassingly I find it difficult. My job is basically skim reading docs, so when I try to read a book I find myself going into autopilot and read pages upon pages without actually absorbing anything. I find it hard to read anything with a low information density in general.

My last book was Steve Jobs' biography by Walter Isaacson, which I found interesting, but I don't remember a great deal about it because it just isn't really relevant to my life.

I've come to the conclusion that I don't really have a 'need' to read books anyway. If one day I really want to read something then I will, but I'm not going to actively encourage, or force myself.

It took me a good week of really focussing on reading and comprehension to get my brain rewired to going slowly. I was very much in the same boat of constantly skimming through paragraphs of sci-fi books without actually taking in what I was reading.

I find myself (also embarrassingly) somewhat aligned with what you describe as well, both the point about going into autopilot, and having read interesting books but don't remember a great deal because they aren't relevant to my life.

An additional point I'd make is that I find that in recent years, the books that I did enjoy tend to be written by people who already have an online presence (e.g. Randall Munroe, author of xkcd, or Jorge Cham/Daniel Whiteson, author of phd comics). I think there's something about the voice and tone of these writings that better match what I enjoy reading. Perhaps reading those books makes me feel like I'm reading something online that I like?

Hacker News discussed an essay, http://www.paulgraham.com/newideas.html

I took footnote five as a book recommendation, and bought a second hand copy of From Galileo to Newton

Fascinating stuff. Right from the start, with the Royal Society being set up in 1660, money was a problem. Gentleman amateurs couldn't afford to keep skilled craftsman in their employ, building air pumps, blowing glass barometers and the like. So they looked for government patronage.

But to return to the question, I experience some synergy, with blogs and HN stimulating my curiosity and prompting me to buy and read books. Online is not entirely distraction and time wasting.

Looking at the whole internet as a sort of "Pandora for Books" has been great for me.

I try to recognize when I'm consuming too much short text, like your comment, and then I'll go an pick up a book instead.

I'll let myself drift on the web a bit more when I'm between books, but when I start to get interested in a particular subject, I go looking for a book on it instead of the (usually) much lower quality online discussion.

This includes both fiction and non-fiction. I just finished a Del Rey Star Wars book - much more enjoyable than viewing another Prequel Meme.

> ... whole internet as a sort of "Pandora for Books"

Rings so true. Deciding on what to read is not an easy problem. Here's some digital bookshelves for inspiration: https://tomcritchlow.com/wiki/books/bookshelves/

I embraced not finishing a book years ago and have never looked back. I find being open to the idea of letting perfect not be the enemy of good enough, and letting take a walk stand in for going for a run, and reading half a book stand in for reading it in its entirety.

Forcing oneself to read uninteresting half or third of the book is the stupidest thing one could do, it's shows that you don't value your time. I'm shocked when otherwise intelligent people want to inflict their brain with that.

I'm reading more than ever - I just never got into ebooks - in fact I think the internet and long form blog posts (from pre-Twitter days, not the Medium-led long form revival) kicked me off on reading books proper. Nothing better than waking up with or relaxing in the evening with a physical book! I often have a non-fiction and fiction book in the rotation. I listen to Podcasts but there are too many that have little substance. I enjoyed Serial but like I enjoy a big bag of crisps. Obviously there are good ones, and many many books that suffer the same thing.

Mostly I hit a point where blogs and online text just didn't go into as much depth as I wanted and I realized the benefits of books (presumably they get compensated more for very long-form format of books?) and I find the physicality of books too comforting to remove from the experience.

Despite all that I dislike about the state of internet culture, I think the importance of text has been revived from suffering in the TV era. And if text isn't your bag, there are plenty of options and a new golden era of TV!

No. I guess I read more ebooks, just because I read a vast variety of books and papers. But (at age 49) I know who my favourite writers are, and never stop rereading them—e.g. Emerson, Stevenson, Chesterton, Collingwood, Putnam, Hazlitt, Fulghum, W James. Just recently I ordered online some of the Collingwood, Chesterton and Hazlitt books I'd never owned physically. I got a tablet which is great for reading ebooks in the park, but actual books are far better for bath, toilet..and anywhere. And writing in the margins and marking passages is essential! e.g. I have just about every book of Nietzsche's heavily marked and argued with on almost every page. Also am halfway through reading aloud Jane Eyre to the SO. We've watched a lot of movies together. She, a fan of 'period dramas', was shocked to realize how little any movie version of Jane Eyre (or any great novel) would or could give you of the book—virtually nothing.

I had mostly stopped reading books for about ten years, but then discovered I could absolutely devour audiobooks. I “read” more books in 2019 than I had in the previous decade.

I think it’s a combination of being able to listen while doing chores or commuting, and if the book is okay but not excellent, I can play a slow paced video game while listening and they add up to a worthwhile activity.

I didn’t read much in 2020 since i had run out of books i wanted to read and the audible subscription wasn’t worth renewing, but i’ve slowly added enough to my wishlist that I’ll re-up once i find one or two more. It’s not that other things are competing, I just find it hard to find true novelty.

I have a personal rule: Never leave the house without a book.

It works quite well. E.g. for reading on the daily commute.

I prefer non-fiction but I try to read some novels too for good measure.

I'm going to adopt this.

Awesome! Hope it will work out for you.

Not entirely, but I have noticed I do more skimming of books when I read lately. Many popular books in the past decade feel like the authors have taken sparse material and expanded it with unnecessary elaboration until it becomes book-length.

My favorite books are the dense ones, where I feel the need to read cover to cover or even read twice lest I miss something.

> In their place is a mix of podcasts, blogs, other articles, YouTube videos, and HN (a lot of which aren't reading at all but scratch the same itch for me)

I’d suggest a trial of removing some or all of these from your life for a while. Maybe a week out of every month. I’ve noticed that a lot of bite-sized time fillers feel satisfying in the moment but are overall less fulfilling than other tasks they replaced. For example, I’ve found that when I have 10 minutes to spare I’m happier if I go outside and go for a walk than if I click through HN on my phone. However, unless I make a conscious effort to go for the walk, I’ll automatically choose pulling out my phone because it’s convenient and low effort.

The most fulfilling activities are often not the most accessible.

I found myself in a similar position a few years ago and had to deliberately choose to read more books. I had gone from someone who read multiple academic books a week (when I was in a humanities grad school program) to someone who struggled to make it all the way through long form articles.

I think the mind's natural inclination is to "snack" on things like blog posts, news articles, podcasts, etc, and only commit to a long text when it's engrossing or aligns very well with your natural interests. The trouble is that it can often take a substantial amount of text (much more than a blog post typically contains!) to establish that alignment of interests, especially if the writer is an expert in their field and not a master storyteller.

If you are looking to get back into reading books and are having trouble getting over the initial hump, I found that buying a Kindle and Audible version of the same book and switching between formats helps. (Amazon will give you a discount on the audiobook if you already own the ebook and will sync your place between the two.)

Not really, reading feels like a way to go deep into a topic for me, while podcasts, documentaries, and articles scratch the surface and show what topics might be interesting. Compare reading “The Smartest Guys in the Room” with browsing the Enron Wikipedia article or watching the documentary and there’s a massive difference.

The tough part is always finding quality books of course.

I think this is frequently true but one thing that can break this trend for me is long form interview content. Their are podcasts I listen to that will release thingsblike 5 hour panel discussions with subject matter experts that can go relaly deep and yet have a very different tone than written material usually would and I tend to like these a lot.

I agree though that to methodically learn a subject books are probably the only way.

I have been reading a lot less than normal since January. In my case, I just got caught up with work and needed to do something more relaxing in my little free time.

My amount of reading has greatly varied from month to month throughout my whole life. I’d say it’s pretty normal to naturally take a break from it every now and then.

I work as a production editor in book publishing, so I'm constantly reading parts of books, and rarely have time to read a whole book. I used to do that for money--copyediting and proofreading, a lot of really terrible stuff, which is partly why I feel kind of burnt out on it now.

Oh god. Perhaps a writer, like a solo startup founder, can often fall in love with their "great idea" (first draft) that is so "amazing but no one is special enough to get it." But then there's the uncomfortable truth deriving from averaging truthful opinions: it's between unpolished and horrid. The writer might help themselves by putting it down for a week or two... years, and then rereading it like someone else wrote it.

A former roommate's wife was a Hav-ard English prodigy and then editor at Penguin who actually got things done (I hear getting things done in publishing doesn't always happen). If you're in publishing then everyone pitches a draft and everyone wants a literary agent, correct? I think she eventually got burnt-out and left for family and writing on her own.

I don't know how I could bear the tortious, torturous ennui of playing with the other people's mud soup without wanting to shower and burn my clothes afterwards because it's not like many are even building mud pies, much less the Great Mosque of Djenné. My attention span is so limited (real ADHD) that a work has to be enrapturing with "Lost-level" antici---pation* to get through it.

* Let's do the time warp again.

As long as I have books queued up on my kindle I'll read fiction pretty much every single night before going to sleep, and I really enjoy it. Books feel like they scratch an itch that's unrelated to any of the other mediums that involve reading. At the same time, I won't read anything that's not on my kindle, primarily because I read in the dark before falling asleep and the kindle is backlit.

If I run out of books to read on my Kindle I'll stop reading, sometimes for months until I have time to find books I'm interested in reading, buy/download them, find my now dead Kindle, charge it, and transfer the books to it. I love reading long fiction series in particular because I don't have to figure out what to read next.

I read fiction books.

I skim non-fiction, because many non-fiction books are composed primarily of filler material, presumably to boost a book's perceived value.

I'd pay +$1-2 per book for an official abridged book without the filler.

Which kinds of fiction? And which kinds of non-fiction? Only pop contemporary?

For an anecdotal example, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies is an account by a priest of what was happening in the New World. There's not much filler there.

Three Felonies a Day by Silvergate doesn't have prolix filler I can discern. Chris Hedges and the late Chalmers Johnson didn't seem to mince words and spread them around like hors d'oeuvres or paper doll chains.

If an editor had a word minimum, I'd do like a former English lecturer did on any of his papers he didn't think were actually read: write "Fuck you. Mary had a little lamb. Fuck you in the asshole." sprinkled throughout some actual filler word-salad.

Usually special operations/espionage/post-apocalypse type fiction. Some recent examples:

- The Dog Stars by Peter Heller (I've re-read this a number of times)

- The Postman by David Brin (Again, re-read this many times). Nothing like the movie.

- Sapiens

- The book series by Dalton Fury (RIP). His fiction is great, and if you do a little OSINT on the places in the book, you can see that he's describing these places from first-hand experience. Extremely realistic and you get the sense that many of these events really happened and are fictionalized to bypass censorship. I've re-read his book series at least 7 times. Easy reads.

- One Second After by William R. Forstchen. Although I have some minor issues with things in it, it's a fun post-apoc book.

- Anything by Derek Sivers. His writing is concise.

- The Terminal List by Jack Carr. Pretty good, not quite as good as Dalton Fury, but will read the next in the series.

- Bunches of tech books

I am very picky about the fiction I'll read but am open to unsolicited suggestions. Prefer post-apoc type stuff. Can't really get into fantasy. It needs to be an easy read because I have a house full of kids and no privacy.

Since leaving university, I haven't been able to read books unless I'm on vacation. Fiction or non-fiction.

I read all day long. It's literally all I do, aside from typing, at work. So the prospect of cracking open a book at the end of the day is less appealing than it used to be, when my day was more varied. (Classroom discussion, breaks for socialization or exercise, etc)

When I go on vacation, I typically read 2-3 novels. So while I'm reading less, I don't think I've lost anything per se.

I definitely haven't. I try to read books at least 30 minuntes a day. Sometimes, though, I have to do it on the go, on my way to work. I had some digital versions on my devices (here are some great places to find them, by the way: https://custom-writing.org/blog/free-books-online).

2 months ago:

Ask HN: How much do you read and what do you get from it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26817654

Also, 2 months ago:

Ask HN: Do you read books regularly? Fiction or nonfiction?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26593122

I stopped for a good while, but I've recently started reading again. The Box, by Marc Levinson, was a really interesting read about the development of containerized/intermodal transport. I also liked People Must Live By Work, by Steven Attewell, which covers the history of direct job creation policy in the US from the Depression to Reagan.

Once the last local bookstore left the area, I stopped buying books and magazines. The local newspaper is now $3.00 on a weekday, and only about 40 pages, 4 of which are worth reading.

All my news intake is from the internet now, here, and select youtubers, and lots of tangential followup.

Plus, now print is too small for me, I do better with text on my 31" monitor.

I read much more book content in Japanese, a language I've been learning the past ten years, than English.

It helps that I can finish an English novel in a single day while I can pace myself in a foreign language.

I simply cannot stop myself from reading a story in English and it comes at a severe detriment to productivity and sleep.

Now that my current job isn’t miserably stressful, I find myself happy to wind down with a book. I’ve read over a dozen books so far this year and it’s been quite enjoyable.

When people say they have little time to read, I understand. I’m just super grateful my current circumstances allows for it again.

This pattern held me for a while, but I intentionally reversed it, and my WIS and INT scores shot back up.

Lose books at your peril. It isn't the format itself, it's the length that is Exercise.

You cannot train for a marathon by routinely catching a city bus, no matter how fast you hustle

Nowadays it definitely takes an effort to restart. Much less or none to keep going.

I recommend time blocking (for this and other things). What works for me now is non fiction with the morning coffee, and fiction at bedtime.

I still read but mostly fiction. I strongly dislike most non fiction books, YouTube videos, podcasts, and the very idea of an audio book. If I want to learn something , I read a textbook.

Isn't a textbook a non fiction book?

I said most. There's a huge difference in quality of information between something you study and something you can read on your commute.

Other than technical books, I find myself rarely read any book these days. And I have a bad habit of leaving about the last 15-20% un-read. I need to change this.

Nope, I still read daily for pleasure. I take my Kindle with me everywhere and fit in as much reading as I can on breaks, lunch, etc.

Yes

Just all the other stuff plus audiobooks

No. I have read much more in the last year than before.

No. I stopped watching movies, series and videos.

I've been reading more: from classics of nonfiction, i.e., THOTDAFOTRE#, and literature, i.e., magical realism, and just got into fantasy romance novels. Also, I picked-up some books by and about George Carlin, Snowden, Assange, Kiriakou, and Ellsberg.

I stopped paying attention to sources of short-form pieces that lacked depth, signal, or elucidation.

# The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. I-VI

Which Ellsberg book(s) have you read? I read his memoir Secrets a while back and enjoyed it; I've been meaning to read his book on nuclear war planning, The Doomsday Machine.

Risk, Ambiguity and Decision & Doomsday

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