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Comment by martopix | Hacker News Reader

Choosing a good book, which is deep and requires focus, and taking the time to fully appreciate it, is much better than reading 10 other books. If you go by the numbers you'll never set aside the time for reading Dostoevski or Proust or Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian. It's not about the numbers.

In the same way, it's much nicer to have a good dish from a good chef than chucking down 10 burgers.

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Interesting point.. but it also brings to mind that story about the pottery class with two student groups - one tasked with making multiple pots, and the other with a single most perfect pot.

(https://aliabdaal.com/pottery/

https://joshdance.medium.com/pottery-class-parable-or-real-e...)

It could be argued that finishing (and enjoying and extracting value from) books is a skill that can be honed by doing the quantity approach, at least initially.

Usually I don't read books to increase my book reading skills

Why should findings from pottery generalize to reading? It's not like reading is an activity with a clearly defined goal for each attempt, where one gets clear feedback based on which to "improve".

If we were discussing a textbook where "reading" equates to solving exercises, I might agree with you. However, attempting to apply a metric-driven approach in a field where metrics are vague/implicit (which books are "high-quality", and what value does one get for the time spent reading them?) sounds like a fool's errand.

define "good book"

Oscar Wilde is apparently meant to be the master of quips, but the diary of dorian grey is not the greatest.

Dostoevski might be "good" but he goes on, and its a relentless torrent of misery.

I get what your trying to say, but for me personally I am not overly taken by "Good literature" books. They tend to be thick, obtuse or just plain difficult.

i found short story collection of these 'miserable authors' good. tolstoys 'how much land does a man need' was epic.

"Good" doesn't necessarily mean classic. I think what GP said was that a book that resonates with you, for any reason, requires focus to be really understood; not just mindlessly trying to read as much text as you can, just so you can check a box in your todo list.

I think it helps to understand that classic literature is not always the same as a book that is just fun. There can be overlap, and many people would say that those are their favourite books and often the best books, but often classic literature is "classic" because it has been very influential and has been talked about a lot. In other words, it helps to understand that reading the classics is taking part in a long conversation that often goes back hundreds of years, and in some cases thousands of years. They are good because they are important to a collective idea of human culture. They tell us who we are and were.

> They tend to be thick, obtuse or just plain difficult.

This is where taking literature courses, or knowing history, can be very important. Courses like these fit the classics into a timeline, act like cartographers of human culture, and, most of all, provide context, so that you can understand the humanity (the forms of life in the world often so different from our own) tied up in these books. It helps when reading The Picture of Dorian Grey to know about Wilde's life and trial, aesthetics and popular culture at the time, and especially the ideas of late 19th century dandyism in England that were so prominent at the time of its writing precisely because the book is a brilliantly witty encapsulation of all those ideas. They are what make it mean. The same goes for Dostoevsky who was writing in a time when Russia was in the midst of an incredibly fertile period for literature, the arts, and philosophy and general intellectualism for a relatively small minority.

I disagree to some extent.

I think there's significant value in being exposed to the different ideas/concepts/stories/whatever in 10 books than only being exposed to a single viewpoint.

of course, that means reading broadly, rather than deeply, but I think more folks should try to read more broadly in general too.

Many people are not in a position to enjoy those works, just as many are not prepared to appreciate the amazing subtleties found in a world-class meal.

I would argue the first step is getting non-readers to read… anything. Just read consistently.

Why this overarching need to read a certain number of books? I have read a book in a couple hrs and some have taken me months , although I was reading couple hrs each day, they were dense and hard to digest and needed reflection.

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