Books I’ve read
sive.rs
sive.rs
I have not read through all the list but by skimming, there's a really huge majority of nonfiction books.
I love nonfiction and I'm reading quite a lot myself, but I can't imagine to not have a novel or any fiction book to balance it out.
The lack of fiction in this list also makes it indigestible to me.
Why would you spare yourself from the epic,from the beautiful or from the tragic of a fiction book? This is beyond me, but this is just me as well, so thanks for sharing the list, I'll read some of these :)
Your comment was also addressed.
“Why don’t I see __(some book)___?”
I do read fiction, but I don’t take notes on it. For fiction, I prefer audiobook.
I also read hundreds of books before 2007, but didn’t start taking notes until I realized I was forgetting what I had read.
And ultimately, I only read things that apply to my life or current interests right now. I say no to all requests, and publishers asking me to do reviews.
So? This seems like a thought-stopping word: "Oh, gatekeeping! Awful". I'd say we could use some more gatekeeping.
>Some people rely on audiobooks
Well, if you mean the blind, or even people with no time outside car commuting, etc, well for them it's another matter.
I might rely on a walker to go around, but that doesn't mean that it's just an altertive for walking that I prefer, as opposed to a remedy for a health issue.
My sense is that when people talk about gate keeping there’s necessarily an emotional component. In this case I’d guess perhaps there’s a sense that “reading a book” is valuable or prestigious and they don’t want to exclude someone from it.
But to me it’s just an observation of how you consumed content, free of emotional charge.
If you have a lot of dialog, like I do, I think a narrator can bring it to life, by inhabiting the characters. If you're reading the book, you might well be imagining the author talking to you, so an audiobook narrator becomes the voice of the author.
So no, they're not mutually exclusive.
The negative tense of the name “non-fiction” is interesting too. The original categorizers must also not have thought too highly of it.
Real stories have a tendency not to be as real as one might hope.
Fake stories have a way of being more real than the "fake" label might imply.
He has these "conversations" between people 35 years ago, with wildly unrealistic dialog that no human would ever speak. And yet this qualifies as "non-fiction"?
Having done this reconstruction myself, I can tell you that absolutely NO ONE remembers what they said 40 years ago. No one remembers when meetings happened or who was there.
Take, for example, the famous Steve Jobs visits to Xerox PARC. I wasn't there so I didn't include them. But a podcast host told me he's talked to three people who were, and they have three different stories.
There are, in fact, some writers who manage to bring history to life without inventing dialog and scenes that maybe never happened. I salute them.
I stand by the saying "S.he who has read 1000 books has lived 1000 lives".
When fiction, the life of the characters. When "nonfiction", share the life and thoughts of the author(s).
I hope HN won't turn into Twitter where everyone finds something offending all the time.
Bourdieu is a good start on these topics.
Why would you do that? Why would you rather read something where you could learn something useful or even nice maybe? I mean of course you can read whatever you want. Genuinely curious.
Also shit or otherwise, it’s such a fallacious myth that you only learn from non-fiction.
Just this year I tried to read Musashi, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and some classic Russian novels and I can’t do it. I’m not sure why and I’m well aware of the benefits. So to an extent I imagine Sivers is similar.
I don't think the images play in my head as well as other people and that is not really an issue with non-fiction. With non-fiction I am just parsing the content in a sense.
Anyway such lists are very depressing to look at. Feels like you were expecting a diverse spread at the meal table and all you got was make believe chips, and biscuits made of pure plastic which you’re maybe just supposed to chew on for sometime and then spit out — you do that because others do that and well it’s the fashion. Most of this list just feels like that.
It could have been just one shelf at an airport bookshop listed top to bottom with few exceptions.
If I want culture I'll consult Harold Bloom, thank you very much.
I do like the reviews and recommendations I’ve read from Michael Dirda and Christian Lorentzen.
"My 0-10 rating is not just how much I liked the book. It’s how strongly I would recommend it to almost anyone. So I would give a little lower rating to a book I loved about an obscure subject, like the culture of Switzerland, because I wouldn’t recommend it to most people."
i.e. the rating is, roughly, how much it's likely to help you.
But I'm curious how other people square this circle.
The one exception where I literally took like hundred of notes was from the book "This is how they tell me the world ends" which has a 50 page word file that you can download from the author's site that contains all the bibliography and online resources she used to write the book. I've gone through each and every one of the references. There are thousands of them in there.
I didn't used to keep notes. Then about 6-7 years ago, I decided I would (for nonfiction books that seem to contain lessons).
Why?
Because I realized I retained very little of the book a year down the road. So I asked myself why I was reading these books if I'm not absorbing the lessons contained therein. Without retaining that knowledge, the reality was that the only benefit they provided me was entertainment. And nonfiction pales in comparison to fiction for entertainment value (at least for books like Sapiens, etc).
So I decided that either I should stop reading them and simply read more fiction instead, or I continue reading nonfiction and take decent notes I can refer to later.
I picked the latter.
And yes, it has the downsides you mentioned: I cannot even read a fifth of the books I used to as taking notes is time consuming (and my notes are still a lot rawer than his). I don't think I mentally retain that much more than I used to, and I still wonder whether I should just stick to fiction. But going back to reading nonfiction without taking notes seems like the worst of both worlds - you get inferior entertainment, and you don't really learn much.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31615147
To add to that, here's a story.
Back in Feb of 2014, I was reading the book Willpower. While reading it, I kept saying to myself "Wow! I need to note this stuff down somewhere!" It was one of the first books I started taking notes for.
Right after that, I decided to revisit Thinking, Fast and Slow (TFS), which I had read less than a year before. Lo and behold, I found that 90% of the stuff I said "Wow" to in Willpower was in that book, and I had no memory of having encountered the material. And it hadn't even been a year. What was the point of reading such a good book as TFS if I didn't retain stuff that was a clear "Wow!" to me?
I don't know if note taking is necessarily the solution - I still don't retain much unless I revisit my notes, which I almost never do. But I do know that for me, reading such books in a manner where I'm almost guaranteed to forget most of it - it's just passing time and giving me a false notion that this book is useful for me past the time of reading.
otherwise excessive note-taking just distracts from the reading experience and makes it harder for me to remember anything (its the same way for me in lectures btw)
It's a thematically coherent list though so if some of these are up your alley, others likely will be.
Regarding technical books, I'll repeat a stance of mine: I spent over a decade in university, and learned a ton. The majority of which I never used. The majority of engineering/technical courses I took as an undergrad? Never once utilized for my job. When you start including grad level courses, the ratio looks much worse!
Reading just a few books on communication and negotiations has proved more useful than the majority of technical courses/books I've read - easily! Reading psychology and understanding what motivates people and how they behave was more effective at understanding dysfunction in the work place and did more for my career than the majority of technical books I've read.
Tech folks are addicted to tech, but sit down and start enumerating: How many technical books that you've read were of actual use to you? When you read your next technical book, are you doing it because you enjoy it (entertainment), or because it'll be useful to you? If the former (which is the case for most tech people), it's no better than reading a fluff book is for others.
I swear hardly anybody thinks for themselves anymore much less engage in critical thinking. People are just Parrots.