Reading fast, reading well, and reading widely (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Reading fast, reading well, and reading widely (2020)

driverlesscrocodile.com

189 pointsipnon146 comments

> People feel compelled to finish books they’ve started – that’s just a tax on your reading. Why would you do that to yourself? Imagine a world where any restaurant you tried you had to keep on going there for days or weeks, you’d hardly ever go out to eat.

I got this advice from an English Lit professor 20 or so years ago. His advice was: "Read the first 50 pages, if the author hasn't earned your attention by then, you can stop reading. You'll never read all the good books anyway, don't waste your time on the bad ones." A literature professor, mind.

It's among the top pieces of advice I've ever put into practice. It's liberating. I try to pass on this advice, but it's rare that anybody sees the wisdom there.

It's not like this can work for college or high school reading assignments, in which you have to read the whole thing and cannot bail out. Maybe this is why some kids grow up not liking reading...they are forced to read books they dislike in school.

SparkNotes can get you through enough of a book for a C in a small fraction of the time it would take to read the book. In fact, I got more out of SparkNotes’ vernacular-ified versions of Shakespeare than I did out of reading the actual Shakespeare.

This is where reading smarter works for you.

Unless you're actually studying for your own interest (and this is a good thing of itself), the goal in a college course isn't to read the assigned texts, it's to maximise your grade in the course. Usually with a minimum required effort.

If you are studying for your own interest, the text will probably be intrinsically interesting to you, and you don't have a problem.

If you're reading "for the course", then consider what the goal of the reading is. This will vary by subject and text, but generally:

- Skills courses (maths, engineering, comp sci) tend to focus on learning a specific skill or ability. Focus on what delivers that. Often the assigned text is not the best.

- Theory courses (typically social sciences and some humanities) focus on understanding a concept and its applications or instances.

- Knowledge courses (law, medicine, philosophy) often require memorisation of a large body of knowledge.

In all cases, examination or essays will only focus on a small quantity of the material. Understanding how tests are structure or how essays or presentations are graded gives you a leg up here.

Specific approaches will vary by subject, course, and instructor, but "read it all" is virtually never actually required.

A good study group can be invaluable, if the group and its members understand what is required to pass the specific course.

> A good study group can be invaluable, if the group and its members understand what is required to pass the specific course.

Maybe you've had a better experience than I have but over 3 college degrees I've never been part of a study group that was worth the time. The problem is it's so hard to find other motivated people who won't let the group devolve into social hour. After multiple attempts I gave up.

Rare, yes, but invaluable.

I don't know the magic behind creating, cultivating, or finding one, but I suspect that giving up on the social-hour element is key.

It doesn't have to be large either.

The Paper Chase is a fictitious example, but might be worth considering, for its successes and failures.

Finding the lecturer's own notes doesn't hurt either. As in Chase and also this recent HN thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32335884

My grandmother did the opposite. If she was about to put the book down for good, she’d read the last page. If that was good enough, she’d read the second-to-last page. If that was good enough, she’d go back and finish the book from the beginning.

Seems like stupid advice but it’s helped me through books I would otherwise have dropped permanently.

This is actually good advice.

I don't like this advice. For one because I would have missed out on some incredible books. (the first one that comes to mind for me is Roberto Bolaño's 2666, I struggled with the first part, the rest blew me away).

But more importantly to me this seems like a mindset that centers around quick gratification. Perseverance is a useful skill. Thinking the author needs to get you in the first 50 pages is somewhat entitled attitude. The restaurant metaphor seems apt because it seems like taking the "the customer is king" attitude to reading. There's humility involved in reading that requires to give an author time.

I think this is exactly why people have a hard time with this advice. We're used to thinking we owe the author something because we've chosen to read their book. What this presupposes is that we owe them nothing, in fact it's up to them to justify spending our limited time and attention on their book, rather than in the million other options for books available to us.

You will occasionally miss out on a good one by following this advice, but in the end you'll read so many more good books, because you'll spend less time halfheartedly slogging through books you hate and dread.

I think that "first 50 pages" just gives you a poor sample. I often read 5 sections of 5-10 pages from several random parts of a book, including closer to the final.

For fiction in can give you "spoilers", but I don't care. A book which is worth reading to the end is usually worth re-reading anyway, despite your knowing the entire plot. "Hamlet" can be seen as a detective story, but we don't read it to find out who is the murderer.

A book that can be destroyed by a spoiler is not worth reading, to my mind.

In non-fiction spoilers don't exist. But looking at the farther chapters you can see if the author is going to tackle some new and interesting material. First 50 pages of many non-fiction books are often intros, and if the topic is not new to you, you already know what they are trying to explain, and can skim / skip.them.

That's great. Especially if you have a lot of people telling you this is an awesome book worth reading. I've definitely put effort into reading hard books because of this. But mean, 95% of the stuff I read isn't this. It's still useful to glean some info out of but there are only so many masterpieces in the world.

For me it comes down to trust: if I trust that the author will deliver on a good book (by recommendations, by its reputation in a community, etc.) I will not give up so easily on it. But if I have no reason to trust, why should I waste my time?

I agree with you that we should generally give authors a chance and I would also have missed out on some great books if I would not have kept going. But I am also a very slow reader and therefore have to be very selective. So I rely a lot on opinions from reviewers and other readers to give me a hint that the text might grow on me, otherwise I cannot possibly give any book the chance it may deserve; there are just too many other great books that I would never get to read at all.

I had a hard time with The Savage Detectives but the ending was cool.

I always do my best to finish the book, including the foreword and any other additional texts that the book may have. To me, it feels disrespectful to the author to not read the whole book, even if they've been dead for 2000 years, they still deserve respect for the work that they've done.

To me, not finishing a book is like looking at only half of a painting - you can't see the whole picture. ^^

But I do understand that these days people are obsessed over not wasting time, even though I disagree with the "must not waste time" mentality.

You know, sometimes I quite enjoy pressing the Snooze button and just taking in the cold fresh morning air while enjoying the warmth of my blanket.

I used to think this way, but think about all of the amazing books that you didn't experience because you were stuck on a book that didn't click with you. There are a bazzilion books, you aren't going to read them all, you might as well read what clicks with you.

isn’t the really interesting argument here about the next word?

edit: should i read the next

But the problem is that you don't know if the book will click for you later, and click in such a way that it might change the way you look at life.

I don't know, what I don't know.

You might also not yet be at a point in your life where you'll be able to appreciate a book. You can't force these things.

But based on the first 50 pages, statistically, the chance of this book clicking for you is lower than the chance the next book will click.

it took me a good 30-40 years to learn to give up on books. There are quite a few I ground out but they didn't really land.

I think there are some that I'll give another go. I'm older, more perspective. There are books I read that I hated but friends enjoyed. There's also stuff that I read as a kid that, well, didn't hold up on a revisit. I imagine I'll give Borges' fantastical realism another shot someday. But at that time in my life it just didn't hook me. There are some big bad Russian books I'll take another stab at as well.

I think the Bible I think pushed me over the edge. My profession gives me a certain tolerance for long lists of names and rules. There's some beautiful stuff, there's some horrible stuff. . (no judgment either way about other readers beliefs). But yeah, multiple authors over a long time, with whatever revisions. It's a difficult book. Maybe someday, I'll take another run at big religious texts. Every attempt is sooo hard.

There are very few books I'd say I'd never try again, but most are so forgettable to begin with, I doubt I'd ever find them again, or realize this was round 2.

"The Bible" isn't really one book, and trying to read it as one is ... messy and hard.

It's a convenient collection of a whole bunch of short books.

I'd think reading individual books would be a better approach.

Story books: (written as narrative, can pretty much be read as is, just with lots of historical context need for some "wtf?" And "why is that a good thing?" Moments) Ruth, Esther, Jonah, possibly Mark and Acts.

poetic stories: ( narrative content, but expressed in Hebrew poems, so form and patterns etc more than just reading for the story) parts of Genesis, Job, parts of John, and Revelation.

History (biased, but still intended to be read as history, contains lots of individual short stories): Parts of Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, Judges, The Samuels, Kings and chronicles collection, some of the prophets, Luke, Acts...

"Wisdom literature" / poetry: Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, song of Solomon...

And a whole bunch of prophecy, laws, other stories, collected letters to people, and a whole bucket of misc.

Genesis & exodus, as a "ancient Israel primary establishing narrative" maybe a good start if you want to read a whole bunch of the Bible. But then skip and read some stories from later on in Jewish history, try reading some of the more famous Psalms, perhaps with some of the commentaries about them, to see what people believe the meanings behind them are, etc. Checking out some "Bible history timelines" may be helpful too, to get a grasp of when and why different bits were written, and to whom.

Reading about Jesus' life, the four gospels basically cover the same stuff, but written to different audiences, with slightly different emphasis (writing to Jews who knew their religious history, compared to writing to non-Jews living in Roman context who were still investigating this new thing, etc). John is kinda poetic, Mark is all about the action, Luke is trying to be methodical, and Matthew brings in a lot of expected past knowledge of things)... Reading them and comparing them can be interesting to see the different perspectives, but any one of them is enough to get the basic idea.

After Jesus, Acts gives the continued story, what the early church did. And then most after that is letters addressing specific people and circumstances. Reading them as "blanket rules for all ages" without knowing who and why they were written, knowing about the context, what was already the culture at the time, etc, makes them really easy to misread parts as endorsing things our culture does differently, compared to critiquing the situation at the time... I guess that's true of all ancient literature.

> Reading them as "blanket rules for all ages" without knowing who and why they were written, knowing about the context, what was already the culture at the time, etc, makes them really easy to misread parts as endorsing things our culture does differently, compared to critiquing the situation at the time... I guess that's true of all ancient literature.

A very important point. I find that many, including Christians, approach reading the Bible as a textbook, or a moral code of sorts to guide behaviour.

Treat it like ancient literature developed over thousands of years, different people making various modifications to it not unlike an open source project, and it can become super insightful. Of course ancient people were wired differently from us, but the lindy stuff in humanity remains

My finish/start ratio is something around 15%. I consider it as a feature and not a bug. It’s the price I have to pay in order to unearth good books that cater to my taste.

Also, I have made peace with the fact that I will never be able to read all the good books. It’s a tough pull to swallow but that’s just the way it is unless I spend stupendous amount of time reading which I won’t so it’s OK.

I too follow this advice and i wish someone would have told me earlier. But hiw do you judge if the book at hand is „interesting“? I for myself try to figure out my emotions towards the book- do i feel a real urge to keep reading? If the answer is yes, you probably wouldn’t even think about it. If not it can be hard to detach oneself from the book. Maybe you like the author or the cover print. Going back to the question above helps. But what is even more important is the selection process. Reading should be fun but selecting your next book can be tedious. Often researching the internet is sufficient but sometimes i have to sit down inside the bookshop and start reading. I often leave without buying anything. Dont buy loads of books and only read a fraction- this is bad advice and will make you loose interest quickly.

One fun metric I heard: subtract your age from 100 and that's that pages you should read. So, for example, if you're 60, then 100-60 = 40. If it hasn't grabbed you by page 40, toss it.

I love the implication of inverse relation between accumulation of wisdom over time and a need to get your hands dirty to accumulate that wisdom.

That is: The younger you are, the more you need to read a given book in the off chance it might teach you something new and worthwhile. The older you are, the less you need to read a given book because you probably already know whatever it contains.

But to answer his rhetorical questions, “why is that”?

Is it simply because it feels like a failure to not finish what you started, or something else?

There is a book called “How to talk about books you haven’t read” by Pierre Bayard. It is exactly about this. And the writer is a also a litt prof. Really interesting, but I also feel that reading books is different from eating at a restaurant in a very unquantifiable way. I don’t know.

This book helped me be okay with not finishing a book. Another way I put it is that the book is there to serve me, not me to serve the book.

Also true for other forms of media like anime, movies, and internet videos.

If you really want to know how it ends, look up a sunmary or watch it at 2x speed with liberal skipping.

Skimming technical books is also severely underrated.

2x with skipping is the only way I can watch many “seminal” animes. Most of the time, due to cost saving measures taken while doing the animation, you’re not really missing anything by going fast.

As for the skipping, well, all I have to do to justify it is point at the “heavy breathing” scenes in Dragon Ball Z and even the most hardcore fans will forgive me.

Another hack: Find a book you sort of want to read, and just watch a 1 hour lecture about the book by the author on YouTube.

If you've ever done both of those things before, you will have realized that the Pareto Principle kicks in and you've got almost all of the value from just the lecture. Books as a medium actively encourage unnecessary verbosity.

This doesn't work with technical texts, obviously. But for those 150 page pop-sci type books, it's fine.

> Books as a medium actively encourage unnecessary verbosity.

From memory that is the main thesis of this article by Sam Harris (from the article):

>If your book is 600 pages long, you are demanding more of my time than I feel free to give. And if I could accomplish the same change in my view of the world by reading a 60-page version of your argument, why didn’t you just publish a book this length instead?

https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-future-of-the-book

It's also that Paul Graham saying ~"books should be blog posts, blog posts should be tweets".

I feel this is a consequence of how cheap books have gotten to produce.

Older books, the sort that were copied by hand onto calf skin, tend to have a lot less meandering filler than contemporary literature.

And the "web-first long form" medium positively drips with filler. Half the time it doesn't even mention the subject at hand for 500 words until a tortured anecdote or analogy has run out of steam, leaving you guessing what the article is even about in the first place. Then it carries on for another few thousand words, at least 70% of which are useless flourishes or word count padding.

There's so much scope for improvement in pedagogy with better mediums. It'd be so good if college courses were presented in the format of an OurWorldInData page, perhaps with pop-out embedded video segments, instead of obscure disjointed lecture slides or a 2 hour long meandering video.

Yes, SEO advise for the past 7+ years is that 'Google likes those who are experts, so you have to have long essays to look like an expert & have longer time-on-page.'.

It’s also a consequence of programs like “Kindle Unlimited” where your pay as an author is directly tied to how many pages are read.

Yeah, there are several factors in this, for example a lot of people look at page counts (or book thickness) when deciding what to buy; thinking that thicker book = more information.

One of my favourite books is Longitude by Dava Soble. It's 224 pages yet conveys an epic and detailed account of an event in history that played out over a century.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Longitude-Genius-Greatest-Scientifi...

I recently read the book Atomic Habits by James Clear and felt exactly this. The book could have easily been one quarter the length and covered all the same material.

The contents of the book is quite good albeit not revolutionary. But it should have been around 60 pages not 270.

I actually found a fantastic short form version at https://www.chrisbehan.ca/posts/atomic-habits which is just as good as the book at explaining the concepts at a fraction of the read time. I advise anyone read that over the book.

I've seen the same thing and come to think of books as preparation by the author for these lectures/interviews. The book is a demonstration that the author has thought things through. They've put things to paper and what they're saying isn't just some off the cuff remark.

That sounds like it doesn't work for the main intended purpose GP mentioned: literature.

> Books as a medium actively encourage unnecessary verbosity.

I think most people call that "literary style". :P

I usually don't do this.

As a counterexample (and they are science fiction works, not necessarily literature) I give you Anathem and Ridley Walker (similarly A Clockwork Orange).

They both make use of the same stylistic device of an invented language that you need to untangle and internalize, before you can seamlessly scan the phrases.

50 pages weren't enough for me to understand what the stories were about. I pushed through it and I found both highly satisfying and I enjoyed the language puzzle that they put in front of me.

It can be argued that it's clear that the stories did grab me before 50 pages, and that's why I pushed through, and maybe this is right, but I just wanted to clarify that 50 pages might not be enough every time. :)

I realized this pretty early on in life. There is an unlimited supply of stuff to read - I'm not wasting my precious time on a book I don't like.

Imo, 99.9% books aren't worth reading. If a book's value can be captured within its cliff notes, then it should have been a long form blog to begin with. Of the 0.1% worth reading, a majority are hard to actually finish. IE. Textbooks. Informative but doesn't become more than the sum of its parts.

This leaves the ones that can be read, and are worth reading. The absolute best. These books have a few common traits.

1. Literary value akin to music. The sheer joy of the act of reading. Pure entertaintment.

2. Philosophy. Everything is philosophy. But good philosophy is felt through a book before it is even stated.

3. Anecdotes that hit beyond standard tropes. Unique anecdotes either in scale, investment or anomalous structure that carry you to the philosophical conclusion.

4. Compression and focus : what not to write and how express it. Often, this is the biggest shortcoming of almost good books written a compilation of great ideas.

I have consistently found these 4 to be the best way to evaluate the value of a book for me. Everything else is secondary.

I'd love to hear some of your recommendations for books you've read or skim-evaluated that yield a large magnitude vector on your <1, 2, 3, 4>-space.

The closest has been the book I'm reading (and should have finished by now) - "Why the west rules for now". No book drives the 'geography is destiny' point home as well as this book. It is one of the rare textbooks that is a delight to read. Lastly, the anecdotes highlight the 'history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes' adage in a uniquely convincing manner. It is one of the few books I see recommended on both center-left (r/askhistorians) and center-right (IDW) platforms.

Catch-22 is another such delightful book without a single fault. It is a cliché now, but it must have been a revelation to see a book capture such a fundamental idea so perfectly through anecdotes. No wonder the title of book became a phrase to represent the phenomenon itself.

Somewhat disappointingly for hipsters, most English language classics are classics for a reason. There are plenty of discerning readers out there, so good books with moderate resources eventually reach a level of deserved critical acclaim. That being said, there is still a lot of underappreciated foreign-language literature yet to be fully appreciated.

Maybe a cliche around here but the book that popped into my mind when reading your list is Godel, Escher, Bach. Maybe not part 4 but the first three.

This book has a very specific thesis but the way it’s introduced is artful and perhaps even literary. The revelations sort of sneak up on you, planted as seeds and tended quietly

99.9% is about right, though for most people it's all but certainly generous to the books.

There are ~40 -- 150 million books published in total.[1]

Your reading lifetime is roughly 4000 weeks.[2] Figure how many books you read per week, and you've got a sense of how what you might be able to read fits into the total.

Using the lower bound of 40 million books:

- 4000 / 40 million is 0.01%. Which would put 99.99% of all books being not worth reading. Note that most people don't read a book a week.

- Tyler Cowan's 5 books a day works out to 140,000 in our 4,000 week lifetime, or 0.35%. That leaves 99.65% of all books not worth reading. I suspect this is an ambitious pace.

________________________________

Notes:

1. US Library of Congress catalogues about 40 million individual titles. Google estimated some years back that about 140 million books had ever been published.

2. 4,000 weeks is 76 years, 7 months, and 28 days. If you begin reading seriously at about age 10, that gets you to age 85. Give or take.

Yup. This is why posts like “I read 100 books last year and this is how I did it” are just dumb. Took me years to understand this. When it comes to books, quality over quantity is the way to go

See also: Sturgeon's law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

I see the article advocates for quantity over quality, superficial skimming over deep analysis, and quitting when things become uncomfortable. I strongly disagree with this stance. I believe that instead of reading many books, you should read few books very well (it's a saying by a classic); and that high quality books are usually not easy, you need to put in some effort - generally, things that are worth it don't come easy.

I also don't understand the fetish for reading "many" books. What is your goal? Do you want to be a better human being, deepen your understanding of the human condition, get a taste of the best this art form has to offer? Or do you just want to kill time or impress others with the quantity of books read?

Why not all 5? Seems like a reasonable way to pass time.

Ironically, that's exactly the points brought up... later down the article.

The article addresses all of your concerns.

> "How long did it take you to read that book?" - "57 years".

It's a humble brag, but an interesting point. Once you've gained the knowledge of 57 years of reading books you can skim parts you already 'know'. Also, there are plain and simply bad books out there. You've only got so much time to "deepen your understanding of the human condition" as you put it, so why let the author waste it.

>I also don't understand the fetish for reading "many" books. What is your goal?

Knowledge

I suspect your point and my point did not intersect. He's advocating for high throughput ingestion of books, exiting the process as early as possible. My point is that you should select a small number of books that are fundamental or iconic to humanity (or at least the civilisation or country you're part of) and read those very well, rather than the latest New York Times best seller.

From the article: "the important thing is to be ruthless with the books that are not good". Well, the criteria for what's good is quite fuzzy, so I can only suspect the author is implying "not good" means "I don't like it". Sticking to your comfort zone has pros and cons.

> Knowledge

The genre I had in mind was fiction. In the case of knowledge in scientific fields, this is generally distilled in academia and scientific papers. With books not being peer-reviewed, you'd often need to follow up their claims with actual verification work. The author of the article doesn't strike me as a person that would go to such lengths. Anyway, that's just me.

For context, Tyler Cowen, the person quoted, would like to be an "information trillionaire". He consumes a lot of information and gives good interviews with people who specialize in a wide variety of subjects. He's able to delve deep into many topics as well. I agree with you though, I think some people fall into the trap of focusing on breadth and assuming that depth is inefficient or time wasted.

I'm sorry, but that seems like an absolutely miserable way to experience books.

Not all books are experience worthy, some are even frustrating to read cover to cover.

I think something that went unsaid here is that readers have fundamentally different reasons to pick up a book. Someone like Tyler Cowen, or indeed many commenters here, are quite keen to absorb knowledge, and time may be limited.

I enjoy reading for learning, but I also enjoy reading to quiet my mind, to practice focus, and to bring myself joy from the beauty of a tapestry of words. I agree with you that some of these objectives can’t be accomplished by ruthlessly discarding a book that doesn’t immediately captivate.

You're right, that's absolutely valid.

And there surely are plenty of non-fiction books that could be summed up in a few pages.

His career as a lobbyist for the Koch brothers requires him to never learn too much (“it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”).

Is this true? I couldn't find anything on wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyler_Cowen.. Did fine this https://littlesis.org/person/41539-Tyler_Cowen

Yeah, it's all out in the open.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercatus_Center

Why. Bailing out on bad books seems like a better way to read.

Most popular nonfiction books these days contain very little information, should be about a dozen pages long, and can indeed be mostly skipped.

There is a good art to skimming and carefully selecting books that get your full attention, there is a lot of garbage out there.

If you only have, say, 20 minutes with a book, you can get a lot out of it.

This does offend people who really like books who read most of their books every word. Lots of books don’t deserve that and you’ll get more out of books if you realize that.

And yes you can absorb a lot of a topic by only spending a short time with many books.

But still, some books do deserve to be read word for word, others studied for years.

I tend to agree. While some nonfiction is enjoyable I find a lot of the better writing to be in fiction or textbooks.

This is very surprising to me. Can you tell more about your method and a couple of books you read like this and what you learnt from them.

The book How to Read a Book (by Mortimer Adler) goes into some detail about the levels of reading (skimming, full reading, analytical, and syntopical) and attention that should be paid to books, and describes good technique for quickly skimming a book to determine what it says, how well it makes its point, and whether more careful reading is needed.

Yeah, I have actually read that book. But he doesn’t say you can learn a lot by reading like this. In fact he says that a book should be read twice, second time soon after finishing it the first time.

Most of these books arent even worth buying. You can watch 2-3 interviews in Youtube/Podcast and get the concepts the author wrote about in 250 pages.

And those podcasts could be condensed into well-edited text, for ingesting the same information even faster?

Most books aren't worth buying. Add those books to the waitlist on the library website and once a week pick up 20 books. 18 of them will be crap. 1 will be ok. 1 will be awesome and maybe worth buying. Try before you buy. Ehem, libgen works this way too.

The Blinkist app is great for getting the next out of these books.

Agreed, the older I get the more I tend toward exclusively reading novels and histories.

I'll argue reading non-fiction books is not solely about information. It's more about insights and actions, actually. You might have a lot of information, but if you can not use them, then they are as good as useless. The hardest part is not acquiring information but gain a personal insight from what the author presented. And to do that, you have to convinced yourself; set yourself in the mind frame and the experience of the author to gain the (same or different) insight. And that takes more than bit of time to read and digest. If you really want to understand deeply, you have to answer the question of how did the author come to these conclusions. That takes even more time than just reading. That is also the reason why distilled summaries (like these on Blinkist or 12 Minutes) read almost all the same and are outright banal. The key ideas are often simple enough. But how to get there is in reality the big question.

> Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books, else distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things.

Excerpted from Of Studies, by Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626) [1]. The whole essay is only about a page, and well worth reading.

[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/575/575-h/575-h.htm#link2H_4...

Absolutely agree with the author's idea that you shouldn't waste your time on bad books, but also wanted to highlight his idea of reading in clusters. I find that to be one way to really gain depth on a topic.

I thought I was a bit of a buff on Ancient Roman history after finishing Mary Beard's SPQR. After reading Tom Holland's Rubicon, and some of Dan Carlin's podcasts on it, I realized how complex, and full of disagreement that world is. It really gave me a huge appreciation for the people that actually study this stuff, moreso than if I had just read the one book.

I have always loved Naval Ravikant’s thoughts on reading (see https://youtube.com/watch?v=z6rklFf69z8), which align nicely with this article.

I have switched almost completely to audiobooks. I believe it's more natural for humans to listen as it removes a layer of useless computation(deciphering symbols and converting into sound or whatever).

Reading is now limited to stuff on the internet and for incremental reading software.

I've found I can't do audiobooks at all. My mind wanders and I lose comprehension, and I can't really do it when I do other things as background noise because, again, no lasting comprehension for me .

But maybe it's a difference of why people read, and I see a lot of comments on multiple sides assuming that there's only one correct way to read and it's theirs.

it's just at the beginning... you will get better at it quickly and your comprehension will also increase.

Not really. I've been trying it regularly with podcasts for years and haven't gotten any better at being able to focus on it. I'm just better at achieving actual understanding through text.

Besides, I'd never try to listen to anything actually deep -- can you imagine listening to Nietzsche?

I can and have. The author makes it quite engaging compared to reading it in book form which I have also done.

But how much did you comprehend? Were you able to easily go back when you didn't understand something or re-listen to a specific part to make sure you understood it? It doesn't seem very conducive to a deep understanding of any topic, let alone deep understanding.

I for one can't imagine actually getting much out of a 'deeper' book via audio, even if I could sit and listen to them with the comprehension levels I get out of reading.

You can process those symbols much faster than the audio.

I'm not sure honestly. Often you can speed up audio content even while doing other stuff. And if you focus solely on the audiobook and want to rush trough it, you can speed up even more.

The tradeoff is that the audiobooks are agonizingly slow and unpleasant to listen to if you speed them up.

I have ten meals I want to eat, but only ten minutes to eat all of them. How can I do this well? Any advice?

Sort your meals by most to least favorite then eat what you can slowly. Whatever you eat in 10 minutes is likely enough for you.

Put it all in a blender and chug.

So lossless compression?

Something is definitely lost.

The space between?

By his metric, I "read" fifty books every time I go to a bookstore.

I'll argue reading non-fiction books is not solely about information. It's more about insights and actions, actually. You might have a lot of information, but if you can not use them, then they are as good as useless. The hardest part is not acquiring information but gain a personal insight from what the author presented. And to do that, you have to convinced yourself; set yourself in the mind frame and the experience of the author to gain the (same or different) insight. And that takes more than a bit of time to read and to digest. If you really want to understand deeply, you have to answer the question of how did the author come to these conclusions. That takes even more time than just reading. That is also the reason why distilled summaries (like these on Blinkist or 12 Minutes) read almost all the same and feel outright trivial. The key ideas are often simple enough. But how to get there is in reality the big question.

maybe not a particularly useful comment to many, but there's a recent Econtalk episode with Tyler Cowen on the topic of reading: https://www.econtalk.org/tyler-cowen-on-reading/ (transcript available on the site as well).

I enjoyed the episode a lot. Not sure if better than the podcast episode the submission story is based on, but I don't know the podcast in question and like Econtalk. And since the latter seems to get some love with the HN crowd regularly, thought I'd make some people aware.

“ Every area you don’t given a damn about you probably should read at least one book in. Because the very best book in that area is superb, and you’re not going to know what it is. So if tennis is something you don’t know anything about, well, read Andre Agassi’s memoir. That’s a wonderful book. You don’t have to know about or care about tennis. And just go through other areas – gardening, dogs, turtles, whatever. Find the best book about dogs and read it, and the less you like dogs, actually, the better that book is going to be, because you are not sick of the topic.”

Great idea

I tried subscribing to blinkist with this idea of learning a bunch of new things, ...and all I learned was that the only books I enjoy reading are the ones too dense and technical to skim through for key points.

I pretty much agree on everything, plus three personal ideas about reading:

1) there's no need to cluster. I like better to read different topics at once, you don't know what ideas are in there that may apply to other fields by analogy or something

2) read very specific books over more broader stuff, sonetimes. For instance, a book about the birds of zone X may be better than a books on birds

3) read controversial books or books that has been controversial. Books that stimulated people are more likely to stimulate you

Yes, don't spend time on books you don't feel like. That is a good rule.. don't be afraid to.give up a book early and find a better one.

>… I go through five or ten books a day.

That sounds like wilt chamberlain’s 20000 women. If the book is any good it should take months to really understand deeply.

Interesting but I decline the invitation to feel guilty about my book a year max habit. Non fiction books to me are labourious because convention means they need to spill a few thousand words when 1000 will do. Most can be a cheat sheet. With the words “just trust me” replacing the 500 anecdotes. Less is more.

The action to reading ration is almost always to low. If you read 200 pages but haven’t practiced or implemented anything then it is a bit useless. This would be interesting for fiction too. Maybe some end of chapter open ended questions. I would probably enjoy it more.

What is the point of reading? Most people would say "learning". So, to be provocative, I will make the following, slightly exaggerated, point. I have never, not once in my life, learned something important by reading about it. Everything meaningful I've learned, I've learned by doing. When you read a textbook, you can almost skip to the exercises immediately. That's where the learning is done anyway.

Without tremendously disagreeing with your admittedly exaggerated point, but to add flavor:

The learning of a skill or trade -- your skip to the exercises bit -- yes, teach a man to fish, etc. But to stare at, e.g., a polynomial for the first time ever in the exercises and be asked to "factor" it ... well, maybe your Gauss, but for others, it means going back in the chapter to read the axioms, lemma, the laws, examples -- that knowledge you apply to your own understanding, allowing you to learn.

Most people didn't fly to Juneau, on a strong hunch, buy a spray paint can, graffiti a local bridge with "This is the capital of Alaska" just so they confirmed or finally learned, by being arrested for vandalism that, in fact, Juneau is the capital of Alaska. We learn this fact from, e.g., reading about it.

Not all knowledge was derived through some form of the Scientific Method. To equally play provocative, I will posit, with no linked papers, most of what we know, to a person, is not from doing, but from some form of passive communication.

wow, they have downvoted your comment--but you did not belittle anyone, nor is your comment irrelevant. Hey, HN, must we all write what you like or can we have our own original thoughts? why you so afraid of debates? if he is wrong, prove him wrong (I think he is wrong, btw), why do you downvote his answer? that's pathetic and so 1984.

Or: How to take all the joy out of reading.

I think a lot of people are missing the point here, or just read the first two points of the article and didn't go further.

TLDR:

- reading many books doesn't mean that you don't read some of them in depth, or for enjoyment

- reading many books quickly is often richer reading a single one end to end

- reading many books is something you can learn and practice, it is not "shallow"

- over time, what remains of a book read end to end and a book skimmed is often the same

---

The first couple of entries focus on reading for the purpose of gaining information, and he expands upon what that means in more detail further down. The whole "5 books a day" is for his work. He brings up that he reads in order to answer a specific question or solving a specific problem, and reading books in cluster, which is in fact more "studying" or "working" than reading.

He explicitly brings up the fun he gets from reading, in particular fiction, and I don't think he skims through 5 novels a day. In fact, he advocates reading the best book on every subject you don't care about to gain insight and future pleasure from knowing about that domain (or that the first book about a subject that you read, probably more carefully than others, has to make you "travel").

I am in a bit of a similar spot in that I churn through books (mostly programming/systems/science-related, mostly textbooks), and when I work on something, I can "read" through 10 books a day. Not only will those 10 books be about the same subject, and I can pick the one book that is clearly better, but by reading fast and in group, I can focus on concepts, how they are differently examined by different authors, and see relationships between these different approaches. It is a very rich way of reading, and you get better at it over time.

Reading 5 books at once in a day can also be: read one book much more carefully, and skimp around and discard the 4 others as have not much more to say than that first one. Or realizing they are "factoid" books that will be useful when I need something very specific. Or reading the first book, and only using the other 4 in order to get a different explanation for a certain concept.

Sometimes, I will also pick one of those books and study it in great depth, annotating and dissecting pretty much every page. In those cases, I can maybe go through 10 pages a day. The insights into reading and how to extract information from books gained by these hyperfocused readings translates to being able to skim through a table of contents and index and know that that pretty much counts as "having read" the book.

---

Even book I read in detail end to end, 5 years later, I will remember at most one big idea. More importantly, I will remember the overall quality of the book and the table of contents. That's great value, because when I will have to study X, I can zoom in on that book and get my answer.

Say I want to read up on prolog implementations, I'll remember the implementations I wrote from SICP and PAIP, I'll remember bratko and the odd NLP books I had, I'll remember that odd Partial Evaluation book, and that will allow me to get a good start for my renewed interest. As I go back to those books, I'll have further things to look up, say the alice book for some storage/query engines material, potentially transaction processing and ddia if I get into more datalog-y stuff. That's because I spent many days skimming 10+ books about each subject, and discarding most of them as just repeats or as "discoverable" resources (as in, the interesting info in them can just be googled ad hoc).

Building that kind of organic feel for where good information can be found and what "shape" it has can go very quickly after a while. Extracting the valuable information out of them can also be practiced and become extremely quick. Valuable information is the information I will be able to act upon. For technical information, that can often be completely skipping the content and just reading/doing the exercises, that can be taking very "academic" notes (say, math definitions and proofs or algorithms), or very "philosophical" notes (concepts, relationships between concepts, forming or refining personal concepts).

I used to filter a lot by typography and quality of writing as well, but that signal is not as good these days. Plenty of good typography around, but mediocre (even if well edited) content, and on the other hand, great content but shitty direct to print self-publishing.

(edit: formatting)

>I go through five or ten books a day.

This is a great example of self-help “optimized performance for super geniuses with enormous brains” drivel that I’ve talked about being a silly feature of the content on HN!

I would absolutely love to watch a live stream of this guy reading between two and ten books per day! (he immediately says the number is likely actually 2-3 depending on your definition of… reading?)

He can do a livestream in which someone picks a book at random for him to read and then he is quizzed on the book.

Book 1: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Book 2: Goodnight Moon

> … I go through five or ten books a day. And which parts of them I’ve read you can debate – maybe it washes out to be two or three books a day. Some good nights you can get through five whole books…

Smells like BS.

Some people are just really gifted readers. Whether through some combination of learning to read early or just being able to skip the ‘sub-vocalization’ part of reading, many are able to get through hundreds of books a year. It’s a kind of super-power if you think about it.

I don’t think I’ve gotten faster at reading as I’ve aged, but I’ve certainly gotten better at skimming through texts. If you’re relatively familiar with a subject you’ll know which sections of text you can skim over and which sections are worthy of careful reading

I don’t subvocalize and haven’t for many years, but when I did (and more so now), the speed-limiting factor was never the time it took to read the word, but to comprehend what’s on the page in the sense of understanding it. You can probably get away with 200+ pages per hour if you’re not reading for comprehension, but it’s hard to imagine getting anything out of a difficult text at that speed.

I think that’s an important point, and not all texts are made equal. Reading and understanding 200 pages of Heidegger is very different than reading 200 pages of Harry Potter. Part of reading well is know what to spend the time on.

Heidegger was a Nazi, besides, and Being And Time and the concept of Dasein are rubbish -- he was a circular reasoner and a poor communicator -- and B&T really doesn't purport any new claim that hasn't already been made in some form or fashion since Socrates. 200 pages of Aristotle makes more sense. I would just watch Sugrue's Princeton lecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaobMHescwg&t=476s if you're interested in getting the gist of Heidegger without having to slog through his nonsense. It all goes back to the Overman in some form or fashion. I'm rambling now.

200 pages of math text is probably a year of full time undergrad study.

depends hugely on the math book

It's sometimes called photo reading, and it's likely genetic and correlated with high IQ (which Tyler certainly possesses). Someone described it as not having to process the letters or words individually but as a chunk. For example, when you see a McDonald's logo, you don't have to mentally recite the word "McDonald's" but you instantly know what it is. So with photo reading, this can apply to entire sentences. I think this how some people can speed read and not sacrifice comprehension.

I’m not sure avoiding sub vocalisation is an advantage unless your only priority is speed. If you’re reading poetry or rhetorical writing, i.e. a speech, and if you’re neither sub vocalizing nor reading aloud, then you’re missing most of what’s on offer: the careful arrangement of rhythm and sound to create literary effect.

If you’ve listened to Tyler Cowen, he seems to have a deep erudition about a broad range of topics. Maybe most people can’t pull it off, but he can.

From TFA:

> People feel compelled to finish books they’ve started – that’s just a tax on your reading. Why would you do that to yourself?

He clearly doesn't finish "five or ten books a day". It also sounds like he doesn't read a single book until it's done. He hops from book to book, even if they're good books. I've heard a lot of people do that. On an episode of Would I Lie To You, Victoria Coren Mitchell said she's in various states of completion on 7-8 books at a time.

If you want a laugh, here's the segment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHbSBjuoVE4

I’ll juggle a few pieces of any media at any given time but my goodness, 7-8 books at a time?

I’ve got ADHD and that still gives me anxiety.

Not that hard if you have good memory. Mine works my association. I can forgot all about a book, but as soon as I saw the cover I can give you the rough plot. If I saw the table of content, I can give you a summary of each chapter. I don’t hope between books as I don’t force myself to finish what I don’t like. But I can only reread books after a good deal of time (3 years mostly). Earlier than that, I just find myself skipping ahead as I remember stuff before I read them.

I also call BS. If he only did two of the three, he'd be far more interesting than he is.

If there’s one thing Tyler Cowen is not it’s uninteresting.

I remember I read one book when I was a child that promised to raise your IQ by reading pages of a book within seconds like you're looking at an autostereogram. LMAO! These crooks, I tell yah.

I think when he says "go through" he does not mean cover to cover, but either skim parts or only read part of the book, and maybe some of the books are short. It does seem sorta ridiculous.

For me, reading is decided by two factors:

1: is the author intelligent enough? (I filter out atheists, extremists, nonsense-blatherers, rudes and hypocrites etc).

2a: if humanities, does it touch a chord in my heart? the first 100 pages can decide.

2b: if sciences, do I understand enough to keep reading?

For 1, how does intelligence correlate with the types you mentioned? Seems pretty subjective.

anyone in that original list of mine has deficient intelligence levels. you need an elementary analysis to see that it is so--there is nothing subjective about logic.

Did Turing have deficient intelligence levels? We are after all having this conversation in large part thanks to him.

are we? Your history of computing begins with Turing????? Turing--with generous help from the British military--merely followed up and finished (in effect stole and took credit for) what Babbage started and conceived but could not finish due to no financial or governmental support in his time (btw Babbage was no atheist). Turing was merely a functionally normal.

There is a difference between a functionally normal atheist (like Turing) and a genius theist like Descartes. When I say deficient--it is in this relative term. The atheist is merely functionally normal but in objective terms, still deficient. It is not atheism that leads to that, but the underlying low level of intelligence that leads to atheism. Fortunately, there's hope: the underlying low level is ARTIFICIALLY-induced. In other words, the human brain is capable of achieving higher intelligence levels even if it has been stuck in low levels for a long time.

Functional normality is being just intelligent enough to pull off the type of tasks that given training, both computers and chimpanzees could do--the functionally normal person is somewhere in between. The difference being, as I stated in my second paragraph, that with humans, you can go beyond and remove the artificial barrier to higher level of intelligence.

Ask any former atheist and they will be glad to tell you how they fully self-actualized and became smarter beyond their wildest dreams.

What sort of religion should I believe in to unlock this extra intelligence?

I’m probably being facetious but I’m guessing whatever his religion is.

Based on his other comments, he’s not worth a discussion with. To dismiss someone’s ideas based on someone’s belief system is the sign of closed-mindedness. And I say that for both religious and atheistic people.

How do you reconcile point 1 with the fact that atheists on average have higher IQ's than non-atheists?

If you atheists were indeed smart you would not have felt so hurt and downvote my original comment. Also, IQ tests are rubbish (and you didn't know that--which shows your intelligence level).

Among us, we look down on any work that is written by an atheist. It is the ultimate mark of low intelligence.

would we?

it is the WE that does not care for the works of an atheist because of the fundamental intelligence flaw. If YOU do, then by all means, sate your thirst for second-rate knowledge. I'd rather stand with the likes of Descartes and Leibnitz, minds vastly greater than any modern atheist's.

anyone who does not have and practice a standard code of morality does not earn my respect, and should not feel hurt if I don't read their books... I am free in my choice as are atheists. I simply said I don't read their books because they are not clever. They are welcome to say to same about me.

and I couldn't care less about the downvotes.

> How do you reconcile point 1 with the fact that atheists on average have higher IQ's than non-atheists?

2b point answers your question.

I don't think it does. Being an atheist, you display your fine intellect for all other readers to see. 2b is a logical outcome for me, and if you think sth is wrong with it, you are implying that an atheist reads scientific works that he does not understand! ...

that explains the fairy tales called big Bang, Natural Selection, and other assorted amusements.

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