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Serial Reader: Reading Schedule Builder

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68 pointsmlschmitt2354 comments

In 2021, I did an experiment to find out how long it takes to read classic technical books if we spend 40 minutes a day. It turned out that our small book club could read and understand a complete analytic number theory book in 120 days. The complete meetup logs are archived here: https://susam.net/club/meets/iant.html

I am currently doing a similar book club meetups for Mastering Emacs. If this sounds interesting to you, you are very welcome to join us. Meeting link, schedule, and other details are available here: https://susam.net/club/mastering-emacs/

This sounds very interesting. Might come lurk a couple of times if the scheduling works!

The estimates seem a bit high, or perhaps unbalanced from book to book. The Count of Monte Cristo is slated for 208 days at twenty minutes per day!

I read mostly just in bed before going to sleep, averaging around 30 minutes. The Count of Monte Cristo took me three to four weeks (I don't keep notes on that, so it's an estimate), and I'm not a speed-reader. It's just a book that has aged well (i.e., a limited cognitive overhead) and is not particularly hard to read in the English translation.

On the other hand, it lists The Canterbury Tales for 64 days, which seems reasonable given that reading English that old really does take a lot more effort (and that's assuming an annotated edition), but way out of whack compared to Dumas' novel above. (Also The Canterbury Tales is not a work I read in one go; a couple of stories before moving to another book is sensible here in my opinion.)

> The estimates seem a bit high, or perhaps unbalanced from book to book. The Count of Monte Cristo is slated for 208 days at twenty minutes per day!

I've started reading Monte Cristo one day. I finished the 1800 pages of it in one long 48 hours sitting, hardly sleeping or doing anything else. That's how you read this book. It was a feuilleton, one page a day in the newspaper, and there is a cliffhanger at the last line of every frigging page. You just can't stop. It was certainly a big selling point for the journal publishing it back then :D

> I've started reading Monte Cristo one day. I finished the 1800 pages of it in one long 48 hours sitting, hardly sleeping or doing anything else. That's how you read this book.

I don't think I could do it in one long sitting. The last time I read it, my "serial" approach was to read one chapter per day, before going to bed. It was hard to stop; but, it was also easy to pick up each day. (Another advantage was it sat next to the bed and I didn't have to carry it anywhere, since it didn't fit in a pocket.) I'm about to read it again and I'm not sure what approach I'll take.

If the only translation you’ve read is the public domain one from the 19th century, it was heavily censored/edited. Newer translations are much better, and have all the hash smoking and lesbian sex. (And yea, I’m being literal)

How does the Penguin translation stack up? It's the only one I can easily find.

Assuming it's the Robin Buss translation - that's the one you want! Only version that was fully translated in the modern era. The earlier ones were all based off the problematic 19th century translations with various amounts of the "scandalous" stuff added back in.

Samples:

19th PD: https://welovetranslations.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/st...

Buss: https://welovetranslations.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/bu...

(Not any spoilers really...these are both the 1st page).

Even here, notice the heavy abridgement...two whole sentences axed from the first 3 paragraphs alone!

The Buss just reads so much better and more idiomatically, even ignoring the censorship issues.

Thanks for the information!! I just checked my copy, and it is indeed the Buss translation. I was reading it for several week a few months ago, and I ended up putting it down, just because it just wasn't happening for me and I couldn't figure out why.

Very recently I discovered that I need glasses (for the first time in my life). My eyes went from perfect to downhill very quickly. I'm now trying to get used to wearing reading glasses. This is especially important with a book like this, which has a tiny font. Now I know why I was feeling uncomfortable and getting headaches :-)

> And yea, I’m being literal

highly recommend Ovid then :)

The unabridged Count of Monte Cristo is substantially longer than the more popular abridged version.

The first copy I found have 1286 pages, so that means you read six pages per day at around three minutes per page.

It's harder (but more rewarding) reading certain books the umpteenth time because they are so complex or require other reading to fully grasp and appreciate. For me some examples were

J. Joyce Dubliners

Dante's Divine Comedy

several others.

The hard work makes the journey meaningful (for me) and I'm absolutely bored ticking check boxes just to brag about having speed read through 60 classics in a year.

Your comment reminds me of a description I once heard of the Divine Comedy: "once you've read the Divine Comedy, you're ready to read the Divine Comedy."

You may have read the abridged version while the estimate is calculated on the unabridged version.

I am an avid reader, reading 2 or 3 books at a time, alternating between history and economics to fiction and fantasy, with detours into science and periodicals (like The Economist). I think I exceed this 50 books/year goal easily, but I never bother counting. I am also lucky to read in more than one language, for a nice variety. Incidentally, I read Moby Dick this year and found it a mixed experience, but more on a pleasure side.

Anyhow, it's been very interesting to see changes in myself the attention span required. I have to consciously put my phone and get cozy in reading chair so I am not distracted.

For my teenage children, once phones and high school was introduced, their reading dropped quite a bit. They still read but they seem like madly dancing gadflys in their approach to it.

Yesterday we visited with friends and their 12 year old daughter was on chapter 3 of Count of Monte Cristo and was complaining that it was dull and when it was going to start being awesome. We (her parents and our family) were cheering her to stay with it because the epic tale of escape and revenge (served quite cold) is really good.

> Yesterday we visited with friends and their 12 year old daughter was on chapter 3 of Count of Monte Cristo and was complaining that it was dull and when it was going to start being awesome. We (her parents and our family) were cheering her to stay with it because the epic tale of escape and revenge (served quite cold) is really good.

It is really good, but one thing I have learned to appreciate is that some books just don't work for many teenagers yet. Classics in particular! You need quite a large frame of reference (history, geography, societal issues and classes) to be able to appreciate a novel written in 1844 which takes place in France in the decades before that. If a book doesn't work at 12, just let it be and find something more accessible for her.

Nothing kills a long time habit of reading better than being forced to read novels that don't (yet) work for you.

You are absolutely right.

I was one of the teenagers who read everything that was in front of me and I think when I read the Count of Monte Cristo at ~12, I already had an understanding of at least a general outline of the Napoleonic wars and some inkling of the geography.

My brother hardly read anything as a kid and laughed at my nose being the book a lot. I remember him calling me when he was in his early 30ies and saying - hey, I am reading this Monte Cristo book and it is REALLY GOOD. I was like YEAH IT IS REALLY GOOD, I told you so! But he couldn't have appreciated it before he was ready...

> It is really good, but one thing I have learned to appreciate is that some books just don't work for many teenagers yet. Classics in particular!

I think it was Forster who wrote (I'm paraphrasing) that trying to teach teenagers literary novels is almost pointless, and more likely to piss them off than enlighten them, because they simply don't have the highly-developed sense of empathy to appreciate them yet.

I was under impression that reading novels was ‘to develop sense of empathy’ not to enlighten them.

It’s pretty much about stretching yourself but not overstretching. The classics might be the latter for a teenager. I guess it depends on the person.

It depends strongly on the person. Blessed are those who have/had a teacher that could recommend them the right books for them at any given time. I didn't start reading for leisure again until my late twenties when The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy drew me in, despite growing up reading everything from Franco-Belgian comics to Karl May.

High school kills any interest in reading more often than not.

I had an extended sabbatical during the lockdown where I made an effort to rekindle my reading habit - one thing I noticed about my attention was that it came in waves. Within a minute or two of really sitting down with a book, my attention would wander; if I ignored it and attended to the book, I was fine. Fifteen or so minutes later, my brain again started wandering; getting past this mark gave me another 45 minutes to an hour of focused reading. In previous years at work, I'd find that if I didn't succumb to distraction at that 45-60min mark, I could usually get another hour and a half or two hours of serious focused work in.

I had a solid year of sabbatical in which I was able to really get to know my attention span - it's much harder to maintain and cultivate now that I'm working again, but learning those patterns has given me a lot more confidence in my ability to exercise my attention span when needed.

I find that part of the reason a book can feel so great is because of the time investment. If you could somehow read Count of Monte Cristo in 5 minutes and absorb all the information I don't think it would have the same impact. So basically you need the "dull" or at least more mundane parts of the story so that the climax can exist and actually feel climactic.

Semi related, but I feel like this is one of the reasons that a lot of Japanese RPG games are 80-100 hours long. It feels much more like a long adventure and despite a large percentage of it being mundane it really adds to the emotional investment in what you are doing.

Yes, that's right! In many ways a good book experience is like a really nicely made and presented dinner. Sure, you can wolf down a nicely made steak and drown a glass of wine quickly, but you would have missed out on a nice conversation and enjoyment.

Lots of modern literature for youths is all about crash boom bang getting right into it tiktokiness algorithm wise - hey if something isn't flipping on the screen quickly it's no good. I enjoy that occasionally, like at the beach or by the pool, but not always.

> Incidentally, I read Moby Dick this year and found it a mixed experience, but more on a pleasure side.

Same here! Enjoyed more than not, but not at all what I was expecting. Much funnier than I had thought it would be. I did get a chuckle at how quickly things wrapped up at the end and how I had completely forgot the narrator was actually a character on the ship.

Let those kids watch the recent-ish movie. Then, after tell them as good as it was, it sucks compared to the book, because it does. I love that movie but there's just not enough time for everything in COMC

I devote part of my time to rereading books, on the basis that you've read a book for the first time only on second read. One benefit is that I get a lot more out of them, another is that I remember more of them. This is useful when the book is complicated, or more is going on than is obvious at the surface: many classics benefit from this strategy.

one piece of advice for anyone about to read war and peace: the number of chracters are vast and you'll find that the names used to refer to each can often change with no warning. different names can be used interchangeably, even in the same piece of dialogue. it can get very confusing. best to have a map of character names before you start.

I recommend reading a book every three days (on average) and doing it for a year. I did this one year and read mostly bios and history material. At the end of the year I felt I have so much more knowledge in so many different areas and has given me different perspectives.

How many hours are you spending reading each day?

6/8 hours.

How do you do it? That seems a lot and more than 100+ a year

I did it one year and I am focused in other areas now but will go back to it when I have time.

I got an ebook reader and found something in each book that made me want to absorb the entire book and keep going. I started with bio of wrestling heros and learned so much.

In my experience reading frequently, even if just for short periods, is easily the best way to read a lot.

Ten thousand pages in a year might seem like an enormous ammount, but it is actually quite manageable if you dedicade one part of every day to doing so.

I’m so happy to see this on HN! I have nothing to add to the conversation except to say I’m a satisfied and dedicated user! I read a lot but I tend to read books that are “shorter” (~350) and finish them in 3-5 days so the huge classics can be intimidating and sometimes feel like a bit of a slog. I read on Serial Reader every morning while I have breakfast and I’ve finished 15 books this year on the app that I absolutely never would’ve bothered with otherwise. The $5 or whatever it costs to upgrade and read ahead is also well worth it. Sometimes you just need to know what happens next!

Sadly this doesn't include many books. Probably going by free ebooks library or such.

Would Love to hear from other's book recommendations fiction or non.

Those looking for inspiration I'd recommend (not in order)

* Ray Bradbury

* Pearl S. Buck

* John Wyndham

* Fyodor Dostoevsky

* Frank Herbert - Dune

* Terry GoodKind - Wizard's first rule

It's caught some shit over the years, but it's hard to go wrong picking almost anything off Bloom's (IIRC somewhat reluctantly-compiled, at the request of the publisher) list from the appendices of The Western Canon.

There's another pretty good one, that includes more science writing and such, at the end of Adler's How to Read a Book.

Bloom's:

http://sonic.net/~rteeter/grtbloom.html

Adler's:

http://sonic.net/~rteeter/grtadler.html

And that site has a bunch of other lists in a similar spirit, on it.

[EDIT] One thing to beware of with free ebooks and non-English works in translation, is that it's pretty common for older public-domain translations to be needlessly-obtuse to a modern reader, or outright bad. Worth taking a few minutes to compare your options before committing to one of those.

Dostoevsky is definitely in the library. And if you pay a one-time fee (it’s $3-5, IIRC) you unlock some additional features, one of which is the ability to upload and automatically “serialize” your own .epub files but I haven’t tried this feature yet myself.

@mlschmitt23 not sure if you're looking for feedback, as this isn't a Show HN, but when I click to download the app in the banner on your website, then it turns into an Open button, which opens the app when I click it. Unfortunately the app only opens for a split second, and then bounces me back to Safari to your website.

I was able to open the app like normal from my home screen.

Reading War and Peace in 20 min/day increments? Would that be a good experience?

disclaimer: I have not read, but normally very long books are best absorbed in larger chunks as they tend to be more descriptive and take longer for plot to unfold

I haven't read War and Peace, nor (presumably) have I tried this app, but I will gladly come into the comments and shit on it. Gotta love hacker news.

A bit lost. In what way did I shit on it? And why do I need an app to understand how much reading 20 min a day is? I'm simply suggesting larger, richer books are often best absorbed when you have more time to enjoy them and get involved in the plot which often takes longer to unfold. I could be wrong it just struck me as a bad fit for a 20 min/day. exercise. I could be wrong.

There are really short chapters and really long chapters. I agree that some of the longer chapters, especially the battle scenes, are probably too long for a 20 minute reading session.

Don't be discouraged from "War and Peace", because it says that it is 235 days (probably it is much less). When I finished it, I wished it had another 1,000 pages.

I low key enjoyed COVID, it gave me a week of free time to read.

Does anyone know of a more generic piece of software for this? I want to be able to input my own books to read and get a schedule.

That seems like it would be a fun side project to work on... Thanks for the idea!

The pro version of the app lets you upload .epub files. You have one free epub to test in the free version.

readinglength.com can give you an estimate based on page count, which, if you wanted to build your own tool, is freely available for most books via Open Library's API.

My two cents, if you have to think hard about how to set aside time for reading, you have another problem

Nice. Can you talk a little bit about what this is written in and how the development process went?

This web project is Python Flask web server backed by MongoDB, mostly written as Jinja template HTMLs and forms instead of any slick JavaScript which was fun to try!

The mobile apps are Objective-C for iOS (with very small amounts of Swift, boy I have been slow to pick that up and start migrating my codebase) and Java for Android. Backed by a Flask API and MongoDB.

I have read a lot of classic books and several of them are quite dull. I have no idea why you would read both Wuthering Heights and The Count of Monte Cristo just because they are "classic".

For people that really want to read through some these books, I actually recommend the abridged versions first. It is a lot easier to read the details of the full novel if you have read the abridged versions, and know that you enjoy the story.

Another suggestion if you just want to get used to reading long books is to start with something more modern like the Game of Thrones books, Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter.

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