Comment by lumb63 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lumb63 | Hacker News Reader

That was an awful lot of words to say “read what you can”.

I used to worry about adding items to my “want to read” list faster than I could read them. I realized that this is preferable to the opposite - having nothing to read. As long as I’m alive and want to read, I’ll be reading something. Having read all the books I want to is not my objective; enjoying reading books is. So, no need to worry about not having enough time to read all I want to.

I now treat my list as a pre-filtered pool of books that span various topics. There is no prioritization associated with them. I find it best to read next whichever book seems most relevant to my interests at the time, which I can’t anticipate in advance.

The other day my girlfriend sent me an article about microscopic gears in the legs of an insect and so I decided to read a book off my list about intelligent design. My prior read was about cardiovascular disease because I read an article about cholesterol on the internet. The one prior to that was about gender disparities, simply because I felt like it fit my frame of mind at the time.

There is no need to make the matter complicated: read what you want to read, when you want to read it.

> an awful lot of words to say “read what you can”.

But it needs to be said and repeated, right?

Because people feel time-poor when it comes to matching what they want to do against what they can do. Building up a backlog is probably the worst way to kill the fun there.

And if everyone in that scenario feels like they are somewhat alone in that feeling where the "Books I wish I had time to read" turns into a prioritization exercise where you end up reading the "most important book" while thinking of a book you aren't.

You and the OP are saying the same thing, but it is worth repeating.

The longer you've been out of a structured learning environment like a school/college the more sense that makes because that is a constrained environment where optimization actually helps & the fun reading part isn't.

As for me, my library holds list is a good way to have a "river of books" where I can dip out of it and let it pass through my bookshelf on a schedule whether I read it or not.

> That was an awful lot of words to say “read what you can”.

And yet you added even more with your comment :)

Yeah, seems like the real problem is the desire to clear the backlog. You can have a bucket, just don't expect it to ever empty.

Spot on!

People are making trivial things unnecessarily complicated.

Unless and until you have a specific objective (eg. prepare/need for a job, go through a course etc.) all reading is cursory i.e. people are natural born dilettantes and flaneurs.

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