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Comment by qingcharles | Hacker News Reader

WTF. I spent 10 years in jail reading endlessly and only managed about 900 in total. And I had LITERALLY nothing else to do.

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You read 90 a year. I’ve read 75 a year while going to school or working full time. So it’s possible to read more, and for more than 10 years.

(However I might lose my mind if I did that. Even at 75 I started to feel like I was wasting my life with over consumptions.)

I've read 56 books this year--keeping track of them is pretty much all I use GoodReads for--and it's feeling like too much. Not many of them stand out in my memory.

I've seen people on GoodReads reading 200+ a year, which sounds insane to me.

I’ve pulled back to like 25 a year and another 10 I start and don’t finish and I’m happy at this balance.

Just curious, did that (reading 900 books) make any significant impact in your life/thought process/mental model etc?

It's a great question. It's hard to retain the information from so many books and when I looked at the list of books I'd read there were many that I had absolutely no recollection of. And some of them where I just had a vague feeling of how wonderful they were to read and how sad I was that they ended, but no recollection of the plot.

I tried to read as many non-fiction books as I could, but these were almost non-existent in the jails I was housed in. The ones I got sent in about business and languages were a god-send and I find the information I gained from those to be very useful to me; especially the books on Japanese and Arabic which gave me a great grounding in those languages, although you can't easily learn pronunciation from a book!

Thanks for that. I can imagine, if you don't get an avenue to take the learnings from books, it may fade away. Glad that you are out.

What’s your reading speed like? I can easily read 2 books a day if I’ve got nothing better to do.

Averaging just 2 per week hits 3k books in 29 years which doesn’t sound far fetched to me. Call it ~14 hours a week reading, plenty of people spend more than that playing video games or watching Netflix etc.

It’s unimaginable to me that anyone can read two books in a day and retain any significant amount of its information. Not calling you a liar, I just literally can’t understand how.

Is this a skill you developed over time, did you learn some particular tricks, were you just born that way? How long have you been reading adult literature? Are you skimming or painting images in your mind? What kinds of books?

I have so many books I want to read but I can only get through about 10-15 per year. Some of it probably comes down to where I choose to spend my free time, but I still feel like I crawl through pages. I spend a lot of time/energy painting that mental imagery I asked about, of what is being described.

I started reading adult literature at about 14 or so and just read a lot. I find I retain more if I read faster where if I slow down I tend to drift off more.

Now this is just novels, technical information is a lot more dense and it can take me weeks to read a new programming language book cover to cover because I need to set it down after a while and think about it then go back and reread sections etc.

Speed reading is an entirely different thing, but I did spend a little while learning to read faster. The average person speaks about 180 words per minute at that pace a 120,000 word novel takes 11 hours. If you want to read a little faster don’t sub vocalize individual words just hear them in your head.

I will often set YouTube videos to 2x speed which is easily understandable and about the pace I tend to read. It’s bizarre but if you change the YouTube settings from 2x/1.5x to 1.0x it suddenly feels like most people are incredibly slow but those same videos feel fine when you start at 1.0x speed.

Ah, depends on the book! If it was something I really enjoyed like The Martian or The 3-Body Problem, then I would devour the thing in a day.

I remember reading this and it was so uninspiring (the author won the Nobel Prize for Literature) that it took me an entire month to finish:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_(Pamuk_novel)

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