On the Digestion of Great Books | Hacker News Reader

On the Digestion of Great Books

johnathanbi.com

39 pointsherbertl14 comments

Robertson Davies' [0] lecture, "Reading" (1990), has a nice a answer to the intro of this post:

> Our grandparents used to say that we must eat a peck of dirt before we die, and they were right. And you must read a lot of rubbish before you die, as well, because an exclusive diet of masterpieces will give you spiritual dyspepsia. How can you know that a mountain peak is glorious if you have never scrambled through a dirty valley? How do you know that your gourmet meal is perfect of its kind if you have never eaten a roadside hot dog? If you want to know what a masterpiece The Pilgrim's Progress is, read Bonfire of the Vanities, and if you have any taste -- which of course may not be the case -- you will quickly find out. So I advise you, as well as reading great books that I have been talking about, read some current books and periodicals. They will help you to take the measure of the age in which you live.

(I encourage reading the whole lecture [1]! It's a fun read and there are a lot of great bits in there that I could have quoted here. But I contented myself with just the one excerpt.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robertson_Davies

[1] https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_resources/documents/a-to-z/...

I quite enjoyed Bonfire and have never heard of Pilgrim. Quick googling reveals it's a book inspired by the Bible, which makes me think I would not care for it much. Thanks book critic I have never heard of for revealing I have no taste!

The Canterbury Tales, Dante's Inferno, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Paradise Lost, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. That's just off the top of my head. I wouldn't totally dismiss "inspired by the Bible". As a category, I mean. On the other hand life is short, and we'll never even scratch the surface of the interesting stuff. So you do you, I guess.

Eh, not terribly impressed by the list. But I will do me, good advice!

This conception of 'Great Books' is grim. It is literature denuded of all aesthetics, reading reduced to strip-mining for raw semantic content. For reading philosophical texts, sure it seems pretty fantastic, but the tacit value judgement on the all other forms of literature? Unspeakably depressing.

Though, that context does explain why the article contains the current front-runner for my least favorite sentence in the English language:

> They deserve to be greeted with a tailed-tux and clean palette, chewed with the utmost mindfulness, spat out onto the table to rest for five minutes, licked off the table to savor the flavor of oxidization, digested over a four-hand stomach massage to increase circulation, vomited out Roman-style, spread over the genitalia so that the most sensitive part of the body can gain a tactile appreciation, ingested for a second and penultimate time, passed out quickly with laxatives to preserve the fibrous quality, and cooked in a slow-roast paste to capstone the feast.

Maybe OP will eventually find the leisure to tear himself from his diet of great books long enough to avail himself of a lesser tome that may teach him the distinction between “palette” and “palate”.

There are very few books I’ve bought two copies of. When I was a poor student it would be because a friend borrowed it and lost or damaged it (and damaged our friendship in the process. That was MY book, fucker.)

Once in a while the stars don’t align and I end up with different editions of one of the sequels. If I’m keeping them it’s nicer if I have a matched set. So I think there’s a copy of one of the Murderbot books and one of The Expanse in my giveaway bag. And I bought Three Body Problem because I had borrowed someone else’s and had only 2 and 3.

And then there was Braiding Sweetgrass. This book was almost ahead of its time. Released in 2014, it hit The NY Times Bestseller list in the middle of Quarantine, which is when I found it. By then it was on audiobook, I bought and was blown away by. The whole time I’m listening to it I just wished I could take a highlighter to the audio.

Some books, especially Great ones, have layers, or too much to absorb in one reading. So I bought a paper copy, and I can just open a random page and read it. Still haven’t bought a highlighter though.

It seems incredibly on-brand for a guy who puts Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World on par with some of those other works.

It's horrendous... if you made it the first lines of a novel it would win a prize... https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/

>I read as many full-book summaries as I could for Democracy in America. Including those from GradeSaver, LitCharts, and CourseHero. This gave me a general outline of the content and structure of what I should expect. You’d be amazed by how much clarity this step provides when you actually start reading.

Also how much it takes away.

If the book is seminal you should read it first directly, without being influenced by some individual scholar's interpretation, some popular "preconceived wisdom" about them by some hack, or, even worse, the "Cliff notes" summary.

After you've read the book fresh, you can then read those, and, then, sure, go and re-read the book.

Though, if the book is from a certain historical period, it's good to read some historical accounts of the era before reading it.

To be honest, OP seems to be at the beginning of its reading journey. His method is laborious. This "chain of summaries" seems to be hardly effective. I think the fractal method is close to be atomic - so a good one IMO.

I would suggest to read the book multiple times. The books mentioned here are not literature masterpieces, they are philosophical or they are essays. So the point is to extract information. So it's ok to read the book multiple times. If you understand 60% on the first read, then 80% on the second and 95% on the third, it's alright (Figures are illustrative). By the way, at 95% of understanding of a book, you are already a "specialist" of the book.

Next, take notes when you feel it's important about some concepts. Taking notes is an experience things. The best way to boost this learning would be to learn the semantic of the book before reading, actually it's the role of the first reading. I would not advise to take notes on the whole book structure before the second reading.

Finally, use Zettelkasten-like method to link your notes together. It will reduce redundancy, labour and keep all relevant information.

A heartbreaking work of staggering hubris. If anything or anyone more pretentious and deluded exists in any corner of the internet, I've yet to find it.

I trust my brain to do the work and if I am not able to produce a relevant summary on demand, so be it. What I read is being processed and I do not know how, when, or why, or to what end it will be useful, but it likely will. In other words, all the books I have read and digested, even partially, are metabolized.

Wow, sounds incredibly arduous. I agree synthesis is a good approach for understanding concepts, but this tends to happen automatically as I read a book because I’m synthesizing it with my worldview or with other concepts I’ve been ruminating on. Breaking down a book and re-synthesizing it doesn’t seem very valuable to me personally, but maybe it’s a good method if you need to teach it to others.

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