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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

I had a very ambivalent reaction to this blog post. Most importantly, I find the author's relationship to reading quite odd. Basically, all he talks about is reading self-help books. Not really any reading for pleasure, nor does he discuss reading to learn about other non-self-help related topics that might interest him, just for learning's sake.

So he seems to approach reading primarily from a "how is this going to improve my life", usually from some sort of productivity-enhancing, "always be hustling" mindset. So I'm not surprised at all that he's found diminishing returns in this endeavor.

Don't mean to sound too harsh, but I actually did read his entire post and throughout the whole thing I kept thinking "Maybe try chilling TF out and just reading something you enjoy."

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> As we know only too well, reading books is considered the fundamental ingredient for moving from mental inferiority to inspiring intelligence.

I stopped right there.

I think that statement is a little tongue in cheek, if you read the rest of it.

Reading too much fiction also leads to diminishing returns. The number of works that can be considered of high quality is not infinite, and it diminishes exponentially in relation to the number of books read. After a few hundred or thousand, fiction will be like cigarettes - forestalling a craving but providing little to no pleasure.

Yeah I mean if I find out someone has read a thousand novels I'm not going to judge them about what they choose to read next.

Though actually. Stopping to think about it now for the first time I think I'm about there at this point. It has definitely changed what sorts of books I seek out and what I expect to get from them. But I still find reading fiction rewarding.

I have read significantly more than a thousand novels, and there's so much granularity, so much variation in voices, so many weird thoughts to explore.

I worked in a video store for years and watched many thousands of movies as well, and while I am almost completely burnt out of watching movies because there's so little innovation going on I could not imagine that being applied to books, the direct interaction with someone else's mind is too interesting.

The only problem with modern books is there's so much trash along with the treasure, there's never been a lower bar for self publishing.

You can get pleasure from reading things other than fiction. I agree, though, that stories of made-up people that aren't intended to illustrate any particular idea are as profound as a series of random numbers.

If you think novels, especially good ones, are "stories of made-up people that aren't intended to illustrate any particular idea", then you're missing quite a bit.

Got you covered, this has fantastic reviews:

https://www.amazon.com/Million-Random-Digits-Normal-Deviates...

While I don't agree with your premise (I think there are plenty of high quality fiction books out there such that if you read 20-40 a year you could read pretty much only great fiction for a lifetime), more importantly is that I'm not talking just about fiction.

Why not read into a nonfiction topic just for interest's sake, like a layman's accessible book on quantum physics, or the battles of WWII, or the development of Western music, or whatever topic makes one just go "Hmm, that's cool, I want to find out more about that."

I've read over 1,000 novels and I still find many high quality works I haven't read. They do make more of them each year, you know...

So yes it's obviously not infinite, but I imagine it's at least 10,000 and that's enough for anyone.

Here I am despairing at the 90-95% of Bloom’s Western Canon list that I bet I’d love and find moving and sublime, and would each form a new little piece of me, but am definitely never going to get to, and that’s not even close to a list of all the excellent books that exist (mostly, but not all, fiction in that case) given its explicitly limited scope and the implicit limits from its having been assembled by one person (and perhaps a few of his students, IDK, but seems likely)

Unless all one does is read fiction, I don’t think hitting seriously diminishing returns or running out of top-tier material are likely problems. Mere mortals with other interests and hobbies who achieve low-tens of books a year, and not all in that meaty very-high-quality bunch, need not worry.

I really doubt anyone can read all the "high quality" fiction out there in their lifetime. If you're reading 12 books a week, sure, but I think that's really too fast.

You don't need to read all of them, just all within a certain discoverability threshold not sharing the same archetypes. At that point, the rate of encountering high quality works which are not stale will fall to almost nothing.

There are more categories then just 'fiction' and 'self-help'.

Reading fiction isn’t about the books, it’s about yourself. The books are a stimulus to introspect about your relation to the text.

As long as you keep changing, the quantity of books to read is infinite. I like the analogy of the article that books are like a stream and just dip in and pick the one of the moment and let the rest float by. It’s only people who don’t change enough who consume too much from the same point in the stream and feel the effects of water sickness.

Some people only read self-help books and popular biographies that they have been told will inspire them. It's how the modern version of a religious education is delivered. Through sheer volume of inspiration, they will be delivered into success.

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