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Comment by bitmasher9 | Hacker News Reader

I read many books a year by reading for 20-30 minutes per night before sleeping. A habit with multiple benefits (winding down and reading or commuting and reading) is very powerful for getting the most value out of your time.

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Until the book gets really good and you have to keep reading past your bedtime to learn what happens (or maybe that's just me)

It's not just you, I hear this often, but I am always suprised people can read for so long in bed. No matter how interesting a book is, I can rarely read more than 20-30 minutes before the urge to fall asleep becomes too strong.

But I can sometimes code until like 4AM. Weird.

Reading is usually more passive than coding. I'm often never sleepy if I'm actively coding something late at night but reading a book (no matter how engaging) or watching a tv show can very easily make me sleepy. That said, everyone's brains work very differently.

This is just so weird. In general coding won't let me fall asleep but a book 100% will never let me sleep until I finish.

I also find the idea of "forcing" yourself to read rather peculiar, but we're all different people. I wonder if there's genuinely something different in how the brain reacts.

Well you are sitting in front of a relatively bright lamp when coding.

Anything true crime keeps me up. Same with many genre's like you said, but for some reason true crime always hooks me.

I read the Zodiac book by Robert Graysmith in less than two days over break in college. Could not put it down.

This happens to me about once a year. I’m much more likely to stay up later than planned while doing other activities such as watching tv, coding, talking, social media, or spending time with my partner.

To offer a counterargument: I would strongly recommend aspiring and avid readers to not make reading in bed your primary / only mode of reading. It will make your brain associate books with sleep and thus make you turn drowsy the moment you have turned a few pages.

I wore out the elbows of quite a few shirts lying on my side in bed reading. This was during the time I would go to the local science fiction bookstore every Saturday and buy three or four books, ocassionally finishing them by Monday.

I stopped because I would feel sleepy and also feel like I didn’t get what I was reading and would forget the book. I suppose that’s something of a champagne problem.

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