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Comment by mrexroad | Hacker News Reader

Been a year of re-reads and some classics I never started b/c of thickness. Standouts for me were “A Tale of Two Cities” and “Norwegian Wood.”

“Kafka on The Shore”, “Norwegian Wood” - Haruki Murakami

“A Tale of Two Cities” - Dickens

“Count of Monte Cristo” - Alexandre Dumas

LotR, “Hobbit” - Tolkien

“World Atlas of Coffee” - James Hoffmann

“Anathem”, “Diamond Age”, “Termination Shock” - Neal Stephenson

“A Timeless Way of Building” - Christopher Alexander

“Where The Wizards Stay Up Late” - Lyon

“Fahrenheit 451” - Ray Bradbury

“Slaughterhouse V” - Kurt Vonnegut

“Neuromancer”/Sprawl trilogy - William Gibson

Plus an assortment of business, systems thinking, and tech related books that were “fine”, but none that really left me with much to chew on afterwards.

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How much do you read weekly? This is an impressive amount of stuff

First the minimum time: - audiobooks while commuting (mostly walking to work). Even if it's like 30-40 minutes some day at most, it still adds up. - add to that lets say ~15 minutes each night before sleeping.

And on top of that: - sleepless nights, when you want to get back to sleep: 30 minutes - ... - just having a good series to grind through. - audiobooks during some manual labor (home restoration works for example).

So for me audiobooks + capability to read at night without disturbing others (dark mode + backlight on e-reader). And from that it adds up.

This comment slightly terrifies me. My reading has dipped this year, but generally this is a small amount of reading for 12 months. I think the norm on reading quantity has shifted.

Is social media to blame? TikTok and meta videos are extremely addictive. I have perhaps the strongest willpower of anyone I know, and the only way I can avoid losing hours to them every day is to delete these apps from all devices, and have a separate browser on my Mac for them.

Don’t be terrified, it just sounds like you read a lot. Many of these books are huge, most people definitely wouldn’t finish then all in a year.

I do not read a lot. I know people who do. That’s why I’m terrified.

I’d say 12 books a year is minimal, 52 is excellent. If you’re not in that range, you’re in trouble.

I consider myself a fairly slow reader (see other comment) and nothing on this list took very long to read, other than LotR and The Count of Monte Cristo. One of my goals for 2025 was to replace parades of endless distractions (social media, hn, Reddit) with books. I found that if I only read even for just 5min during morning coffee, I was far, far more likely to open a book when waiting while my car got smogged, kid at dentist, school pickups, etc. Those little between moments are so easily stolen from us and monetized, and they add up to a frightful total.

100%.

One of the best pieces of advice I got was from my English lit teacher: always carry a book with you. You never know when you’ll have down time to read.

I think it's quite hard to talk about norms for reading quantity, because it varies so much between people. There are a lot of people (more than half the population) who read basically no books in a year, and a tiny slice who read a huge number: so your intuitive take on what's "normal" is going to depend a lot on whether your social circle happens to have voracious readers in it. I suppose you can statistically determine some point in between as the "norm" but I'm not sure that point would reflect many people's experience...

I envy your reading abilities

FWIW, I’m mildly dyslexic and likely read slower than most. This year I’ve made it a goal to un-do many of the coping strategies I’d developed over the years to keep pace, and instead really focus on stopping and looking up phonetics for words I couldn’t easily sight (kindle is clutch here). On the plus, it also means I’ve had to become rather deliberate about what I read and when I read it — HN, newspapers, and Reddit all took back seat this year (and I couldn't be happier).

A couple of says ago there was an excellent comment here on Hacker News about that you shouldn't read only in bed but allocate proper not tired time for reading. Otherwise you learn to associate reading with sleeping and drowse off after a few pages.

Yeah, I read non-fiction in the morning prior to work and then fiction in the evening. Works great!

Here’s the trick about reading, folks.

Firstly, reading is actually a bit boring and unpleasurable at first. Only once you’ve gotten up to speed does it start rewarding you. A bit like working out at the gym.

The other surprise is that once you start reading, you get really quick. Like, surprisingly fast. After a while you notice the words are going by faster. So the effort compounds.

When you start you think “my god that took 5 hours of boring reading time to get though” and by book 10 you think “that was 2.5 hours and I learnt a lot and my brain is happy.”

Curious about your view on The Count of Monte Cristo. It's one of my more disappointing reads of the year. I'm familiar with the story line from various film adaptations, but I wasn't prepared for the sheer amount of repetition and drawn out bullshit. That's when I learned it was originally published in a journal where Dumas was paid by the word over 18 parts. Then all the meandering bullshit and repetition made so much more sense.

I love the first third. Then it is a slog.

I took read it this year and invested about 8 weeks getting through it. I found the story disjointed, repetitive and very hard to follow. It was only after finishing it I discovered I had read the abridged version that cuts out a number of chapters leaving multiple characters without conclusions. No wonder it was difficult to follow.

Similar to other commenter, after the first third, I felt it devolved into a long, overly drawn out and predictable slog. Glad to have finished it, but it’s probably not on my re-read list.

I loved the first and last third. The middle is meandering and hard to get through. Watching everything unfold though is really satisfying at the end.

Like many major novels it needs a lot of editing, and that’s often for the reason you’ve pointed out - or similarly, serialisation.

Don Quixote is a long novel that just keeps giving, by contrast.

Still would encourage everyone to read TCOMC at least once.

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