What about audio books, magazines, news, websites, studies?
Reading is so much more than curated dead trees.
Reading is so much more than curated dead trees.
After you've done about 50 or so major classics, selected broadly from different thinkers and authors, it is clear the vast majority of most books have negligible additional value. This can all be done quickly in your late teens to early twenties, after that, there is no real need to read more than a book or two in a year, and even then, it is not usually worth reading those one or two in entirety.
Digital textual sources like the ones you mention have far more continued and sustained value at this point.
Agreed to your larger point that reading is of itself not worthwhile. Reading great works of literature broadly is.
But then I kind of thought, for most people, that is probably overkill. If you stick with just one text from each great author, 50 is still a huge variety relative I think to what was available to people in the past. More is great, but not necessary: there are plenty of other sources of depth in life beyond texts, and text doesn't work well for everyone either.