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Comment by chowells | Hacker News Reader

Improve at what? Pretentiousness?

Book people really hate to hear it, but literary fiction follows Sturgeon's law just as much as Sturgeon's own genre. 90% of it isn't worth reading, and that includes 90% of what's fashionable at any given time. You're better off reading books you enjoy than suffering through garbage that you're told you're a bad person if you don't read.

(Literary fiction isn't bad. But for the love of reading, skip anything new and fashionable until enough decades go by for the influnce of fashion to fade. And skip things that aren't enjoyable to actually read.)

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> But for the love of reading, skip anything new and fashionable until enough decades go by for the influnce of fashion to fade

You could stick to the old stuff, but I think it's also enjoyable to read things written by people that exist in the context I exist in. I don't know what "fashionable" means to you - likely best seller lists of awards? - but I don't find it all that difficult or burdensome (in fact, I find it fun!) to look for newer books dealing with topics and themes I'm interested in. Sure, not all of them are great, but a few are, and many are good. It's a little less fun TO ME to ONLY read consensus lists arounds "top books of the 70s" or whatever.

To be fair, this is no different than any other thing people might want to do more of. Increasing the amount you can bench press, cycle, run, read, write, cook, whatever. Most will allow you to progress at something that most people don't care about. Nor, necessarily, should they.

By far, the best thing to learn when learning to progress at something, is learning to be satisfied with your own progression.

Improve at the ability to read, understand, and digest higher literature.

I am in complete agreement with you that 99% of books are crap. It's the 1% that you hopefully want to get around to reading, and those are typically not the easiest reads.

Eh, 99% of “literature” that I’ve read also wasn’t worth reading, and didn’t leave me with any lasting impact.

Unfortunately that last 1% has been so impactful that it’s still worth seeking it out.

What's how you so upset about their comment? They just said if you want to be able to read harder books, you need to start reading harder books. It's a pretty obvious statement.

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