Choose your reading carefully
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
> The real challenge is reading works that you disagree
> with, with ideas that make you think and change your
> perception.
I subscribe to The Spectator, which is an exceptionally well-written, urbane and articulate equivalent to Fox News. I disagree with almost everything I read in it: it's Islamophobic, classist, popularist, chauvinistic, misogynist, and I occasionally throw it against the wall in disgust, but I _enjoy_ reading it, because it's well written and well argued. It's challenging, and it forces me much out of my comfort zone, and I enjoy having my thinking challenged, and I enjoy the silent arguments in my head with the authors.
Conversely (and ironically, given the source) I stopped reading The Guardian. I agree with most of the politics, but it's so _whiney_. It's often poorly written, poorly argued, and snipey.
The article suggests reading books you _enjoy_, not ones you agree with, and the difference is important.
As is typical when I started college (UK college; 16 year's old) I became more politically engaged and found my views tended toward the left. I read the Guardian but before long realised that sagely nodding along to their 'right-on' articles wasn't doing anything to expand or challenge my world view so switched to The Times. My views on some subjects changed and now I'm afraid I too find the whiney, hand-wringing tone of the Guardian (especially Comment is Free... dear God.) a massive turn-off.
Unrelated, but on magazines - special mention to Private Eye, who consistently disclose stories that ought to surprise but at this stage leave me resigned.
I hope I am, but I also think that the subset of people reading HN are more likely to pick up works with which they disagree. The article is aimed at a more general audience than usual, so my response has that crowd in mind.
For example I went through a phase of "harrowing" books, like Primo Levi's books, books about Stalingrad and drug addiction. Then I needed a break and went back to comfortable, fun sci-fi authors I knew.
At the moment I'm doing a historical fiction binge. The current book I'm reading is very easy reading, almost a bit too pulpy. When it's done I'm considering tackling the Koran.
We'll see! :)
And then there's the issue of "why" do you read. Are you reading for enjoyment? Well then give me Dean Koontz, Stephen King, Lee Child, David Baldacci, Vince Flynn, Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, Charles Stross, etc. all day long. Are you reading for social commentary? Then read Ayn Rand, Tom Wolfe, Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, etc. Are you reading to "improve your mind" or "broaden your thinking?" Great, read David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, etc.
Classics? Sure, read classics if they have value to you. I don't think anyone should feel compelled to read classics just because somebody said they "ought" to have read them. This is where my "life is too short filter" kicks in. I'll read works I anticipate liking, or anticipate gaining some sort of value from. I won't waste my time reading something for no better reason than to satisfy the whims of some judgmental, pretentious asshole.
First, when you're young, your life experiences in the world are less varied, so you can fail to appreciate many of the more subtle interactions in those works which you pick up on when you're older. That's why the classics offer so much re-readability. You're a different person each time you read them, and bring different perceptions and knowledge to bear. It's also why fantasy and science fiction has broader appeal, especially when you're younger--the real-world experience matters less, and it is the creation of these worlds that sets much of that background context that you're missing at those ages.
Second and similarly, the more you read, the better reader you become. This applies to artistic media like movies too. I remember the difference between my ability to follow the plot in movies as a kid versus as a young adult versus as an adult. Subtext and complications not appreciated at a young age become much more apparent the more "good" stuff you watch.
Take something like "Miller's Crossing". I saw this when it first came out and focused mostly on the acting and the events unfolding, but didn't really get into the motivations and missed a couple of the implications. Watching it again more recently, a whole new level opened up. I wanted to share it with my high school kid to broaden his horizons a bit, but I realized that even those plot points I took away the first time would require explanation because he doesn't really have enough experience inferring implied motivation of characters.
It seems like the "classics" become classics because they are written to appeal to all of these levels and can be revisited many times. Perhaps introducing these at a young age simply gets that first exposure out of the way, even if all the subtext is lost.
Most books really aren't worth the time to read.
I'd be a very different person than I am today.
Though I also like Joseph Heller...so, I probably won't choose Butler over Heller, but I'll continue to read both, until the supply has run out.
Classics are just the books that millions of people, over dozens of generations and hundreds of years, have enjoyed more than other books. Of course that is the list you should start from.
My experience has been that if I don't like a classic, it's usually my fault, not the book's, and if I wait a few years, read and learn some more things, and try it again I'll likely get a lot more out of it.
[EDIT] A closer reading of the linked article has revealed that only some of those 300 were what the author had been told were must-read classics, making my criticism less relevant.
Classics definitely aren't picked because millions of people over dozens of generations have enjoyed them more than other books. If that were the case, high school students would spend a year just reading Agatha Christie.
And I can count on one hand the number of science fiction and fantasy books we read in high school and college literature classes (1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451).
There's a strange belief that reading certain books will make your mind better. (For ''better', read 'more middle class' - at least, that's how it works in the UK.)
It may even be true:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/07/reading...
There's an entire series of books by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu where he pulls apart culture as a symbol of status and social distinction. He's well worth reading on the topic. (But being middle class, I would say that...)
A lot of people miss the fact that literature is about teaching moral lessons. If you read books about novel writing, you'll see that some recommend that you start with a premise - which is a moral point you want to make.
You can then use the writing to dramatise the premise. This is more persuasive than stating it outright as an opinion, and also gives the book a focus it wouldn't otherwise have.
This is a slightly old-fashioned view now, but I think it applies to many old-fashioned classics - maybe not so much to modern fiction, a lot of which is either escapist or nihilistic or horrific for the sake of it.
1984, Brave New World, and F451 all have a strong premise, IMO.
Even just within sci-fi, there are plenty of writers who are far, far better than Asimov at characterization or prosecraft. But if you judge solely by characterization and prosecraft, as too many fans of classic literature seem to, then that too is a very superficial way of appreciating reading.
All strong characters, with genuine personality, that have resonated through decades of my reading. (And, I've read very widely.)
Just because Asimov didn't spend pages on introspection (Frank Herbert was the opposite in this regard) doesn't make his characters any weaker. They were part of a much wider story than 'mainstream' writers dare to tackle, often set in a far future where dialog (often from very rational characters) should be thought of as contemporary. That's what science fiction is about, surely?
What? I recently re-read the entire foundation series and was amazed at how I actually remembered a staggering number of the many protagonists from my single time reading the books almost 20 years ago.
I do agree that he might not be sci-fi writer with the best technique - Bester or Le Guin might be better there. Ironically we now suffer (somewhat) from the reverse problems: writers all have a higher education in writing: and end up writing very similarly (in my experience this is a bigger problem with American writers -- but that could be overt and non-overt selection bias: who gets published and who gets marketing/press).
On a side note: after viewing the pilot episode of "Man in the High Castle" (based on the book by P K Dick) earlier this evening, I realized I hadn't read the book. Now I'm a little over halfway through -- and I find it highly enjoyable. And more interestingly highly apropos current events with it's not-so-subtle critique of the US versus the horrors of nazism and ww2-era fascism.
TV show looks great, but I very much doubt it'll manage to pull of the dualism of the novel.
This is like complaining that music from the 80s is so much better than music from today because you've cherry picked a few dozen gems from an entire decade.
[1] http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/27/entertainment/ca-cha...
My complaint is that in most cases people are comparing average Science Fiction to the best of Classical Literature, but this tells you nothing about the best of Science Fiction.
Sure the average Science Fiction novel isn't as good as the best classical literature. But that's not the implication of the original comment. The implication is that Science Fiction is inferior--it's meant for entertainment, not capable of holding up to serious literature. Science Fiction is merely enjoyable, not sublime.
I'm not even sure it's that. I mean, what "genre" is "non genre" fiction? If "literate" fiction is just "anything with no specific genre" then that isn't saying much. And a lot of the classification of works into the category of "literate fiction" is post-hoc rationalization anyway.
Bradbury, unreservedly.
I remember really liking Dune through God Emperor, but I read it so long ago that I recommend it only tentatively. I do recall that the one non-Dune book of Herbert's I attempted to read seemed like it was written while on acid, and not in a good way.
A Canticle for Leibowitz is one of the best sci-fi novels I've read. Its author wasn't very active, though, so there's not much else from him. I haven't read any of the rest, but none of it has the reputation that Canticle does.
I'd put forward Vonnegut, but a) he's often not classed as a sci-fi writer for some reason, and b) I personally think he's at his best when his sci-fi tendencies are kept to a minimum (Dead Eye Dick, Bluebeard, Galapagos, which is as more fantasy than sci-fi if one must stick a genre label on it). I'd class Atwood as similar to Vonnegut in this regard, but even more so—her sci-fi work is just OK, from what I've seen of it, and I prefer her "straight" fiction.
If found Clarke's The City and the Stars deeply affecting (though, for long stretches, a bit of a chore), but the other couple novels of his I've read I wish I hadn't. A couple interesting ideas that stick, but not much substance. They were The Hammer of God and The Songs of a Distant Earth, for the record. They weren't even very entertaining. Both were late novels, so maybe his earlier stuff tends to be better? Mere speculation. I've been put off trying more of him by his current 1-for-3 record. I do like the movie 2001, though :-)
Bester's probably my biggest blind spot among the sci-fi greats—I've read nothing by him.
I can recommend The New Hugo Winners collections over The Hugo Winners, pretty much universally, if you're looking for short stories. Asimov all but sneers at them in his torch-passing introduction, but the reason he feels out of touch with those authors' work is because they're way better than what he was used to. However, I've yet to find a contemporary sci-fi author I can rely upon to deliver an entire novel that doesn't fall apart at some point, one way or another. I haven't tried Murakami, who seems well regarded and is, by reputation, my greatest remaining chance.
(Just to be clear, I enjoy plenty of other sci-fi in a guilty-pleasure, lazy weekend sort of way, in the same way that I genuinely like watching [some] crappy movies on Netflix)
Philip K. Dick - anything!
Asimov - Foundation series
Cortázar - anything!
I'd argue that science fiction is more focused on teaching a moral lesson than any other genre.
I'm not sure why you think what is considered a classic could be dictated by what is taught in schools? I can see no basis for this assertion.
Well people have been reading her novels for 95 years now, and she's sold over 2 billion copies. So the answer is yes I do.
>I'm not sure why you think what is considered a classic could be dictated by what is taught in schools? I can see no basis for this assertion.
Because what most people consider classics are books they were told are classics--mostly by their high school literature teacher. I'm sure there are more objective measures, but the majority of people certainly don't use them.
Being a classic is a bit self propagating. Kids grow up hearing that Ethan Frome is a classic, they become teachers and teach their students that Ethan Frome is a classic.
https://nylusmilk.wordpress.com/2008/11/28/top-10-most-taugh...
This also fits with what I remember from high school 13 years ago.
I'm an exact opposite of the author: can never pick a book because of fear it won't be "worth my time" and end up looking at pictures of cute animals instead.
I realized that I will not have enough time to read all the books I want, watch all the Youtube videos I like, play all the games I want, do all the things I wish.
Every time I finish something I ask to myself "What is the most important subject to me at this moment", and I watch, read, play about it.
If I'm on a cinema, or reading a book that I realize it's not good or I'll not like, or just lose interest, I simply leave it, because life is too short for bad books, or bad movies.
What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn't serious.
So, then, you noticed in a newspaper that "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler" had appeared, the new book by Italo Calvino, who hadn't published for several years. You went to the bookshop and bought the volume. Good for you.
In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out: the Books You've Been Planning To Read For Ages, the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success, the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment, the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case, the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer, the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves, the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.
Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread and the Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them.
With a zigzag dash you shake them off and leap straight into the citadel of the New Books Whose Author Or Subject Appeals To You. Even inside this stronghold you can make some breaches in the ranks of the defenders, dividing them into New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Not New (for you or in general) and New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Completely Unknown (at least to you), and defining the attraction they have for you on the basis of your desires and needs for the new and the not new (for the new you seek in the not new and for the not new you seek in the new).
All this simply means that, having rapidly glanced over the titles of the volumes displayed in the bookshop, you have turned toward a stack of If on a Winter's Night a Traveler fresh off the press, you have grasped a copy, and you have carried it to the cashier so that your right to own it can be established.
-- If on a Winters Night a Traveller, Italo Calvino.
Reading was a leisure activity, rather than some kind of moral imperative. As a result, I tend to ditch books I'm not enjoying after ~ 50-100 pages, and I tend to reread books I've enjoyed a lot.
I used to have a slight issue with continuing to read books where I wanted to know what happened, but wasn't enjoying them. Films too. Wikipedia plot summaries have solved this!
Personally, I have a hard time not finishing a book, for example I can't decide whether I want to continue reading Gone Girl past half. This book is written cleverly yet somehow disappointing after the first big twist(it came too early imho).
One strategy I employ is reading three or four books at a time, one sci-fi, one mystery, one science, one philosophy one political and so on.
How do you go about it?
edit: also check out http://www.reddit.com/r/suggestmeabook and make sure to explore the sidebar suggested subreddits
On Thinking for Yourself
1-- As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power. You can think about only what you know, so you ought to learn something; on the other hand, you can know only what you have thought about. Now you can apply yourself voluntarily to reading and learning, but you cannot really apply yourself to thinking: thinking has to be kindled, as a fire is by a draught, and kept going by some kind of interest in its object, which may be an objective interest or merely a subjective one. The latter is possible only with things that affect us personally, the former only to those heads who think by nature, to whom thinking is as natural as breathing, and these are very rare. That is why most scholars do so little of it.
2--
The difference between the effect produced on the mind by thinking for yourself and that produced by reading is incredibly great, so that the original difference which made one head decide for thinking and another for reading is continually increased. For reading forcibly imposes on the mind thoughts that are as foreign to its mood and direction at the moment of reading as the signet is to the wax upon which it impresses its seal. The mind is totally subjected to an external compulsion to think this or that for which it has no inclination and is not in the mood. On the other hand, when it is thinking for itself it is following its own inclination, as this has been more closely determined either by its immediate surroundings or by some recollection or other: for its visible surroundings do not impose some single thought on the mind, as reading does; they merely provide it with occasion and matter for thinking the thoughts appropriate to its nature and present mood. The result is that much reading robs the mind of all elasticity, as the continual pressure of a weight does a spring, and that the surest way of never having any thoughts of your own is to pick up a book every time you have a free moment. The practice of doing this is the reason erudition makes most men duller and sillier than they are by nature and robs their writings of all effectiveness: they are in Pope’s words: For ever reading, never to be read.
3-- Fundamentally it is only our own basic thoughts that possess truth and life, for only these do we really understand through and through. The thoughts of another that we have read are crumbs from another’s table, the cast-off clothes of an unfamiliar guest.
4-- Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. – You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost; it is like deserting untrammelled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes. It may sometimes happen that a truth, an insight, which you have slowly and laboriously puzzled out by thinking for yourself could easily have been found already written in a book; but it is a hundred times more valuable if you have arrived at it by thinking for yourself. For only then will it enter your thought-system as an integral part and living member, be perfectly and firmly consistent with it and in accord with all its other consequences and conclusions, bear the hue, colour and stamp of your whole manner of thinking, and have arrived at just the moment it was needed; thus it will stay firmly and for ever lodged in your mind. This is a perfect application, indeed explanation, of Goethe’s lines: Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen.*
For the man who thinks for himself becomes acquainted with the authorities for his opinions only after he has acquired them and merely as a confirmation of them, while the book-philosopher starts with his authorities, in that he constructs his opinions by collecting together the opinions of others: his mind then compares with that of the former as an automaton compares with a living man. A truth that has merely been learnt adheres to us only as an artificial limb, a false tooth, a wax nose does, or at most like transplanted skin; but a truth won by thinking for ourself is like a natural limb: it alone really belongs to us. This is what determines the difference between a thinker and a mere scholar.
5-- People who pass their lives in reading and acquire their wisdom from books are like those who learn about a country from travel descriptions: they can impart information about a great number of things, but at bottom they possess no connected, clear, thorough knowledge of what the country is like. On the other hand, people who pass their lives in thinking are like those who have visited the country themselves: they alone are really familiar with it, possess connected knowledge of it and are truly at home in it.
ctd...
6-- A man who thinks for himself is related to the ordinary book-philosopher as an eyewitness is to an historian: the former speaks from his own immediate experience. That is why all men who think for themselves are in fundamental agreement: their differences spring only from their differing standpoints; for they merely express what they have objectively apprehended. The book-philosopher, on the contrary, reports what this man has said and that has thought and the other has objected, etc. Then he compares, weighs, criticizes these statements, and thus tries to get to the truth of the matter, in which respect he exactly resembles the critical historian.
7-- Mere experience is no more a substitute for thinking than reading is. Pure empiricism is related to thinking as eating is to digestion and assimilation. When empiricism boasts that it alone has, through its discoveries, advanced human knowledge, it is as if the mouth should boast that it alone keeps the body alive.
8-- The characteristic mark of minds of the first rank is the immediacy of all their judgements. Everything they produce is the result of thinking for themselves and already in the way it is spoken everywhere announces itself as such. He who truly thinks for himself is like a monarch, in that he recognizes no one over him. His judgements, like the decisions of a monarch, arise directly from his own absolute power. He no more accepts authorities than a monarch does orders, and he acknowledges the validity of nothing he has not himself confirmed.
9-- In the realm of actuality, however fair, happy and pleasant we may find it, we are nonetheless always under the influence of gravity, which we have continually to overcome: in the realm of thought, on the contrary, we are disembodied minds, weightless and without needs or cares. That is why there is no happiness on earth to compare with that which a beautiful and fruitful mind finds in a propitious hour in itself.
10-- There are very many thoughts which have value for him who thinks them, but only a few of them possess the power of engaging the interest of a reader after they have been written down.
11-- Yet, all the same, only that possesses true value which you have thought in the first instance for your own instruction. Thinkers can be divided into those who think in the first instance for their own instruction and those who do so for the instruction of others. The former are genuine thinkers for themselves in both senses of the words: they are the true philosophers. They alone are in earnest. The pleasure and happiness of their existence consists in thinking. The latter are sophists: they want to appear as thinkers and seek their happiness in what they hope thereby to get from others. This is what they are in earnest about. To which of these two classes a man belongs may quickly be seen by his whole style and manner. Lichtenberg is an example of the former class, Herder certainly belongs to the latter.
12-- When you consider how great and how immediate is the problem of existence, this ambiguous, tormented, fleeting, dream-like existence – so great and so immediate that as soon as you are aware of it it overshadows and obscures all other problems and aims; and when you then see how men, with a few rare exceptions, have no clear awareness of this problem, indeed seem not to be conscious of it at all, but concern themselves with anything rather than with this problem and live on taking thought only for the day and for the hardly longer span of their own individual future, either expressly refusing to consider this problem or contenting themselves with some system of popular metaphysics; when, I say, you consider this, you may come to the opinion that man can be called a thinking being only in a very broad sense of that term and no longer feel very much surprise at any thoughtlessness or silliness whatever, but will realize, rather, that while the intellectual horizon of the normal man is wider than that of the animal – whose whole existence is, as it were, one continual present, with no consciousness of past or future – it is not so immeasurably wider as is generally supposed.
* What you have inherited from your forefathers you must first win for yourself if you are to possess it.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99), aphorist and satirist. Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), theologian, philosopher and man of letters.
I must have posted to this thread too much?
This sort of questionable title editing is a recurring theme on Hacker News. I might be willing to help with this issue if there's an easy way to get involved. I think the kind of editorial judgment required to make good title changes is right in my wheelhouse.
I do seek out books from lists like "100 greatest books of the 20th century" and similar, but it doesn't bother me in the slightest to say that War and Peace was dry, repetitive, and completely uninteresting, or that Ulysees' and Gravity's Rainbow's prose were so incoherent, I couldn't make it even 50 pages in either book. On the other hand, The Brothers Karamozov is easily one of the top three books I've ever read, so I don't think its an aversion to classic literature in general.
I think using other people's opinions of books is a good starting point for finding books to read. But I derive no enjoyment whatsoever from knowing that someone else likes the music, or books, or movies that I like, so why should I feel guilty or question my tastes when I disagree with even the most highly regarded opinions?