Why can’t we read anymore?
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If modern writers have such disrespect for their audience, is it any wonder some of that audience hasn't the attention span to stick with it?
Older, serious, and timeless literature requires deep concentration because the authors use their thousands of words to express deep pathos that can't be trivialised. It takes practice to commit oneself to a book like that for long enough to get into a flow wherein it can be understood and appreciated. It's _easier_ to read fluff because the dopamine hits quicker, but (for some people) it's worth the effort to read something more meaningful.
In some ways there's an analogy to coding; some books I can't read unless I've got the time to be isolated from distractions. Similarly, some coding problems I can't make progress unless I know I've got more than a half hour to pre-load my brain cache.
Given that I'm railing about redundant words, this seems an appropriate point to stop.
I don't have that problem with good books, so don't put me in the "modern civilization problems" drawer.
With this being printed media, "long-form" was more or less the norm for the more in-depth article, and space requirements were very strenuous: you had exactly this much space to fill, no more, no less [1].
But we were explicitly encouraged to choose topics for which "this much space" was meaningful (for those of my colleagues who didn't get to choose their topics, like the hardware folks who had to write about whatever was happening, the choice of topic and assigned space went hand in hand). Sometimes, I'd choose to cover two or three things in the space that was given to me in order to avoid writing pretentious equivalents to Lorem ipsum so as to fill in the page.
I fondly remember the stern, to-the-point feedback that we'd get from our senior editor. A draft of this article would have probably received a feedback like "twice longer than it needs to be. Make it shorter, send me pics."
The gist was that there was no such thing as "long-" or "shortform". What you wanted was exactly-as-long-as-it-needs-to-be-form. Some points require many words to convey. Some don't. It's being selective in your verbalization that draws the line between eloquence and hypergraphia. The entire "I am an optimist" section is an unfortunate example of that.
1. Most of us weren't exactly experienced journalists though, so filling "this much space" was often achieved with a lot of help from the heroic DTP team, which basically survived on coffee during the last week of an edition.
A particular bugbear of mine is when a non-fiction article starts by describing the weather or somesuch. If the opening line is "It was a warm summer's day when Joshua first..." then I just give up then and there.
There's no glory in padding.
As opposed to whom, paid-by-the-word Dickens and his amazing menagerie of circumlocutions? ;-)
Literature that must be studied to be understood, that must be decoded, that the author spent years on, cramming endless meaning into every last sentence...
This is not fun to read and never has been, even before the age of digital distraction. I don't aspire to read 'great works' that can only be decrypted if you have a degree in literature, in fact I don't think that sort of literature is objectively any good at all - it self-limits, it speaks only to the cognoscenti, and misses out on speaking to everyone else.
The thing is, just because a book has a higher entry barrier (and a higher payoff) doesn't mean that it is objectively bad because it doesn't appeal to everyone. Maybe it's not for you, but it can certainly be appealing to many people who enjoy delving into a book and analysing if and so on. I don't have an English degree so I probably won't be arsed to put it the effort to read Finnegans Wake or whatever. But I certainly enjoy reading and analysing boss with more depth than DaVinci's Code.
The same thing happens with games. Maybe you have no interest learning chess, and prefer to play Angry Birds because it gives instant payoff with little effort. And that's fine. But it doesn't mean that chess is "objectively inferior" because there is depth to it enough to study full-time for a lifetime. Same thing happens with music, and any art form, I guess.
Literary analysis doesn't appeal to me in the slightest. The enjoyable part of the reading experience for me is engaging with the picture it paints, with the world it posits and the characters it places within it. I certainly enjoy reading books with more depth that The DaVinci Code, but I can think of little that would interrupt my enjoyment of reading more than stepping back and analysing 'clever' sentence structures.
I occasionally enjoy strategic board-games, in order to understand the emergent rules of play that come from the board and given rules. That said I have never really bothered with chess. I don't think chess is objectively inferior to other games though, I don't think the two are equivalent. Literature with deliberate, designed density of meaning comes across as intentional obfuscation rather than simple complexity.
I'm not really into stopping my reading to take notes and analyze sentence structures either. However, I deeply enjoy it when the author uses fiction to express complex ideas about society, philosophy and human life in general. I enjoy that I can feel these themes happen through the character development, and the author's thesis come though as the plot advances.
For some especially heavy reads though, this might not happen so organically and that's when it stops feeling like enjoying a good read, and feels more like trying to understand Kant, sentence by sentence. I don't think at this point in my life I'd enjoy Joyce much, either (though I've heard Portrait is somewhat more accessible).
However I do find that the more I read, the more enjoyable I find reading novels with complex themes and such. Practice, I guess, and I find it very rewarding. Just start with something that's not too hard and go from there.
I just can't remember where, but a couple weeks ago I read an editorial in a paper that was about how, historically, fiction has been so much better at expressing "subversive" ideas and bringing them out in the culture. Just think about the thinkers of the French Revolution.
That's why I enjoy good fiction :)
I'd like to say that I can't speak much for books. Like I said I don't read heavy classics nor do I spend dozens of hours analysing a text, but I sometimes do with music. Part of the pleasure I get from listening to classical music is from the aesthetic beauty and pleasantness of the sound, but a larger part is perhaps from re-listening to it and analysing it and discovering new things and meaning in the music. I have pieces that I have listened probably over 50 times, and still I can find new intricacies, or read an analysis that calls my attention to details I have missed, or simply just marvel at the ingenuity of some passage, etc.
For me, analysis isn't a boring procedure that sucks the fun out of art. Much to the contrary, it enhances and deepens my experience beyond what I would have by reading the book/listening to the piece and then putting it aside forever.
Certainly not, no, which is why I see a difference between the complexity of chess and the obfuscation that goes into some high literature.
I don't want to read your irrelevant anectode or clever ironic remark, I want to learn about the subject you promised me.
There was some stuff about speed of dopamine response that was interesting. It aligned with some stuff about dopamine addiction by a guy called Charles Faraone who I'd been reading on Quora.
I did find his proposed solution interesting, but I'd have preferred it stated up front and then explained, rather than left until the final paragraphs by which point I'd lost attentiveness anyway.
I've also read Nick Carr's "The Shallows"[2] and other authors about about the web's effect on attention span, distractions, etc.
With all that said, I'm not convinced that people "should" read long form books. I read all those books because I personally enjoyed it. I just can't say with confidence that others should do the same or they will be "missing out" on some unquantifiable intellectual nirvana.
I also enjoy getting lost in Wikipedia articles and jumping around hyperlinks without fully finishing the wiki article I was reading. (Wiki articles are not ever "finished" anyway so there's no guilt trip in leaving the page to head down another rabbit hole.)
15 years ago, I read a dozen of C++ books cover-to-cover. Can someone today get similar levels of knowledge jumping around quality blog posts and watching youtube videos? I think so. I don't hold my traditional reading method for C++ to be superior; it's simply what I did before the internet was available in 1995. I certainly did not learn Golang by reading a book cover-to-cover.
Books certainly have benefits but I think they are overstated in relation to non-book forms of consuming words.
[1]http://www.artgarfunkel.com/library/list1.html
[2]http://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp...
The difference is with a website, you can go investigate your immediate thoughts rather than committing to the re-read. It is lazier, maybe. It's probably not great if you want to learn something in depth and stay focused on it for long periods of time.
This is me.
"and how I image most people read most of the time."
I wish I knew if this were true. I've always felt that I have some sort of "disorder" or some form of ADHD or something that causes my mind to wander anytime I try to read a book. I'm a terribly slow reader for this reason (at least when it comes to books -- internet articles, for some reason, don't seem to have this same effect on me), and as a result, I've not read too many books at all. I mostly get my information in smaller bursts.
Come to think of it, whenever I see what I consider super long articles posted on HN, and a ton of discussion about how great the article was, I feel terribly inadequate that I can't read said article in less than an hour (or more). Short articles I'm fine with, it's the longer ones -- and books -- that I struggle with.
And it's certainly not the result of any "conditioning" from reading short internet articles all the time -- I've been like this since long before the era of blogs and HN.
Would love it if someone could shed some light on this.
It's a sense of peace I get from few other things in life.
I'm more worried about my time being spoiled than the plot being spoiled, and after all a good movie/book is even better the 2nd time around. This has allowed me to commit to watching or reading things I never would have before as I'd get bored (read: worried this is a waste of my time) 10 minutes into a slow moving movie.
I have tried reading long novels and I have rarely been able to read them efficiently with concentration the whole way, at first I would well up with a lot of self hatred when my friends could read the same books in lesser amounts of time, remembering a lot of interesting details and hold very insightful discussions about it later. I blamed myself for not having better concentration, for feigning interest in books and hundred other accusation that were only partly true.
But, I persevered and found that I could read short texts, remember them pretty well, think about them for some days and largely absorb the idea. I changed my reading habits. I started reading short stories, essays, academic papers and smaller technical books, but providing a lot of to time to reflect upon the material just read.
I stopped focusing on the book count and purely on maximizing the amount of impact produced by reading something.
I'd bet, you have no trouble with those cases. You may rifle through tech documentation till you read the paragraph or 10 that are relevant to your problem, but that part you can just breeze through. Because it matters I'd also bet there are a few books or stories you have no trouble with because the author has really drawn you in, and you care about what's happening, and it matters. If not, take a look at hemmingway or maybe chuck palahniuk. they both put a lot of effort into making short powerful stories. Survivor or invisible monsters might be worth a read.
Other stuff, well, my tolerance really depends on my level of curiosity. If i'm feeling particularly curious, i can read some pretty boring stuff, but not for a long time. Sometimes deep insights are hidden in boring words.
Anyway, you're not weird. People have different defaults. Most stuff i kind of grind through, and don't really soak up the full meaning. On the other hand, most writing is pretty bad, and isn't really worth that much effort. The vast majority of stuff is just rehashed restated rewritten copies of copies that contain enough essence of the original to give you a hint of that dopamine rush.
> I wish I knew if this were true.
I think it really depends on the book (or part of the book) you are reading. Often the start of a book will be designed to grab your attention, but its possible to lose interest part way through the book, or have to concentrate harder to finish chapters.
Its common - my high school English teacher told us about it way back many years ago.
It's a very popular structure. But now that everyone seems to have ADHD, it's being replaced by episodic structures which end each chapter with a cliff hanger.
Episodic structure isn't new, but quite a few savvy writers have discovered it's a better fit for ebook publishing than traditional long form.
If you haven't cultivated the habit of reading, it's not effortless (like most things). When things aren't effortless (or close thereto), its easy for an undisciplined mind to wander.
If it's something that you value, you will do it enough that it becomes effortless. Perhaps the author missed that point?
But if something is good, it is more like a trance - I'll 'come to' hours later and need to be prodded with a stick if you want to interrupt me.
[1] http://www.pearsonhighered.com/educator/course/Advanced-Read...
When that happens to me while reading a book often enough I decide the text is not for me and move to another book.
"The difference is with a website, you can go investigate your immediate thoughts rather than committing to the re-read. "
Funny, I would describe my most engaging readings of a book precisely by this sort of associative experience (unless it's fiction... which I don't actually read that much anymore).
This happens to me sometimes, but its rare and usually means I'm tired or not interested in the subject matter. If I'm interested I'm glued to the page and won't break concentration for hours.
I'd recommend the book Driven to Distraction, it's pretty informative!
That's a feature, not a bug.
Limit your first reading to basic understanding of the plot and setting; ignore exploration of "deeper" themes until subsequent re-reads.
Not saying it's better or worse, but I'm willing to say that the understanding you'll get from blogs is going to be be different than from a long-form book.
Books get the benefit of knowing where they left off one chapter, and picking it up on the next. Unless you're reading a long series of posts on the same blog (which, in the limit, approaches reading a book), reading blog posts will lack that continuity, and I find them inferior for building up a basic understanding of a topic. What blogs do really well, IMO, is for teaching you well-isolated techniques, or other such limited-scope ideas.
Your experience with C++ And Golang are in no way, shape or form comparable. If you've been doing C++ for 15 years, Golang is a comparatively small learning curve. You just need to pick up on a few syntactic differences and you'll be at that basic level of competence that books will give you, and you're ready for the single-topic, specialized learning that you'll get from blogs.
Chapter 1: Simple types (um, could have done this in a page)
Chapter 2: Complex types (this too)
Chapter 3: How you can compile from the command line (even though no-one in their sane mind does this in this language)
Chapter 4: Inheritance (oh god, please stop)
Chapter 5: Conditional statements (no, for the love of god stop)
Chapter 6: Loops (right, I'm skipping some chapters)
Chapter 15: Trangonian Complex Pulsar boofs and why you should use them for everything (even though no-one does and never will because they suck)
Chapter 16: How to make a program (this chapter should have been the entire book)
Chapter 17: How to debug (lots of hand waving and no actual details on how to actually debug the program)
Appendix: Listing every word used in the book in alphabetical order and on which pages each was mentioned.
CD: With a 3 year out of date IDE, possibly abandoned, and if you're really lucky some fairly benign malware
Not this one: http://www.stroustrup.com/3rd_tbl.html Or this one: http://www.forth.com/starting-forth/index.html Or this one: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/toc/toc.html Or this one: http://jonaquino.blogspot.com/2010/04/table-of-contents-for-...
In general, once you know a few different languages and want to learn a new one, read the language spec or a good book on the language.
Good blog posts are an option, too, but those are hard to discriminate from bad ones, and run a greater risk of being incomplete (hm: here's and idea for a new product: a service that ranks blogs for accuracy, completeness and timeliness (K&R C is accurate and complete, but if you want to learn C now, it shouldn't be the only thing you read, and possibly not even a thing you read))
That's the Index. The Appendix is where they list FTP and web sites that are long defunct, sample code for interfacing with a discontinued piece of hardware, and of course an ASCII table.
http://learnxinyminutes.com/ - the Java article is 1500 words :) and, I gather, sufficient to get started.
I once tried to give somebody my C# 4.0 In a Nutshell book when I upgrade to the 5.0 book. "Why do I need that, I can just look at MSDN?". Hrmm.
MSDN has all of it, everything that should be documented. It is easy to get lost, not knowing what and how much should be taken first. The value of a book in such case is to have its author as your guide (as in a tutorial, if you will, but a little bit more than that).
I did both in droves, often simultaneously, and it was bad enough that I'd often be caught reading a book under my desk in class. Mind, the school library only comprised "literature" - no kids books, Harry Potter was a gleam in jk's eye, it was Tolstoy, Homer, Proust, Euripides, Dickens, whatever a nine year old is supposed to read.
Come to think of it, reading in class was only punishable by the book being confiscated until the end of class. I remember in my miserable year of middle school in the U.S. being caught reading, and they not only confiscated the book but suspended me. It was a serious infraction in their eyes, as you were only allowed to read pre-approved books on school grounds.
Perhaps people don't read because educational systems for the most part actively discourage it. Initiatives which focus on getting kids to read more tend to be about appearances and metrics, not kids reading. They also tend to turn reading into this exotic, "other", task/chore in the minds of most due to shit like "you must read 500 words tonight" - I remember in 7th grade kids bursting into tears in response to that sort of thing, so well had their aversion therapy taken root.
Me, I'd ban kids from all except the most primitive digital technology until their teens, as well as all other sources of manufactured "fun". Reading is fun, but we have forgotten this. Now it has to be loud and sparkling and expensive, or it's just not fun for our crack-addled minds.
Thease days we would be forced into the Ofstead approved learning outcomes - or alternatively gotten rid of to game the schools figures
Wow, that is just horrendous.
They really didn't know what to do with an 11 year old who would sit there reading Aristotle in ancient greek under the desk - apart from suspend me, repeatedly, and breathing a big sigh of relief when I told them to stick it and went back to school in the UK - they admitted that they would have expelled me had I not left... which reflects the American approach to problem solving - if you can't figure it out, pretend it doesn't exist.
To this day I have zero difficulty finishing a book. My problem has always been stopping. I'm practically clinically unable to disengage from a book once I've started. Enough so that I have to meter my reading to prevent myself from disappearing for months on end. Not even the internet has made a dent in that. In some ways I wish I were a little more like the author. It would be nice to not feel a little worried when I start a book that I'll go so deep I'll miss something in the world around me.
A proficient reader can easily read 2 pages a minute, so lets say 1200 pages/2=600 minutes, so 10 hours a day. Seems quite doable for a bored teenager without a computer/tablet/phone/outside activity.
I don't think I ever did more than 3 books a day, but still possible to do what OP said.
I think many/most of us has have read a page turner in one late night session.
Years later I spent hours getting through the first few chapters of Godel, Escher, Bach. It was such slow going, and required so much thought, that I ultimately gave up.
That's a real problem. You can't write and sell a book for a fast-changing language. (Go may have stabilized enough for a printed book. A useful Rust book is impossible right now.) A writer and publisher can't invest the time and effort to produce a book that will be obsolete when it ships.
Thanks for the trivia about Art Garfunkel! I do much the same thing on Goodreads, but I started fairly recently, so I'm sure I'm missing a few.
People used to read 500 page books on compilers. Would you read an equivalently long blog article on compilers?
With the Internet we've gained the ability to more readily acquire knowledge in little bits at a time, over a lot of areas. But most of us are incapable of reading a really huge article in depth. And thus we get more shallow levels of understanding, but across a wider range of topics. This explains a lot of arguments on the internet.
It's not a "capability", it's a skill. The problem is it's becoming less and less important in everyday life for most people, which in turn makes them abandon its training. As with most skills, without training you become worse at it with time.
I'm not sure if that's good or bad thing that you can now learn without having mastered this skill. Is the understanding you gain via lots of small chunks of knowledge worse than the one you get from reading The Dragon Book? I don't know; looks like a good topic for research in cognitive science.
Personally I do like reading long and involved texts, but I too learned to enjoy it before the Internet became popular. I don't know if I'd be equally interested in such texts had I started just a few years later.
Isn't the point is that the author of the article actually does enjoy reading books. And feels it's helpful for him personally? And that despite that he'd not managed to read in a satisfying manner for years; because he'd let him get to "addicted" to short term distractions?
I feel with the author; I still manage to read more than five books, but there's weeks were that's not the case. To a large degree because I let myself get distracted in a similar way. Without it being beneficial to myself or others.
This "unquantifiable intellectual nirvana" was used to be called "civilization".
I think the ability to concentrate and focus on a single task is going to become more and more useful, because it is so easy to give in to that temptation to flip away, just for a quick moment. I've been working on practicing mindfulness through meditation, and have thought of reading a book as a form of meditation (nice to see the author allude to that a little).
So your TL;DR: good article, read more books, re-learn how to focus on single tasking.
Most of them are poorly written or written in a way to make money.
That is
* clickbait titles when the bulk of the information in the article could be summarized in the title instead
* lack of introduction / thesis / abstract at the beginning summarizing or outlining the actual content
* meandering content with no clear overarching goal
* content padding – lots of words addling little information
So why should I feel bad about not finishing things I think aren't worth finishing?
In a similar vein are youtube howto videos which spend 2+ minutes with bad animations, awkward greetings, begging for likes, and rambling irrelevant introductions followed by the actually useful 15 seconds of content.
I have similar problems with university lectures, textbooks, and, professionally, finding any information in documentation. It might be specific to my style of brain wiring; I find low-information-density media to be at times almost debilitatingly frustrating.
It's actually reverse for many of us who like to read. If i read an interesting article, i just cannot get over it. The stimulation from this is so strong, that its difficult to concentrate on anything else. Mostly after the first read, i will think for a while on it and then re-read it again. More slowly this time. I keep the tab open and will come back again to re-read. Sometimes the thought provoked by the articles lingers for days and i have to write it down somewhere where to get over it.
Err, I don't know, but I was very surprised by reading all the comments (and original blogpost) implying you can't handle reading a 3000ish signs post without any interruption.
Of course, I see that we are "jumping" frequently, like every ten minutes or so, to find "brain fresh-air"; but if you have that much trouble to focus on a so simple thing like reading a simple article, maybe there is something more serious that you have to check without waiting.
(…honestly, I don't know how you can work in any environment with such an extreme rythm of "brain jumping".)
From there i skimmed a bit and stopped realising it was a boring article, if not a little bit whiny.
In other words I can't really blame him for jumping to twitter midway through the author obviously wanted to break the text up in such a way it was easy or encouraged to do so.
It probably helped that the men's room at work seems to be some kind of Faraday cage, so whatever is cached in your mobile browser when you lock the cubicle door is your reading for the duration.
Like you it really took me some effort, I had to force myself to stay engaged, not skip over whole paragraphs and not flip to something else.
But I got there!
This is precisely the reason I don't actively participate in Twitter or Facebook :)
Since January I read +-25 books. It's not necessarily a good thing. Every book, no matter how short, is a commitment. It requires time and effort you could spend in other, more productive things. As a matter of fact, reading is how I procrastinate.
The road to mediocrity is paved with good books: I've been reading quite a lot on entrepreneurship... let's say 300 hours worth of reading. I could have spent that time by testing ideas and hustling, but I lacked confidence. It was always "1 more book... and then I'll start doing it".
> "And it’s exhausting. I was usually asleep halfway through sentence number five."
Reading books isn't exhausting, you can read books 16 hours per day. If you fall asleep after reading 5 lines, that means you are dead tired and shouldn't even have opened that book in the first place.
And maybe the reason why you're too weak to keep yourself from checking your information sources every 5 seconds during all the other activities you (or your boss) care about is because you're tired during the day as well.
The author suggests 5 solutions, I think that's a bit extreme. If you just do 3 and 4, you'll get more sleep and everything will probably be better. Coincidentally that advice is what you'll find everywhere for sleep related issues: "No computers 2 hours before sleep".
Moving my body or locations temporarily wards it off like a snooze button, but the struggle also keeps me from losing myself in a novel. To this day, if you fast-forwarded a video of me reading on my couch, I'd like look a fish flopping out of water to stay awake until the next chapter.
My best solution so far has been to read more in the morning with my coffee before I begin my work, which also happens to be a good time to read in general: it's before the barrage.
I don't follow the notion that what we read online by default has less value than what is available to us in books. I have learned a lot from what I've read online, whether it's long form articles, Wikipedia articles, piecemeal submissions that make up online forum/community sites or even IRC logs.
The mere fact that something is available in book form is not a guarantee of it's accuracy nor a guarantee of the author's credibility.
Its a new medium. Its awkward to talk to some clients I have who do read the old way - because they will never hear of the authors I read, because I read hundreds of "amateur" authors who produce millions of words a year. And of course, online literature is 95% swill and 5% silver lining. It means you do get hit with a lot of underwhelming crap. But you still have the same thing predominantly happen in normal bookstores - maybe the ratio is better, but you still have to find your authors and interests all the same. And something about clicking through pages of writing online seems to beat pouring over isles of heavy tomes seeking satisfaction.
> "Intellectual laziness and the hurry of the age have produced a craving for literary nips. The torbid brain... has grown too weak for sustained thought." – Israel Zangwill, The Bachelor's Club, 1891
I highly, highly recommend everybody read "The Information: How The Internet Gets Inside Us" by Adam Gopnik: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/02/14/the-information
It points out how this 'Why can't we X anymore", "in the past it was better", "the future will be amazing", "the future will be horrible", and "everything is kinda the same" perspectives have been repeated, remixed, rehashed over and over again.
I think the difference people are noticing is that as some things begin to have an alternative, the minority (or majority) that would prefer said alternative can now express that desire where it was not possible before. Take the quote about sitting down and enjoying long meals. Maybe that's not everybody's cup of tea, but now it's a lot easier to get a quick meal on the go and some people prefer it.
If anything the pace of change has slowed down. But the news and tidbit delivery system is highly optimized.
I read nine books in two weeks.
I felt so energized and accomplished. I vowed to keep it up when I returned to a world with internet.
I have not.
An Internet fast is an interesting experience. People might drop off the grid for backpacking trips, or trips to monasteries... I think it's legitimate to drop off and take anything you think might be your hobby but for internet. Take books, like I did, or maybe a typewriter. Or a musical instrument. Canvases and paint. A sharp knife and some pieces of wood. Yarn. Give your mind some idle stretches, a few days without constant distraction. See what happens, you'll probably be amazed.
I am an avid reader. I am part of readers clubs and meetings. I don't see less people today there than 10 years ago, in fact I see way more(probably something to do with the economic crisis).
The world does not end because we can read online and distract ourselves. A person does not need this for distraction, in fact just a fly making noises around you or thinking on your partner-son-mother while looking at the wall is enough.
The same was said about TV decades ago, and radio before it, even about books when it became cheap centuries ago. The Quijote is a book about someone that reads instead of living and wants to live at the end of his life. At the time cheap books were a novelty because of the printing press, remember that before it it took a year to copy a single book.
Everyone who I knew liked to read while growing up still likes to read. Some people don't, and thats fine too. What annoys me is people who don't like to read, but feel like they should, and therefore go looking for a scapegoat. And something tells me that some people have struggled to read and felt inadequate about that throughout history.
But there are lots of books that just aren't that good in comparison to really interesting articles on the internet. There are a even a lot more articles, so the reader must develop the skill of skimming quickly and deciding early whether there's any meat in it. But good articles are really good and they're easy to find. Books that aren't bad and books that are just all right but not really, truly good can't simply compete: earlier they could because there was no alternative. But now there is.
Nothing can beat a good book but there's so many other things to read that are incredibly good too, so the partitioning of our reading time will simply change.
I am watching Chopped, skimming articles like this one, I just stepped up mid-typing that last bit to help my wife with something and finally I'm programming. I was interrupted again after finishing that sentence.
Reading is a luxury.
These days, the currency is attention. The amount of attention required for reading of any substance is very high, and with thousands of apps, sites, shows, brands, and everything else pulling at us in a way that's engineered to be ideally visceral and tailored to our animal impulses, the lack of attention left over is no surprise.
We didn't read at all, then we read leaves, then we read scrolls, then we read books, now we read the internet. Books have been around for extremely small percentage of our species' span. Moreover before the internet, the general public showed more interest in reading up more current affairs/entertainment than traditional books. Newspapers and magazine numbers are still strong.
Frankly, I would rather have a race of people reading up on general knowledge and keep themselves aware than a race of people wasting time trying to read story books just to fit in. It is not that the books have been replaced. Better stuff has brutally shown that books were truly appealing to only a few. If, given chance, most people flea, it is a failed product.
Only in this case we abandoned cars for hoping along barefoot on one foot while wearing a diving suit...
>Frankly, I would rather have a race of people reading up on general knowledge and keep themselves aware than a race of people wasting time trying to read story books just to fit in.
We have that former thing, and its producing a race of people who have no understanding of anything substantial, be it politics, world affairs or arts, and jump from BS celebrity tweet to twerking videos.
Of course one can resort to the classic "People have always complained about new technologies and trends, hence there's no problem with them".
For one, "people always complained about new technologies" is not such an obvious and true fact -- how many people and how seriously complained is not measured, nor is their reasoning examing. We're just given some examples of people complaining for some new technology/trend, and are told that all those examples are of equal zero validity, just "get off of my line" kind of affairs).
Second, even if "people always complained about new technologies" that doesn't automatically mean that they were always wrong (nor is proof offered, besides "and yet, those technologies stayed with us and we now are ok with them" as if that proves anything qualitatively).
A more nuanced approach would have been to check whether something was indeed lost (a tradeoff) in adopting those technologies, something that we could maybe preserve if we adopted them with less abandon.
And in fact a lot of our subsequent behavior --which is usually ommited when glorifying technology-- points to that (e.g. the adoption of cars lead to huge cities built around driving like L.A., which we now find less than great. Or the city noises and environment led to a flight for the suburbs. Examples are numerous).
I started keeping track of my reading in 2011. Here's my history:
2011: 11 books
2012: 16 books
2013: 29 books
2014: 54 books
2015: 26 books (to date)
1. I read to and from work. 45 min each way.
2. I read at lunch. 1 hr.
3. I chose reading instead of watching TV or playing video games.
4. I use eReaders, so I have dozens of books to read next.
5. I log my reading (obsessively?) on goodreads.com.
"Why can't we read anymore?" I dunno. Maybe because _you_ aren't reading anymore.
I only know that I read that many because I owned that many books (and didn't own every book I ever read). I was 26 then, and reading since 5-6, so that's really only 10 books a year. The real number of books at that point might have been more like 3000 - but I did re-read a lot of the books I owned so maybe not.
Since this time last year, I've probably read 30+ books. Gotta love the Kindle and Kindle Unlimited.
Setting up a goodreads account is simplicity itself. And since it's owned by Amazon, you can import all your books with a click. There's also a bookmarklet that "Adds book to Goodreads" from the Amazon page.
Once you get used to logging progress and marking completed books, you will really see the pages and books mount up.
I set up an account yesterday and did like that Amazon import feature. I wish It imported all the books you read with Kindle Unlimited though. Thanks for the heads up with the bookmarklet, I'll check it out.
Last year, I read 25 books. And the year before, too. And the year before. Then I stopped reading this blog post.
The number of books is a weak benchmark, because I read books as thin as 100 pages up to 1,300 pages. I read blog posts that have 50 pages and some that have 140 characters.
Reading is enjoyable, but still a form of consumption. There are only so many ideas per week you can think a lot about and thus, you can read only so many books that really benefit your life and make you change your mindset.
One of the amazing insights: new information is a drug. It causes a dopamine rush. The influx of all this new information, alerts, everything tugging at us every day is the new legal high, and we're all addicted, with thousands of external entities profiting off the act, dealing out notifications.
I highly recommend reading it fully!
I mean, I could play anecdote wars (I read ridiculous numbers of books now I have FBReader on my phone) but that would be feeding the foolishness.
The author also seems to assume that everyone reads like he does, pausing to think about each word, "walking through another's thoughts." This is something I've given a bit of thought to recently, interestingly triggered by an episode of King of the Hill. I don't read in this manner and never really have.
I read fiction for the story. I want to know what happens next. I don't linger on a sentence trying to decipher the subtext. It was a great struggle for me to learn to read in that manner for English courses, and I never really enjoyed it.
Meanwhile today there are great TV shows with interesting things to say. The Wire, The Sopranos, and Black Mirror all have gotten me thinking, trying to see from another perspective much more easily than any book ever has.
I believe that our brains don't all work the same way. What the author gets out of reading, I get out of TV and movies and cannot get naturally out of books.
I read a great excerpt from something published in the 1800s complaining about the same thing... I'll have to dig it up.
There they are... see 1894 and 1895 in particular.
In a blog post, a tweet, or email I can quickly decide if it's worth my time -- does it pique interest, make me feel more connected to the world.
With a book, the investment of time and energy is much greater for an uncertain (but perhaps marvelously more meaningful) payoff.
But give me a good fantasy novel, I will devour it. Wheel Of time (13 x 700 pages) was completed in 3 months. Chronicles of Amber? Done. ~60 books of Pratchett, a lot of them multiple times? Done. Tolkien? Done. There were countless of times, where I couldn't sleep before finishing a book, staying up to 4-5 am, when I usually go to sleep around 23-24:00. That's why I feel it is really hard to start a book, when you don't know what type of books you like. Some people enjoy fantasy/sci-fi/romance/action/prose and many more. Maybe something non-fiction? And I feel that schools should somehow help students discover their favourite authors and their favourite ganres.
Good article, but he could have given his point in one/third of the content length and it wouldn't have lost anything.
I also think that we have forgotten that the point of email and text messaging was so that we could be asynchronous, rather than interrupt driven like a phone call.
What is he/she really saying?
There's a thousand and one problems one could be solving in his/her life. Checking twitter/facebook less often and reading words printed on paper is priority number 356 for me. I don't know why it ranks so high for the author to warrant a blog post.
The real issue is not having your priorities straight that you are worrying about your allocation of time/resources. Surely there's bigger fish to fry in your own life - where's the blog post on that?
The problem we have nowadays is that, because it became so much easier to write books, we have more and more books that don't add much to human knowledge. In the old times, writing and publishing a book was hard, which meant that the threshold for acceptance was much higher. Our society views this downgrading of book quality as a sign that books are not a good format, when in fact this is just an unintended consequence of our technology.
When you read an interesting nonfiction book today, you can also check wikipedia, listen to podcasts, watch the author giving a Ted talk and jump into the infinite sea of informal online commentary.
IE, reading on HN is not reading in the sense that reading some book in 1991 was. It's being in a conversation, for better and worse. Your mind is operating in a different context.
I also think that writing is adapting more slowly than reading. Many nonfiction books I find interesting are 250-400 pages when they could be under 100 and just as effective. I think that's some side effect of paperback books published by the publishing industry, the medium and its economic ecosystem.
In any case, if you want to maintain reading of that kind as a habit or pursuit, you need to create an environment for it. Have a reading room in your house, go to a cafe or park or your garden and read there. Set and setting. You also need to be somewhat honest about what you like and how. Are you so engrossed that you read for 3hrs when you meant to read for 30min? Are you doing something that you need to discipline yourself into doing?
I only listen to podcasts when trapped on a long drive. Them I tend to listen to end-to-end again because the tech sucks.
I've always found it hard to sit and watch a film, or even a youtube video, linearly. It's generally just way too slow (and occastionally too fast) and I like to be able to skip around. But the tools suck.
Books, on the other hand, are ideal. In so many I luxuriate in them, especially fiction which can be so multimedia compared to a film, generally reading linearly. Others I skip around, skipping over boring bits, coming back to them, going back to parts I loved, or just reading something interesting over and over.
It's not that "the digital" caused me to lose my ability to concentrate, rather it allowed me access to media in a way that supports my enjoyment: sometimes intense, sometimes casual, and sometimes intense just on the parts that matter. How can this be bad?
I used to read books by the dozen. Sometimes literally, in about 2006 I discovered Gollancz/Orion's "Sci-Fi Masterworks" series and was getting through more than one per week, in addition to holding down a job and having a pretty active social life.
Now I don't think I've read a book since I motored through my second reading of the "Song of Ice and Fire" stuff last year.
I, like the author, also find myself putting on some of the best TV there has ever been, and then doing something else while it's on, like checking email or facebook, or reading HN. So I don't really absorb it.
I don't want to cut out tv, but I do want to be able to concentrate on it, and I do want to read more books again. And get control of my sleeping patterns which have always, always been up the wazoo anyway.
So perhaps I shall join in and try to do as the author of this post has - start reading, deny the instant-gratification urges and reclaim my brain and my attention span.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-ne...
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/05/tech/gaming-gadgets/e-read...
http://www.buzzfeed.com/krystieyandoli/facts-that-prove-youn...
I know for myself that, when putting something on the television, I'll pop out my mobile not too much later after, just to check up on things. It's very much the modern day curse, I think, and we seem to have no real constraint. We get these positive reinforcements ("Ooh, new e-mail. Ooh, new message from a friend. Ooh, something new and unknown and exciting.") from constantly not being present, so that's why we keep doing it.
Personally, I bought myself an e-reader and I already read a full book in a week or so. I'm not an avid reader, but I love books. The key was, for me at least, to read one chapter at a time. That way I always got progress each time I read.
I don't even use things like Facebook and Twitter, but I do have a habit of reading the front page of HN/Reddit/whatever and opening a dozen different interesting-looking discussions and their corresponding articles all at once. Perhaps this attempt to be a bit more organised is actually more like the example mentioned in the article, where you're reading something but know you have a new mail waiting and it knocks 10 points off your effective IQ.
Instead, I check my email or certain websites for substantial updates to my favorite fanfic or web serial.
3K words is heavenly.
10K words even more so.
The more words the better. If you can update faster than I can read, that'll be awesome.
I have "better" (to me) things to do. I want to read about boost. I want to study LLVM. I want to write code. I want to set up a Linux server running node.js. I want to compare some NoSQL datastores to an RDBMS or two.
When I want distraction or to rest my brain, I'll take entertainment in short spans. I really don't want to invest weeks of two-hour nights reading a work of fiction. I'm not terribly interested in reading someone's biography. And unless a non-fiction topic is currently meaningful to me (for example, books about the human mind when I was in my early 20s), then I'm not likely to Just Read.
I feel like if I Just Read for reading's sake, I'm not honing the craft that's important to me. I feel like it makes me a "jack of all trades" and therefore "master of none."
But I didn't find it all that hard to just close my laptop and put my phone facedown more than an arm's length away. I thought it would be a titanic struggle - but as soon as I made it slightly inconvenient to distract myself, I found myself once again able to read through hundreds of pages of books.
It's anecdotal, of course. But for me, being able to "read" again was as simple of giving myself the slightest barrier to getting distracted.
I think notable exceptions to this are found in 'The Practice of System and Network Administration' and 'Time Management for System Administrators.'
Fiction, I can read at times. For the last book I read, 'The Mote in God's Eye', I read the first four chapters or so, then put it off for 5 months, and then finished it in a week. That one does start off pretty slowly.
I have a slightly different problem which is reading too much. It is embarassing when you miss your stop on the train because the article you are reading has distracted you. I also am something of a completionist when it comes to books, so I find even when I don't "like" the book I'm compelled to finish it.
You are just becomming picky about the format, because when there is a lot of quantity, your brain decides what quality it wants to prioritize.
If something is long, complicated and unpleasant to read, it often can be reformated so it's not. All text are not essais. And you don't need to read or write an essay everyday.
So it makes sense to me. Readers to the contexte, we optimize, and writters should too.
Perhaps the author never fully learned that. I wonder if it's age-related. Or maybe I'm the odd one: ADHD/bipolar with hard-won focusing skills ;)
My guess is that the same is the case for others, which makes for a simple solution: don't read badly written books.
The "research" on how our brains are affected by media has historically been incredibly speculative and shoddy. Is it any different this time?
Now, in contrast to other comments on here, I find the best time to listen is just before bed on my evening walk. If I really want to get through quickly, I listen on my commute also.
I'm asking for help, I identified this issue: all this browsing/facebook/YC/reddit is making my attention span and ability to focus weaker.
How to get it back? I want to have a killer attention span and ability to focus on one task. I started meditation in order to do this, any other recommendation?
Books are archaic, and the idea that you aren't intelligent or informed or cultured unless you read them is just pure dogma at this point.
We have internet-connected devices now. Content can be published, peer-reviewed, and disseminated to an international audience in under an hour. I can have a dialogue with the person who wrote it, ask questions and submit corrections that can be published 10 minutes later.
To me that is such a massive improvement over the old model that I no longer have any time for the old model. I don't have to wait for content from a small handful of people at a publisher in New York, and I'm extremely thankful for that.
I can appreciate some books as works of art or just for entertainment, but books are an incredibly inefficient method of pursuing knowledge and culture, and for that purpose I wouldn't recommend them to anybody.
So to answer the question posed by the title of this article: We can, we just shouldn't, which is convenient because we don't want to.
Books tend to be deep, and good ones have gone through many iterations. Do you think you can get the ideas presented in, say, SICP or Principles of Mathematical Analysis by going through online material?
I think it may be possible, but it's actually harder.
The parent was making the point that it's possible to have a much better system where the book authors communicate with the readers online which improves both the quality and ease of understanding. As of now, it may not be the situation but in future there surely will be better ways to do things.
Also if we go by the literal meaning, book is defined as "a written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and bound in covers". The part which requires "approval and published by a publisher" is a model of a book making and there may be better models out there.
I'm currently reading Gods Bankers by Gerald Posner about the history of the Vatican Bank. It has about 10 pages of referenced bibilography on what must be at least 300-400 sources, and 170(!) pages of footnotes from referenced interviews, articles, online reports etc.
You aren't going to get that type of in depth coverage of a subject from something that was curated and thrown together in 10 minutes and put up on the web. Long form writing and investigative journalism still has it's place if you are looking for an in depth view of a subject you are interested in.
The pursuit of culture - I believe you should only do this if you enjoy it. Profound immersion in 'culture' (however you define it) for the sake of obtaining it is like going to the gym for giant muscles you don't need. Pointless, unless you actually enjoy it.
Children do have the same behavior, before they learn to sit down and concentrate.
We are becoming children again. Everything should be super easy. This is what sells. A tablet for example has the haptics of a babies device.
Side note, if your site pops up a stupid SHARE THIS ON FACEBOOK AND TWITTER when someone highlights text, I most likely won't read your articles. I didn't read this one because Medium does this; SBNation articles do this, too and my browser now loads custom Javascript on their pages to remove it. It's distracting and serves no real purpose, except to take me out of my flow of reading.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/column-reader...
It allows me to single out the main text of a site, and break it into screen height sized columns. These can then be paged through much like a book.
Seems to make it much easier for me at least to get through a long article without jumping between paragraphs.
The problem isn't that people are humorless– it's that when you reward people for humor (often resulting in puns and pithy one liners), after a while, people start competing to be as funny as possible– and that's all that ever rises to the top. It crowds out more deliberate, thoughtful discussion.
I love humor and comedy myself, but it makes sense to me why a discussion forum might deliberately choose to discourage it.
Have you ever gone onto a blogpost about procrastination and found the "I'll read this later" comment, and the "I'm here reading this instead of working" comment? Are those comments ever valuable?
It makes sense to downvote them to the bottom, so that people who go looking for them can find them, but the discussion is kept as fresh and relevant as possible.
Also it was how this whole conversation started, although really tangential to the OP; which encouraged a conversation.