"#3 Alienate everyone close to you" is the complete opposite of what I do. My favorite technique is to read a book out loud to my wife (and before I was married, to friends). It improves my reading/pronunciation and we discuss the book as it progresses. We learn something new while spending time together. Someday I hope to read to my kids and have them read back to me. I like reading by myself too but I'd rather read it with someone.
How To: Read more books
21–30 of 107 posts
Re: How To: Read more books
#22The best way to read more books is to get a job where you have to commute. And by that I mean commute by train. That's giving me almost 2 hours per day for pretty uninterrupted reading. Not that I read 100 books per year but it seems that it's much more than my co-workers, so I guess I'm above average. Because of that I actually enjoy commuting. :)
Audiobooks and podcasts work just fine for drivers (and on the train too). It's the weirdest feeling when you find yourself picking the slowest lane in traffic just so you can spend more time enjoying what you're listening to.
Re: How To: Read more books
#23The best way to read more books is to get a job where you have to commute. And by that I mean commute by train. That's giving me almost 2 hours per day for pretty uninterrupted reading. Not that I read 100 books per year but it seems that it's much more than my co-workers, so I guess I'm above average. Because of that I actually enjoy commuting. :)
Audiobooks and podcasts work just fine for drivers (and on the train too). It's the weirdest feeling when you find yourself picking the slowest lane in traffic just so you can spend more time enjoying what you're listening to.
I used to love audiobooks, until I realized how much longer they took over reading. I prefer podcasts for drives, but even a lot of those aren't very focused and tend to banter.
Re: How To: Read more books
#24The biggest consumer of time is undoubtedly other people, in large measure because talking to other people is so fun that you don’t notice time going by. By keeping yourself away from other people (living alone is a good start), you free up an enormous amount of time for reading. I find this is particularly useful in reading books, since books can usually substitute for human company...
How sad, especially coming from someone whose opinion I respect so much.
I love reading books, programming, sports, good food and drink, and a whole bunch of other things. But none of those things is an end unto itself. I do all of them as part of building a better life. Why? To share it with other people!
No matter how many cool things are on my list, sharing my life with others is always #1. If I find myself alone, then sure, I'll pick up a good book or project. But avoiding other people in order to have more time alone for books? Except for extreme circumstances, that just doesn't make sense to me.
Re: How To: Read more books
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Finding time is never an issue. Every day, you are handed 24 shiny new hours to spend. The real issues (which Aaron addresses) are motivation and mental ability.
You get 24 hours each day, true. But it's not just about motivation and mental ability. The time you have available to read is only time you aren't doing something else. If you have a job, or school, or family duties, or anything else, you may not have much time available to read. Your downtime is available for you to use as you please -- via reading, or watching TV, or whatever. That's when it's an issue of motivati…
What I meant by motivation is priorities - "The time you have available to [work|study|family] is only time you aren't doing something else."
Re: How To: Read more books
#26tl;dr: Stop visiting hacker news, reddit and other blogs; stop interacting with people; get books from the library for free. My opinion: seriously, blogs should count as minibooks and everytime I read a particularly good and in depth blog or something that elicits the "I'm smarter for reading that" moment, I'm going to keep a tally. That tally I'll consider a chapter of a book. At 300 chapters, I'll count that as a b…
Hang on: you read about 100 "particularly good and in depth blog"s per day?
Not necessarily just blogs, but I'd say around 100 articles easily. I'd also include tutorials and discussions that are substantial as part of reading those articles.
Re: How To: Read more books
#27Here's a radical idea: only read books that you enjoy and find interesting. Don't measure reading success by the number of books, but by how far your hair was blown back :-)
Re: How To: Read more books
#28>> "since books can usually substitute for human company: you can take them with you on the train and to meals and curl up with them at night and so on."
Seriously? Comes across as slightly sad to me.
The top priority on everyones list should be friends+family IMHO. Everything else is just 'stuff'.
Also I'd say there's far more to be learned/gained/enjoyed from other human beings than in any book.
Re: How To: Read more books
#29tl;dr: Stop visiting hacker news, reddit and other blogs; stop interacting with people; get books from the library for free. My opinion: seriously, blogs should count as minibooks and everytime I read a particularly good and in depth blog or something that elicits the "I'm smarter for reading that" moment, I'm going to keep a tally. That tally I'll consider a chapter of a book. At 300 chapters, I'll count that as a b…
Wow, are you really reading 30,000 good blog posts in a year? Could you please share what blogs you read? I find most blogs tiring and annoying, because there is so little new content and so much reposting and regurgitating of the same things going on over and over again. I am rediscovering what a joy it is to read books. It seems it does take a lot of work to write well. Blog posts, almost by definition, are not mea…
See my reply to tome.
There are lots of good blogs out there. I think a substantial number of bloggers end up getting published in books, and a lot of good writers blog. There is a lot of information out there, my primary point is that you don't have to consume it on parchment for it to count.
Re: How To: Read more books
#30I used to visit http://www.bn.com store on every saturday & sunday to read more books.