Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lessons learned after 300 books in 4 years

jovicailic.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 92 posts

Re: Lessons learned after 300 books in 4 years

#71

Post by TeMPOraL »

Paul_S wrote: post #39
TeMPOraL wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately - and this is something I see many smart people around me not realizing - we live in the day and age where it's trivial to identify and get the very best books humanity has produced about any given topic. That is, as long as you can read English.

How, please tell me. I'll pay you for that list. Do I have to sacrifice my firstborn for this?

Most fields that aren't freshly created cutting-edge research can be handled by simple Google queries:

- best books on

- best books on reddit

Look for titles most often mentioned/recommended by people in the .

Re: Lessons learned after 300 books in 4 years

#72

Post by ashark »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #54
Paul_S wrote: post #2

I decided to read a book a day this year. So far I'm ahead at 336 and here are my counter opinions. "* It’s much better to read the best book on the topic 5 times, than to read 5 different books on the topic once." Flat out no. Unless you're a freaking machine. Reading different books covering the same topic keeps me interested more. I don't mind the repetition then because I get the warm "I know that" feeling. "* Ey…

That sounds impossible to me. How can you possibly read one book every day, unless they're extremely short? I could imagine this being true if you dedicate something like 8-12 hours per day, but how do you have time for that?

Hardy Boys/Goosebumps/Boxcar Children? That's about the most advanced literature I can imagine achieving 1/day with.

Re: Lessons learned after 300 books in 4 years

#73

Post by mimimimi »

quinndupont wrote: post #15

This person is either reading the lightest self-help type of books, or not really "reading" these books. I'm an academic, and my only job is to read books (and articles, etc), and I do my job at least 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and I don't even read this many books. My advice for getting genuinely intelligent about a topic: read hard books, intensively, and leave the buffet-stats-counter stuff to those who just w…

My advice would be that if you really want to learn something then you have to do it. The book is a reference but there is no substitute for on hands training. Unless all you want to learn is facts like an encyclopedia, which I guess is ok but I find it hard to see as a good method to learn something deeply.

Re: Lessons learned after 300 books in 4 years

#74

Post by Paul_S »

ashark wrote: post #69
Paul_S wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How, please tell me. I'll pay you for that list. Do I have to sacrifice my firstborn for this?

For most technical, scientific, and mathematic topics, it's usually very easy to find the next best book to read with a google search or two. Starting on or strengthening long-forgotten Calculus? Probably get Spivak. Et c. This might get tougher as you approach a field's state-of-the-art, but by then "what to read next" will often come from a journal, not a book. Literature and verse? Harold Bloom's western canon lis…

Not any topic in particular. Things in my own field I can judge myself and I don't really get to chose anyway but I'm talking about general reading.

Most lists just tell you which books are popular. I'd be reading nothing but Harry Potters if I followed those lists. I'm talking about choosing a book I will like. Not you, not the critic, not the public. Following these kinds of static lists doesn't really fair better than looking at the cover.

There needs to be some algorithm that can be applied to my books which is what I was hoping goodreads would do for me but their recommendations are a joke - they just recommend whatever goodreads author they're currently promoting regardless of what you like.

Re: Lessons learned after 300 books in 4 years

#75

Post by TeMPOraL »

Paul_S wrote: post #74
ashark wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most technical, scientific, and mathematic topics, it's usually very easy to find the next best book to read with a google search or two. Starting on or strengthening long-forgotten Calculus? Probably get Spivak. Et c. This might get tougher as you approach a field's state-of-the-art, but by then "what to read next" will often come from a journal, not a book. Literature and verse? Harold Bloom's western canon lis…

Not any topic in particular. Things in my own field I can judge myself and I don't really get to chose anyway but I'm talking about general reading. Most lists just tell you which books are popular. I'd be reading nothing but Harry Potters if I followed those lists. I'm talking about choosing a book I will like. Not you, not the critic, not the public. Following these kinds of static lists doesn't really fair better…

I didn't realize you're talking fiction. The "algorithm" I applied works best for nonfiction, because those you choose by objective criteria.

As for recommendation engines for fiction, I don't know any that don't have this conflict of interests you described with Goodreads. Personally, I tend to pick up books that are recommended by friends, writers I like reading and people on HN. There's way too much fiction to read all of it, but I try to aim for one (or both) of two separate types: insightful and genre-popular. Insightful, because I love to read new ideas, and genre-popular, because culture is pretty much defined by your ability to talk about it with other people.

Re: Lessons learned after 300 books in 4 years

#76

Post by TeMPOraL »

Paul_S wrote: post #65
300 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. I put quite a lot of effort to explore available books on the topic, but that would take another (much longer) blog post. Good luck with your quest! If you need some inspiration for books to read, check out this great list: https://sivers.org/book

Open the page, sort by "best" and see how far up you have to go before you get to a book that doesn't get a negative review. As far as I can tell no one has this figured out yet and it's a no way of proving a program will stop without running it sort of a thing - all we need now is a name for this law relating to books.

Everything gets negative reviews - even if God Himself stepped down and put a poem on Amazon that was explicitly designed to trigger hidden backdoors in people's firmware to induce state of extreme pleasure, somebody would leave a negative review because they've only read second stanza while drunk, and decided it sucks. One has to get used to it, and learn not to flinch away from reading an occasional negative review to make sure whether it's just someone's very specific subjective opinion, or whether it can be a problem for many other readers too.

Re: Lessons learned after 300 books in 4 years

#77

Post by Paul_S »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #54
Paul_S wrote: post #2

I decided to read a book a day this year. So far I'm ahead at 336 and here are my counter opinions. "* It’s much better to read the best book on the topic 5 times, than to read 5 different books on the topic once." Flat out no. Unless you're a freaking machine. Reading different books covering the same topic keeps me interested more. I don't mind the repetition then because I get the warm "I know that" feeling. "* Ey…

That sounds impossible to me. How can you possibly read one book every day, unless they're extremely short? I could imagine this being true if you dedicate something like 8-12 hours per day, but how do you have time for that?

That's what I thought too but no, it's totally doable (I am doing it after all) and the average page count according to goodreads is 357. I have no family, I work a 9-5 at a multinational and my only other hobby is bouldering. I use every spare moment to read. If you added up all your spare time every day you'd be surprised (clearly). It's not evenly distributed - I usually catch up over the weekend when I have loads of free time (2 days). Also it doesn't take 8 hours to read a book (at least not every one, fiction is pretty quick). Not even an audiobook (which are slower even when you speed them up x2.5)!

Even if it took 8 hours on average (which might be right, I never actually tried to measure this) you could still read 9 books a week with 72 hours:

( (24 * 7) week

- 40 work

- (8 * 7) sleep )

/ 8 hr/book

= 9 books

Re: Lessons learned after 300 books in 4 years

#78

Post by TeMPOraL »

sotojuan wrote: post #5
Paul_S wrote: post #2

I decided to read a book a day this year. So far I'm ahead at 336 and here are my counter opinions. "* It’s much better to read the best book on the topic 5 times, than to read 5 different books on the topic once." Flat out no. Unless you're a freaking machine. Reading different books covering the same topic keeps me interested more. I don't mind the repetition then because I get the warm "I know that" feeling. "* Ey…

I agree that it's really easy to find time for reading. For us in tech, just replace your HN/Reddit time with reading and you'll be surprised how much you can read!

Personally, books are why I don't mind having ~40 minute commute one-way to work in the city. I use public transport and read books. Of course, I try to read some more at other times too, but at least I have a guaranteed minimum of 5-6 hours of reading time each week. I'd be utterly mad if I had to commute that long by a non-self-driving car though.

Re: Lessons learned after 300 books in 4 years

#79

Post by TeMPOraL »

300 wrote: post #61
ezequiel-garzon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you feel like sharing, does the number 300 hundred hold a special meaning to you for any reason? Your handle, the title of the post, I see a patter, Watson :)

No special meaning at all. I recently realized I almost crossed this number, so I thought to share what I learned. I'm not proud of the number of books I've read. Actually, I would prefer that I've read less books, but that I've read more times the best ones (in my opinion).

Exploration vs exploitation :). It's hard to judge well. Were you to read 30 books 10 times each, you'd probably wonder if you couldn't read more different books instead ;).

I wonder what the perfect number is. For non-fiction, I guess you'll hit diminishing returns with most books in something like 5 iterations. But then again, I want to take a following challenge: pick one good fiction book, and read it 100 times. I've read (in Adler's "How to Read a Book", I think) that the way you understand and feel about a piece of writing will change profoundly after so many read-throughs.

Re: Lessons learned after 300 books in 4 years

#80

Post by TeMPOraL »

chillwaves wrote: post #68
B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

G.R.R.M. writes well, and I'm a long-time paying customer, but that phrase is advertising bullshit. The reader doesn't 'live' squat, he reads about someone else's life. Watching cooking shows doesn't feed anyone.

Does it have to be "advertising bullshit"? Maybe GRRM sees reading differently than you do? For someone who has devoted their life to writing, that is a sensible perspective.

There's an interesting thread in Dark Forest by Cixin Liu (second book of the Three Body Problem trilogy (yes, I know I'm being boring constantly recommending them here but these are really good books)). I actually wonder whether it's a real thing.

A short (minor) spoiler follows.

One of the protagonists is married to a writer. He follows her advice about writing, and in the process of developing a character he manages to, well, instantiate a pretty much living version of that character in his own mind - a version that grows and thinks independently of its creator. He eventually gets emotionally involved with his imaginary creation, and later learns that it's something that happens to good writers, and that his wife has such a character "living" with her too.

What I wonder is whether it's really the case that good writers actually develop their characters to the point of them turning pretty much into tulpas? A kind of background thread in their brains, with separate micro-consciousness.

Post reply on HN