I've been digging through Hacker News posts, hackernewsbooks, etc. It was a non-ficton book, about the loss of power/money/wealth in New York? I believe. It was like 1000+ pages, and only around $15, and I can't for the life of me remember what the hell it was. Had a picture of the guy on the cover, that's about all I can remember. But I know I wanted it!
Ways to Read More Books
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Re: Ways to Read More Books
#42I've been digging through Hacker News posts, hackernewsbooks, etc. It was a non-ficton book, about the loss of power/money/wealth in New York? I believe. It was like 1000+ pages, and only around $15, and I can't for the life of me remember what the hell it was. Had a picture of the guy on the cover, that's about all I can remember. But I know I wanted it!
"The Power Broker" by Robert Caro?
Re: Ways to Read More Books
#43I've been digging through Hacker News posts, hackernewsbooks, etc. It was a non-ficton book, about the loss of power/money/wealth in New York? I believe. It was like 1000+ pages, and only around $15, and I can't for the life of me remember what the hell it was. Had a picture of the guy on the cover, that's about all I can remember. But I know I wanted it!
"The Power Broker" by Robert Caro?
Will you marry me? This is why I love Hacker News.
Re: Ways to Read More Books
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. I'd rather read books in my couch at my own pace than feel stressed about finishing the latest non fiction self help book. The best way to read more books is to make time for it and read books you enjoy.
Read hardbacks in the bath tub. That's the secret.
Oh, btw. you can slip ipad, kindle, android tablet into a regular ziplock bag, zip it in and read it in the bathtub. Trust me - it's completely waterproof.
Re: Ways to Read More Books
#45This article touches on, in my opinion, the 2 great problems with non-fiction reading nowadays: * Deciding which book to read next out of the seemingly infinite decision space (which book is optimal?) * Reading books "well", such that you truly elevate your level of understanding of a topic to that of the author, and then remember what you've learned. Notably, I think "Read More Books", the title of the article, is m…
I think finding the topic is the harder issue. Or picking a topic among those you are interested in.
If you are interested in a specific topic, then usually you can find discussions of "game changing" books in that topic. Or trace the "tree" of current books to earlier books in the topic.
If you want to know what influenced an author, take a look at the sources the book cites. A quick Google search revealed a bunch of sites which offer search for book / pub citation info. Maybe that's a good place to start.
An interesting service might be to take this a step further and add some sort of visualization for a given topic.
Re: Ways to Read More Books
#46This may be an unusual opinion, but I read a lot, and I've found non-fiction books to just not be efficient means of educating myself anymore. Most topics can be illustrated and described in far fewer words than a book takes. I get about a third of the way through a lot of books and say "ok I get it", as the author basically just continues to say the same thing in different ways. I'm sure this is incentivized by current publishing structure.
Not only that, but figures and plots provide far more information density than words, and books don't frequently include them in large quantity. I've found scientific literature and a number of very high quality bloggers to be a much more efficient source of reading material.
That's not to say this is always true - biographies in particular seem to have the most consistently large content / page count.
Re: Ways to Read More Books
#47This article touches on, in my opinion, the 2 great problems with non-fiction reading nowadays: * Deciding which book to read next out of the seemingly infinite decision space (which book is optimal?) * Reading books "well", such that you truly elevate your level of understanding of a topic to that of the author, and then remember what you've learned. Notably, I think "Read More Books", the title of the article, is m…
I think finding the topic is the harder issue. Or picking a topic among those you are interested in. If you are interested in a specific topic, then usually you can find discussions of "game changing" books in that topic. Or trace the "tree" of current books to earlier books in the topic. If you want to know what influenced an author, take a look at the sources the book cites. A quick Google search revealed a bunch o…
Interesting! For myself, I tend to already know what topics I care about, e.g Entrepreneurship, History of Computing, Stoicism, etc. These topics usually become quite apparent when I look at my goals in life. Can you explain more about how you decide on topics?
As for the "game changing" books, I definitely agree! It seems that most areas seem to have those "seminal" books that most of the other books in the genre reference non-stop. One example that jumps out at me is Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, which seems to be referenced by every book I can get my hands on.
The visualization of a tree is definitely interesting: I suppose the goal of it would to be able to find the roots.
Re: Ways to Read More Books
#48I've read more in the past 12 months than in the past few years, purely because I discovered a company in the UK called the Folio Society[1]. They sell beautifully bound and illustrated editions of fantastic books, although at rather high prices (£30-40 on average).
Previously the majority of the books I read came in the form of cheap ebooks from the Kindle store. As a result, I often abandoned them (or even just forgot about them), only reading a few chapters. Now though, when I spend £30 on a single book, damn right am I going to finish it.
Plus, as a result of the curation, there isn't a single book on their site that isn't at least worth a glance. The same can't be said for many physical bookstores, let alone Amazon, etc.
And, the best part is, I don't really need these expensive books anymore. I've gotten into such a habit of reading because of them that I'm buying regular books again and I'm reading for at least an hour or two a night.
Re: Ways to Read More Books
#49This may be an unusual opinion, but I read a lot, and I've found non-fiction books to just not be efficient means of educating myself anymore. Most topics can be illustrated and described in far fewer words than a book takes. I get about a third of the way through a lot of books and say "ok I get it", as the author basically just continues to say the same thing in different ways. I'm sure this is incentivized by curr…
> I get about a third of the way through a lot of books and say "ok I get it", as the author basically just continues to say the same thing in different ways.
With you here, I thought the same with "Quiet" and "Scarcity". It's not even about arrogance, more like time economy - I can move on and do other things, while those newly learnt principles stew away in the mind shed.
Re: Ways to Read More Books
#50For me, I started reading a lot more when I moved to New York and started taking the subway everywhere.
Public transit makes a good excuse to read, since I find it a rather difficult place to do "real" work, but there's also a lot of downtime.
Also, despite what this article says, I found that purchasing a Kindle really made reading a lot less of a chore.