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The Case Against Reading Everything

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Re: The Case Against Reading Everything

#41

Post by nitrogen »

todd8 wrote: post #21

I've read a great deal for the last 50 years, but I feel that this gives me little time for fiction. Every time I pick up a fictional work, I know that I'm going to be forgoing hours of reading or thinking about other things. I feel that I have limited time for fiction. Sadly, this causes me to miss out on the joy of reading good fiction. It's easy to speed read technical material, especially with the benefit of 50 y…

You might enjoy Anathem by Neal Stephenson. It has some hard sci-fi elements inspired by mathematics (orbital mechanics, phase space). Also books by Greg Egan such as Schild's Ladder (graph theory).

Re: The Case Against Reading Everything

#43

Post by psyklic »

jonnathanson wrote: post #11
jasode wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You also realize there is no trade off between depth and breadth. It's a false dichotomy. It's a tradeoff because of the finite time for reading. One can reread Shakespeare's 4 tragedies (Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Macbeth) again for the 10th time (about 8 hours of reading) -- or -- read E.L. James "50 Shades of Grey" for the 1st time (also about ~8 hours of reading). Some writers may suggest that you read E.L. Jam…

No, I'm not literally suggesting people have infinite time on their hands. Rather, what I'm suggesting is that time compresses when you're reading for pleasure. When you reach a certain "level," shall we say, you read so naturally and so widely and so frequently that it is truly astonishing how much you can read in a day. Then again, I'll continue to caveat all of this by saying that my subjective experience seems in…

It's the same with computer science, or any other field. The best, most motivated people will naturally have breadth and depth due to their own voracious curiosity, without thinking about the distinction at all.

Re: The Case Against Reading Everything

#44

Post by vonnik »

vonnik wrote: post #30

The author is being provocative in order to be noticed, and his strategy worked. He could have articulated the same point in another way. Everyday every reader faces a choice between exploration and exploitation, between reading someone new and strange, or something more written by someone he knows. Both are necessary. If you don't explore, you'll never find the writers you truly love. If you don't exploit, you will…

And to follow up, obsession can lead to further discovery. If you love an author, you can read every author they loved. Or if you're obsessed with a topic, like Japanese imperialism or Victorian naturalists, that combines exploitation and exploration.

Re: The Case Against Reading Everything

#45

Post by ellius »

folksinger wrote: post #24
ellius wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think maybe the only way to be a good artist though is to explore the things that resonate with you. If rap-funk-metal-folk-electro-bluegrass speaks to your soul, and creating that music fulfills you, then who’s to say exploring those genres is a mistake? There are other measures of success than recognition. Austin Kleon puts this especially well in “Steal Like An Artist.” He says that you can cut off some of your…

Neither of us want me to write an essay about Wittgenstein's notion of "meaning through social interactions" and how this applies to artistic value, but I'll summarize it thus: art needs an audience. Now, given the vast population of the world, I'm sure there are a few people out there who are into bluegrass-rap fusion, but your friends, family and neighbors are probably not going to get much out of it. So who do you…

I think ultimately we’re going to go back and forth about an unanswerable question: what fulfills people? You can’t answer it for anyone else. One artist will need the audience as a foil; another will be perfectly happy to toil away in obscurity. To my mind the best advice is “try a lot of things and see what feels right to you; don’t be dogmatic about your approach until you have a very high level of confidence based on experience.” Beyond that I’m just not sure this is a question with a meaningful answer.

Re: The Case Against Reading Everything

#46

Post by brett40324 »

guywaffle wrote: post #42

Hmm take advice from the greatest author of the last thousand years, Stephen King, or someone who has three books I’ve never heard of?

Not sure why you're down voted, but it's probably for the lack of further description on why not to take the latter author's advice.

Anyhow, i agree with following Steven King as someone to look into for inspiration and advice on writing. The only reason i'm making this comment is because i want to mention something i once read about King that has always stuck with me. That being, that when he ends the last page of a novel, he then writes the first page of his next work right away to avoid ever having a time without some work in progress.

Re: The Case Against Reading Everything

#47

Post by hateduser2 »

todd8 wrote: post #21

I've read a great deal for the last 50 years, but I feel that this gives me little time for fiction. Every time I pick up a fictional work, I know that I'm going to be forgoing hours of reading or thinking about other things. I feel that I have limited time for fiction. Sadly, this causes me to miss out on the joy of reading good fiction. It's easy to speed read technical material, especially with the benefit of 50 y…

Probably there is not a way to accept death. Humans forever fight against death. Probably death truly should be scary and offputting, and it’s inevitability drives us to do crazy things like believe it’s ok. We probably should fight death with all the strength we have. It’s one of our evolutionary imperatives!

Re: The Case Against Reading Everything

#48

Post by uoaei »

hateduser2 wrote: post #47
todd8 wrote: post #21

I've read a great deal for the last 50 years, but I feel that this gives me little time for fiction. Every time I pick up a fictional work, I know that I'm going to be forgoing hours of reading or thinking about other things. I feel that I have limited time for fiction. Sadly, this causes me to miss out on the joy of reading good fiction. It's easy to speed read technical material, especially with the benefit of 50 y…

Probably there is not a way to accept death. Humans forever fight against death. Probably death truly should be scary and offputting, and it’s inevitability drives us to do crazy things like believe it’s ok. We probably should fight death with all the strength we have. It’s one of our evolutionary imperatives!

Of all the reasons to delay death, an argument on grounds of an "evolutionary imperative" has got to be the weakest.

The value of life is not in its quantity alone, but in $\int_{birth}^{death} quality \: dt$. If life is extended without due diligence to improving quality of life for humans and indeed all sentient beings, we are ultimately doing a disservice to our fellow humans.

Re: The Case Against Reading Everything

#49

Post by [deleted] »

egypturnash wrote: post #36

My experience as an artist AND a writer (I make comics, it involves both) is that cribbing from one person is plagarism, while cribbing from eight people in the course of a single drawing/paragraph is a Bold, Original Style. Reading widely has exposed me to new ideas, some of which became favorites. It's also exposed me to a lot of bad writing, which is helpful in building that inner sense that says "this sentence is…

[deleted]

Re: The Case Against Reading Everything

#50

Post by AlexCoventry »

nitrogen wrote: post #41
todd8 wrote: post #21

I've read a great deal for the last 50 years, but I feel that this gives me little time for fiction. Every time I pick up a fictional work, I know that I'm going to be forgoing hours of reading or thinking about other things. I feel that I have limited time for fiction. Sadly, this causes me to miss out on the joy of reading good fiction. It's easy to speed read technical material, especially with the benefit of 50 y…

You might enjoy Anathem by Neal Stephenson. It has some hard sci-fi elements inspired by mathematics (orbital mechanics, phase space). Also books by Greg Egan such as Schild's Ladder (graph theory).

I don't think you can learn much from Anathem. Greg Egan's Clockwork Trilogy, though, is a very unique and illuminating perspective on Relativity: "What if we lived in a universe where the space-time metric was Riemannian?"
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