41–50 of 200 posts
Short plug: your local library has thousands of books, all free to borrow. Many libraries let you listen to unlimited free audiobooks using the Libby app (honestly a life-changer for me).
For fiction I read e-books. However for all technical books, things like O’Reilly, No Starch, etc, I always buy physical. The decision to do that has very much 10x my learning. Even when it comes to long documentation (MySQL is an astounding 5,000+ pages) I’ll usually print out portions to cover if it’s reasonable. I don’t know why this has increased my learning so much. The best I can come up with is that memory is…
Nothing too revelatory here, but I can certainly agree with the ideas presented. So many of us are used to a constant, reliable dopamine drip while reading things on the internet that larger texts bore us. The conclusion at the end of the piece is right, though--it just takes willpower. Choosing delayed gratification in the form of good, rich, long-form writing is a lot like choosing a balanced diet. The benefits of…
I find the new trend of long form articles infuriating. Just get to the point, without all the rigamarole! Is there an actual benefit? Or is it just something people say?
Try paying for something that's behind a hard paywall and you'll see shorter articles.
> The narrative action struck her as intolerably slow. > She had, she concluded, “changed in ways I would never have predicted. I now read on the surface and very quickly; in fact, I read too fast to comprehend deeper levels Here she lays the blame solely on her, but I would think that it's also a writer's skill to hook the reader. It takes two to tango, and if she felt the narrative was so slow she started to skim t…
Editors have gotten indulgent IMHO, especially if the author is famous. For example, I'm sure George R. R. Martin is really interested in medieval royal feasts, but readers tend to get bored with yet another page filled with food items after the 20th time.
> The narrative action struck her as intolerably slow. > She had, she concluded, “changed in ways I would never have predicted. I now read on the surface and very quickly; in fact, I read too fast to comprehend deeper levels Here she lays the blame solely on her, but I would think that it's also a writer's skill to hook the reader. It takes two to tango, and if she felt the narrative was so slow she started to skim t…
“Readers” are so judgey. There is nothing wrong with reading the wikipedia summary of books instead of the whole thing. I read “Fellowship of the Ring” in middle school. Took forever! Put me off the whole enterprise.
A lot of non-fiction books have a lot of filler. No need to read 300 pages when a wiki articles or PDF gives you important points
As a reader, I find I have to slowly re-introduce deep reading -- even if I've just been away for a week or two. I usually do this by getting a physical book and a physical distraction device, usually my phone. I go to a place where there's nothing else in the room.
Then I read as much as I can until I feel "bothered" (beats me what the correct adjective is here. "Bored"?) At that point I pick up the distraction device and poke around: Twitter, Facebook, HN, and so on. I make an effort to put it down. Eventually I succeed, then back to reading.
Over a period of many cycles, my reading time gets up to close to an hour long. But it's a struggle.
I don't think I could do it with an e-book reader. In those things, they put the distraction stuff just a click away. Hell, they'll sell you more distraction stuff you can play the millisecond you get bored with the text.
What I'd like to know is whether I'm some weird outlier or whether many other readers are going through this same process.
As a book writer, I tried as hard as possible to plug into a feedback loop with my readers. I ran beta groups, I emailed extensively to find out what worked and what didn't. All of the communication, as far as I could tell, collapsed into some version of "Make it take five minutes so I can go consume more material" Hey, I'm with you, but some things can't be covered in five minutes. Some things require a narrative and background for you to make sense of it, dear reader. What to do then?
(Add: Had one beta reader assure me that he already understood all the stuff around the first third of the book and I was wasting his time. So I jumped him directly to the second third. He was completely lost. I thought about cross-indexing the book to show how each part was used later, but what the heck would that accomplish, aside from reassuring myself that the text was needed? It is a frustrating problem from both sides.)
1. Shameless book plug: https://leanpub.com/info-ops
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find the new trend of long form articles infuriating. Just get to the point, without all the rigamarole! Is there an actual benefit? Or is it just something people say?
New trend?
So I started reading paper books again. The context switch into paper is relatively expensive, so I'd stay there, not cutting over to the internet. I started reading serious material again. From there, my spouse gave me her unused Kindle Paperwhite (she reads a ton on her iPad, so she doesn't use the Paperwhite), and I found the Paperwhite gave me most of the Kindle advantages without the multipurpose device disadvantages.
Next, I cut back seriously on my social media. I went cold turkey on Facebook for a bit (and on Twitter shortly after), and I consciously avoid bad FB habits. Nonetheless, it's an addiction machine, and when I do use it again, I realize that cold turkey is probably better.
Without social media apps on my phone, I find myself with a Kindle app instead. Much better!
When I was 20 or so and reading very heavily (I had a job that gave me four hours of sitting time in half hour chunks, so I read a lot), I started a self-control process of reading one fiction and one non-fiction book simultaneously - at that time, to make sure I read plenty of non-fiction. Now, I have to make myself read fiction instead. I seem to have settled that divide by reading fiction on my phone, and non-fiction on my Kindle.
Audiobooks and podcasts have been a change for me, too. I started with a serious audiobook on a road trip (The Order of Time, by Carlo Rovelli). From there, I blew through all 120 episodes of the Philosophize This! podcast. A new job has me on an ugly commute for the first time in years, so I'm filling that time in the car with Hardcore History (the monstrous six hour Celtic Holocaust episode about the Roman invasion of Gaul), and foreign language vocabulary study (Spanish).
Having a proper reading habit of an hour or two a day on average has me back to reading heavy things. I've read a lot of history this year, and I'm currently back to reading philosophy (Simone de Beauvoir and Herbert Marcuse). Plus, I'm managing to dig through a backlog of software industry books, mostly DevOps things I'd missed out on before.
It's so much better than social media.