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Just Read the Book Already

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Re: Just Read the Book Already

#111

Post by smogcutter »

bowlich wrote: post #64
emodendroket wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author's more concerned with fiction

Fiction has suffered the same bloat. Used to be that letting an author ramble for 200,000+ words was considered indulgent. Dune told it's entire story in around 180,000 words, I can hardly say anything more intriguing is going on in Song of Ice & Fire at 1.7 million words.

Come on, the Song of Ice & Fire books are particularly long, but you're still comparing an entire series with a single book. Dune is a series too, and I'll argue that the quality drops off much more sharply after the first one than ASoI&F does.

For what it's worth, in SF & Fantasy short fiction is still hanging in there:

http://clarkesworldmagazine.com http://dailysciencefiction.com http://www.analogsf.com

Re: Just Read the Book Already

#112

Post by jandrese »

emodendroket wrote: post #44
jandrese wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How much 19th-Century writing have you read, man?

I was more comparing to early 20th century works. There seemed to be a period where pages were expensive and authors more often felt the need to get to the point. Novels were considered long if they were more than an inch thick. The Lord of the Rings was considered epic length (it is dwarfed by a Song of Ice and Fire, especially if you count the unfinished works).

When you pick up a copy of Fahrenheit 451 one thing you notice is how thin it is. To Kill a Mockingbird is another example. There are plenty of others.

Now I wonder if that wasn't an indirect response to ponderous tomes like Moby Dick and War and Peace? Maybe the authors who grew up with those books realized that brevity was a virtue and learned to tamp back their natural urges to digress into long rambling and ultimately pointless interludes?

Re: Just Read the Book Already

#113

Post by SilasX »

bitwize wrote: post #110
rayiner wrote: post #21

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?

Long articles are fine but -- remember five-paragraph essays from grade/primary school? Good, because many online journalists seem to have forgotten them. The thing about the five-paragraph essay is its structure scales well to longer articles. You state your main idea up front, then spend a bit of time elaborating on that main idea, then you wrap up. Online articles are like -- they pick a source, say, a college pro…

I agree -- I wouldn't mind long articles as much if they got the main points upfront. But the New Yorkers of the world don't do that. They're obsessed with starting in media res with some anecdote that gives painstaking details about the subject's mannerisms or appearance or fashion sense.

When I want people to summarize links they post, it's not because I have a short attention span or categorically refuse to read them. It's because I want to know the broad sketches of what it's claiming so that I know whether I need the extra detail (sorry, "color") it provides vs. whether it's citing a study or argument I'm already familiar with (or is even a relevant point to make).

Re: Just Read the Book Already

#114

Post by SilasX »

tjr wrote: post #49
kornakiewicz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New trend?

I enjoyed long articles from the ye olde early days of the world wide web, when long articles were long because the author had a lot of interesting things to say. Now, too many articles are long just for the sake of being long. And often peppered with animated / video advertisements for products I do not want.

And giant floating headers, and autoplay, and making me look at it through blinds on mobile.

Re: Just Read the Book Already

#115

Post by dmd »

commandlinefan wrote: post #59
Bucephalus355 wrote: post #3

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…

> for all technical books, things like O’Reilly, No Starch, etc, I always buy physical Same here. I always feel odd when I'm reading a physical book at my desk, though, since I've never, ever, not even once in 25 years, seen anybody else actually reading a book - not even the ones who have a shelf full of them at their desks.

Where on earth do you work? Everyplace I've ever worked (over the last 15-20 years), people constantly close their doors and read.

Re: Just Read the Book Already

#116

Post by darioush »

dmd wrote: post #115
commandlinefan wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for all technical books, things like O’Reilly, No Starch, etc, I always buy physical Same here. I always feel odd when I'm reading a physical book at my desk, though, since I've never, ever, not even once in 25 years, seen anybody else actually reading a book - not even the ones who have a shelf full of them at their desks.

Where on earth do you work? Everyplace I've ever worked (over the last 15-20 years), people constantly close their doors and read.

Where do you work that has doors?

Re: Just Read the Book Already

#117

Post by dmd »

darioush wrote: post #116
dmd wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where on earth do you work? Everyplace I've ever worked (over the last 15-20 years), people constantly close their doors and read.

Where do you work that has doors?

I would never in a million years even consider working someplace that doesn't.

Re: Just Read the Book Already

#118

Post by ByThyGrace »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #63

I've gone from reading 10 books a year to reading 25+ books a year over the last few years. Mostly I've cut down on my screen time. I am on a computer all day for work but once I go home I try to spend as little time as possible on a computer. What do I do now? Come home, do yoga for 15-30 minutes, make tea, meditate for 10 minutes, read for 15 - 50 minutes. Then I'll allow myself to do other things that may occupy m…

Getting an e-ink reader is the reason I've had a similar boost in reading hours, also over the last few years.

The thing's fantastic. I don't even mind the low dpi, or the delayed responsiveness (it's not slower than turning a paper page). I bring it with me and read anywhere. It does not have the attention seeking alerts nor the eye-straining of a back-lighted smartphone.

There's under a dozen simultaneous books I'm reading at any given time, spanning both fiction and non-fiction, and have already put 1500+ hours on it (the device has nifty time tracking stats!). To me it's about the niftiest piece of consumer tech the industry has put out the past two decades.

Re: Just Read the Book Already

#119

Post by gassiss »

dantheman0207 wrote: post #106
ksdale wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A year or so ago, I decided I wanted to read all of the "best" books so I found a few lists of the best literature in English from the past few hundred years and read a few dozen of the books that showed up on most lists, and I realized that really well written books aren't nearly as low-bandwidth as a lot of more pulpy type books are. Obviously I didn't enjoy all of the books on the list, but even the ones I kind of…

N. N. Taleb always says you shouldn’t read any books that are less than 200 years old. If a book survives for 200 years it must have something genuinely valuable to say. I think this is good advice. I try to follow it for the most part, but obviously I don’t apply that to technical material. Still, I bet if you read Euclid instead of O’Reilly you’d end up a pretty good programmer.

I've read some of Taleb's books and while I find him very smart and with very valuable insights, I'd rather take some of these extreme things he says (like what you pointed) with a grain of salt.

Re: Just Read the Book Already

#120

Post by kashyapc »

Recently I began reading the glorious P.G. Wodehouse (his books with the inimitable Jeeves and other characters) as a breather from the non-fiction work I read. After a serious day with dry technical work, it's incredibly pleasant to read Wodehouse and retire into the night.

As the back cover of my current book, Thank You, Jeeves, says: "Wodehouse always lifts your spirits, no matter how high they happen to be already."

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