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What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

washingtonpost.com

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Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#51

Post by raindropm »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #45
raindropm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why many of us go to HN comments first instead of reading the actual article. Now I'm a bit ashamed haha. Anyway, I've read her book, and have to admit that I skim quite a bit. Her writing style is deep and informative, but with a lot of literary allusions. I found my knowledge and life experience is still inadequate to understand everything she wrote. Overall an interesting read though!

I was going to highlight the same exact sentence, and then realized you did it too. Funny, no?

You mean half of HN reader? :p

Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#52

Post by sp332 »

Aeolun wrote: post #48

It sounds a bit silly to assume that reading a hundred reddit posts a day would interfere with my reading of a good novel. I haven’t encountered anuthing even close to it, but I guess it might be different for others?

It's hard for me to switch between skimming and reading intently. If I've been browsing news aggregator sites, I have to consciously slow down and stop skipping around when I sit down to read a book. Personally it's not as hard as what Wolf describes.

Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#53

Post by bootsz »

Aeolun wrote: post #48

It sounds a bit silly to assume that reading a hundred reddit posts a day would interfere with my reading of a good novel. I haven’t encountered anuthing even close to it, but I guess it might be different for others?

I've definitely noticed it myself. I have a much harder time reading novels or any long-form content these days, and I suspect it's due to consuming lots of very-short-form content on a daily basis. On HN and elsewhere on the internet you can consume a huge number of distinct ideas in a very short time. This causes me to now be impatient with long-form pieces where I find myself wanting to just "get to the point already". It's a quantity vs. quality problem. The internet tends to favor quantity.

It's something I'm trying to work on because there's obviously immense value in books and long-form reads (and a lot you get out of them that you can't get out of little snippets and quick articles).

Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#55

Post by beat »

Aeolun wrote: post #48

It sounds a bit silly to assume that reading a hundred reddit posts a day would interfere with my reading of a good novel. I haven’t encountered anuthing even close to it, but I guess it might be different for others?

In my experience, it's very real. Years of social media pushed me out of the habit of reading real books. Two problems - first, social media started filling the time I might spend knocking off a chapter in a book. Second, it got me used to the fortune-cookie size of writing, making it hard to switch gears to reading big ideas developed over many pages.

Earlier this year, I quit my core social media (FB, Twitter), and focused on reading real books, which was wonderful. I got in the habit of putting books that could be read in small doses on my phone's Kindle app for small breaks like walking or bathroom breaks.

Then I let myself have FB and Twitter on the phone again, because I "needed" them for something or other, and I was right back to the Likes addiction and wasting time. Then one day I realized I hadn't read a book all day, I was just checking FB. So the apps are removed from the phone again.

But yeah, reading books - especially difficult books - is such a different experience from social media, that reading social media actively interferes with at least my own ability to read them. Then again, I have a taste for pretty heavy books.

Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#56

Post by dpark »

> “My grafted, spasmodic, online style, while appropriate for much of my day’s ordinary reading, had been transferred indiscriminately to all of my reading, rending my former immersion in more difficult texts less and less satisfying,” she writes. Wolf soon tried again, forcing herself to start with 20-minute intervals, and managed to recover her “former reading self.”

Translation: I stopped reading novels and then found it difficult to start again.

The problem isn’t the fluff we read online. The problem is that when you go long periods without reading novels, it’s harder to pick up a novel and enjoy it. Reading fluff online doesn’t make you stop reading novels, though, any more than watching TV makes you stop reading novels. It’s entirely possible to do both, with the caveat that everyone’s time is limited. But there’s nothing about browsing online that intrinsically makes it hard to read novels.

Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#57

Post by beat »

jasode wrote: post #23

First off, I haven't studied Maryanne Wolf's neuroscientific research on "deep reading" and its claimed benefits. But, as a person who has read most of the major thick books like Moby Dick, War & Peace, Les Miserables, Middlemarch, Proust, and reading cover-to-cover the old computer books like the 3-ring binders of C Language[1], my lifetime reading experience could offer counterpoint to why "deep reading" seems to b…

fwiw, one thing I've learned is to just ditch books early if they aren't rewarding. Someone's rule of thumb is to give a book 50 pages to engage you. Yeah, you may miss out on some good stuff, but every minute you spend reading something is a minute you spend not reading something else that may be better. We'll never, ever, ever run out of good things to read.

Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#58

Post by checkyoursudo »

dpark wrote: post #56

> “My grafted, spasmodic, online style, while appropriate for much of my day’s ordinary reading, had been transferred indiscriminately to all of my reading, rending my former immersion in more difficult texts less and less satisfying,” she writes. Wolf soon tried again, forcing herself to start with 20-minute intervals, and managed to recover her “former reading self.” Translation: I stopped reading novels and then f…

Now I went to law school more than 15 years ago, so the web was a little different then than today. However, I went three years without reading a single novel or any other significant piece of non-legal anything, for fun or not, for that whole three years. So it wasn't the web keeping me away from reading.

As soon as I was done, I read Les Miserables, then Player of Games by Ian Banks, then few (2-3) other sci fi novels that I don't specifically remember, and then a bunch of random stuff.

I loved it all. I will grant that this is possibly because I had been denying myself that pleasure in order to focus on the grueling pursuit of law school, and that I had wanted to be reading novels the whole time.

I am not convinced that the problem is only going long periods of time without. I have done that. My wife did the same when she went to law school. Maybe that's part of it, but I would guess that training your brain on fluff for that period of time is not an insignificant part of it.

Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#59

Post by distances »

bootsz wrote: post #53
Aeolun wrote: post #48

It sounds a bit silly to assume that reading a hundred reddit posts a day would interfere with my reading of a good novel. I haven’t encountered anuthing even close to it, but I guess it might be different for others?

I've definitely noticed it myself. I have a much harder time reading novels or any long-form content these days, and I suspect it's due to consuming lots of very-short-form content on a daily basis. On HN and elsewhere on the internet you can consume a huge number of distinct ideas in a very short time. This causes me to now be impatient with long-form pieces where I find myself wanting to just "get to the point alre…

Definitely this. I'm currently carrying a book (as always), and still here I am reading HN. I've long observed this happening, but the novel reading habit is surprisingly hard to re-establish.

Re: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

#60

Post by AlwaysRock »

dpark wrote: post #56

> “My grafted, spasmodic, online style, while appropriate for much of my day’s ordinary reading, had been transferred indiscriminately to all of my reading, rending my former immersion in more difficult texts less and less satisfying,” she writes. Wolf soon tried again, forcing herself to start with 20-minute intervals, and managed to recover her “former reading self.” Translation: I stopped reading novels and then f…

This. I consume books endlessly and almost always have... Unless I stop. A few times in my life I've started reading a book and when it didnt hold my interest I stopped picking it up. 3 months to a year later I would come across an interesting book and then it was back to constantly reading.

To help avoid this situation I've made it part of my morning routine to read for 15 minutes every morning (keeps the world/story alive in my head) and if I don't pick up a book for 7 days I move on to another book.

Using this method I'm at 27 books for the year and I've moved on from 2.

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