Online content is often low-quality, highly commercial in nature and very ephemeral. Books, the real kind, when they are good can stay with you for a very long time. A well-written story, be it fiction or non-fiction can have a long lastig impact and even an emotional connection that I have personally never experienced with anything 'online'. If you don't read books, you are missing out. Even only 1 or 2 books a year…
I would like to add something: Some books are written to get sold too. Some books in self-help and business fall into this category, most of them lose money, but a few make it out. Sometimes publishers publish trash when they know it, just because it's a book doesn't mean it's a good one.
From my perspective, reading a book has a different quality. In general, you spend more time on a subject and the content is often a bit deeper than online articles.
On the other hand, if you want to learn some skill, you need to practice it and for programming, it is a lot easier to practice it while you sit in front of a computer ;-)
So asking if books are worth it, is like asking if the internet is worth it. There are good pages and bad ones and similarly, there are incredible books and boring ones.
> I have thousands of non-fiction (mostly self-improvement) books in my reading list “An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its ‘self-help’ section: ‘For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.’” — Roger Ebert ( https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/larger-than-life-1996 )
The people in the self-help section need something else. Those things (philosophy, literature, history and science) are the luxury of folks who aren't struggling with e.g. depression, abuse, drugs & alcohol, co-dependency, etc.
It's a little like, "Have you tried not having a broken leg?"
Honestly, you're lucky if the only personal problems you have can be solved by philosophy, literature, history and science.
(I had crippling depression for many years and was cured in a single session of hypnotherapy by a guy who publishes "self-help" books, so, while YMMV, I'm a lil defensive. I'm sure he meant well.)
Definitely. I'm currently reading The Reading Life, a collection of C.S. Lewis' musings on reading, and I couldn't recommend a better set of arguments for the value of books in general (though it does have a humanities flavor).
As others have noted, the stuff you find online usually isn't nearly as deep or interesting as what you'll get out of sticking with a good book, nor is the reading experience the same. For historical reasons, the way we consume text on a computer is rather sporadic. The internet, generally speaking, is a giant distraction machine; it's not meant for deep reading. Maybe one day it can be, but not today. Of course, your mileage may vary.
Books shouldn't be about absorbing "information." Think of them as intellectual obstacle courses. A good book should challenge you, either with radically new ideas or radically new viewpoints. I basically can't do serious thinking (i.e. not administrative or programming thinking but broader thinking about ideas) without reading. On the other hand, you're not going to get this experience from "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" or w…
Yes. I have always loved books. I read about 30-40 a year, mostly fiction with a few non-fiction thrown in. Novels are the closest thing I know to a form of magic. A good author can completely encode an entire world full of people on 300 pages of black and white text. And when they do it well, it literally never expires. I read mostly books from the last 50 years but I think the best example of a book as magic is Don…
How do you decide which books to read?
When I was a kid I was an obsessive reader, and a teacher basically forbid me from reading anything not from the Classic section of the high school library. Before elementary ended, I'd finished reading all the books they had in their Classics. (Understanding them at that age is a whole separate issue, BTW.) But my point being, the Classics are considered "a classic" for very serious reasons, and unless you really cannot get into a writer's voice after effort, each and every "Classic" is worth reading in a major way. I suggest starting with the Nobel Literature winners.
Reading ability don't stop at the level where everybody agrees that you can read. You can develop it much more. If you read very little and read short pieces in the internet, you may never develop it full.
First you should practice it with something relatively easy before you dwell into classics and must read. Read a lot whatever you want, quality does not matter.
For me, I maxed out all the Sci-Fi movies and TV shows out there and wanted more and discovered early on that Sci-Fi books are 1000 times better than whats out there in movie land. My problem is I have a hard time keeping track of where I am in all the book series I've been reading as new books sometimes take a year or more to come out depending on the authors. Here's a couple resources I recommend... https://www.red…
Yup, if you like scifi/fantasy movies consider that there are at most 2 or 3 that raise to the level of a mediocre sci fi book, and even those are book adaptations.
Yes, books are worth it, physical books especially.
1. The automated information control that occurs online today, means that things are there one day, gone the next. This happens accross the information continuum.
2. The Pareto principle: 20% of things provide 80% of the value. Online, where new content can be created for nearly free, good information about anything can be hard to find, drowned in a sea of advertisement and distraction. In a physical bookstore or library, the cost of printing and stocking means that only things that are worth printing, are kept around.
3. Inheritance of relevancy: I enjoy getting my books from the used bookstores, because time after time I pick up some volume on history that someone has written incredible things in the margins! Of course, we have comment sections and such online, but the Pareto principle applies again here.
4. Impression and discernment of value: You can tell just from looking at the design of a book, what the intended audience is. If the authors name is bigger than the title, for example, that tells you a whole lot. If like me, you look for more uncommon, less known things, you learn to disregard anything with flashy marketing or a bestseller claim. Head straight for the plain and boring: the value is what gets it sold, whats written inside.
5. Obscure, out-of-print, actually supressed and allegedly supressed works. This goes hand in hand with number 1: Its much harder to round up 10,000 copies of a book, than to add the metadata to an automatic blacklist. Everything from textbooks, to historical autobiographies, to contemporary primary source reporting: the beast devours it all. Put it on your shelf, then it cannot be deleted.