I've been reading a lot ever since I learned how to do it. While I do read a lot of stuff online,most of the stuff out there is just low quality crap. Yes, there's some brilliant stuff too,but it's probably 0.001% of the overall. For instance,I recently started reading a pretty heavy book( 800+ pages). It is well written, factually correct, the author doesn't assume I'll just google some other 20 tutorials to make his work and the depth of knowledge is outstanding. No blog would ever match it. Yes,I can get all the info that is in the book on the internet,the time commitment just googling, verifying and understanding would exceed the time itdi take to read 5 books of similar size.
Ask HN: Are books worth it?
161–170 of 407 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are books worth it?
#162A related question is whether you should read “electronic books” (e.g. E-readers) vs. physical books. I’m part of the bridge generation that grew up with only physical books but then everything went digital, and I find that so far, I can’t replace the act of physically reading a book with the digital equivalent, it just doesn’t feel the same.
Are there people here who only use e-readers and prefer that for functional reasons, above and beyond the efficiency aspect of less trees, less weight, etc.?
And are there any suggestions of decent e-readers that aren’t made by Amazon?
Re: Ask HN: Are books worth it?
#163A lot of people have already told you that reading slowly just means you don't have enough practice.
Also consider this: you watch a video or listen to a podcast on some subject. If the speaker is a good actor, you are more likely to believe them even if everything they say is bullshit.
Reading (well, after you actually get used to reading) is less of an assault on your sensory inputs so you're more likely to be able to form your own opinion about the subject.
Edit: also try reading fiction as entertainment. A lot of it is much better than the current Hollywood drivel.
Re: Ask HN: Are books worth it?
#164Often the point of a non-fiction book is to spend hours thinking deeply about the book's subject. You could probably get the major ideas in the length of a short blog post. But that's spending 10 minutes thinking about the topic as opposed to 2-3 hours. You can think of it as the difference between reading about a subject online and having a long conversation about that subject with friends. For me personally, the le…
Definitely. Few years ago I subscribed to this service called "Blinkist" which summarizes whole books into several pages.
But soon enough I understood it's pointless. I got superficial understanding of the books from the summary, but I forgot it just as quickly. If you want to extract value from a book, you must give it time, you must think about it, go deep, try different associations etc.
Re: Ask HN: Are books worth it?
#165Books 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…
Thinking Fast and Slow came out in 2011. Also there is recent work showing that some of its conclusions may be flawed due to failure to replicate. Self help books are not all bad. The early ones around cognitive behavioral therapy have been proven to help in scientific studies. I would look to ones that have scientific basis. That being said the placebo effect is very powerful.
Any recommendation for the early CBT books you mentioned?
Re: Ask HN: Are books worth it?
#166Way too many generalizations on the medium, socioeconomic attainment, quality, etc.
Yes, many books have high-quality information that is not digitized and not accessible without reading them. This is true for older books and newer books.
It is more true in fields like finance, tax, legal and hyper local historical accounts.
It is also true in the software field as well. For example, a programming book by one author can still expose you to elegant efficient techniques that would never be found on someone's blog or on sites like stackoverflow where the community consensus masquerades as better.
In finance and economics there are financial products and circumstances in older books that you might not have heard of, which can become advantageous in upcoming "new" market condition that now only you recognize.
In tax, you no longer have to be one of the citizens angry that wealthy people have accountants to perceive obscure advantages, because you can already perceive them.
Sometimes the exposure to concepts in books can make your internet searches more specific so that you find where these daily conversations occur, or new communities where people take the knowledge to new modern levels. Compared to being in the same communities you are now and assuming you aren't missing anything.
Re: Ask HN: Are books worth it?
#167The few self help and TED-style books I read (or started to read) were utter shite and might as well be summarised in a tweet.
The moment I really enjoyed reading was when I dropped the idea of absorbing as much information as possible. Being comfortable with reading something that does not immediately return some value.
What reading can uniquely offer is a conversation with a very clever mind who might be dead for a hundred years. You can stop, pause think. Reread that section. Put it in current context and see what you make of it. Take a break, walk around, watch the birds and come back.
You might even find that a 10 verse poem about a blue butterfly carries more weight than any recent self-help book.
Re: Ask HN: Are books worth it?
#168> 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 ha…
>Honestly, you're lucky if the only personal problems you have can be solved by philosophy, literature, history and science.
most problems in your life can't be solved by reading a book, period. Self-help or otherwise. The first lie of self-help books is that they're actually 'helping' you in any meaningful sense of the word.
Digging yourself out of bad situations takes time and there is very little magic involved, and sometimes it's not possible at all. What philosophy or literature or history or science can however provide for anyone, is to understand the world a little bit better, which even if it doesn't solve your personal problems still gives you some perspective and solace.
If you're reading philosophy or literature, or just pulpy fiction at least you're reading for reading itself instead of just buying into some racket of "i'll spend ten minutes of reading self-help books and then I'll have 20% more energy and make a thousand dollars!"
And not to doubt your personal story but actual clinical depression is typically not solved by one off hypnotherapy sessions with self-help gurus.
Re: Ask HN: Are books worth it?
#169Yes. 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?
It depends on my goals.If I just want to learn something,I do a little bit research on the subject and what could be good books on it and tgen head to Amazon or local book store for it. If haven't got a concrete goal and just want to explore some random topics,I again hit Amazon and browse random categories,read some literature reviews by critics in newspapers and etc. Also,reading feeds reading. For instance,I was reading some comments on Financial Times and saw someone making a fairly reasonable argument about queuing theory.Not being familiar with it,I googled it, found some very interesting courses and books. Will do a bit of exploration of this topic in near future.
Re: Ask HN: Are books worth it?
#170Yes. 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?
One particular source for me has been the reading lists of great writers and thinkers (Eg: Tolstoy[0], Gandhi[1] and many more kept extensive reading lists). Generally I think it is a good idea to delve into classics because time is a good judge.
[0] https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/30/leo-tolstoy-reading...
[1] http://www.gandhi-manibhavan.org/eduresources/bks_read_by_g....