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Ask HN: Are books worth it?

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Re: Ask HN: Are books worth it?

#301

Post by octokatt »

bathMarm0t wrote: post #296

I am in love with books and the notion that you can talk with another person long dead without any distortion or distraction. Some rules I abide by: 1. Any book that you expect to read once and once only (popular science, pulp fiction, toilet-reading) rent from the library. Keep it by your bed at night and give-er by the lamplight. 2. Any book that you can read, word-over-word, end-on-end, without confusion or intros…

> There have been studies that your brain scans feeds and webpages differently than text on a page.

This +1. Practicing reading longform books helps your brain work on regulating and keeping a longer and longer attention span, which can be hugely helpful.

As experiments go, it might be worth swapping for a while, and seeing if you notice a change in attention and concentration. I notice when I stop reading books, I get a lot more impatient and I can't focus as well. (N=1, YMMV)

Re: Ask HN: Are books worth it?

#302

Post by schlagetown »

Certainly, the majority of books are not worth your time; the same is of course true of YouTube videos, podcasts, blog posts, or any media you may consume. But the best books do offer things you can't get elsewhere.

Crucially, reading book is not just about information intake! Really great books don't just teach you things, they open you up to new ways of thinking, expose new corners of the universe and of experience, stretch your mind, and so on.

If you're reading books filled with "fluff" — read better books! If a book bores you, find a different one! Reading a great book should be a joy.

It's true that most books don't age well — but the converse to this is that books that have been around for a long time and are still popular are usually well-known for good reasons; they've endured on their merits for far longer than any bestsellers of the decade.

Challenge: don't read any more self help books. Instead, read books on education, economics, science, technology, nature, history. Read epics, read science fiction, read poetry.

Do some research on the areas that most interest you, and take time to find the very best books you can find — based on Amazon/Goodreads reviews, suggestions from friends, best-of lists, whatever — and pick just a few to spend time with. And keep in mind it's always a better use of your time to read 10 really amazing books than 100 average ones; take your time and have fun :)

I recently took up a Twitter challenge to post 100 opinions about books and reading, and I wrote a lot about the concept of the "antilibrary" — basically, the value of knowing about books even if you don't necessarily read them, and getting good at curating your reading list. You may find some of this useful for how to think about reading:

https://twitter.com/schlagetown/status/1206268052498780160

A handful of these book thoughts that may be particularly relevant here:

1. Every curious person should be a serious reader. Ever serious reader should build an antilibrary.

(Essential vocab for this thread: your antilibrary = all the books you know about but have not read, designating a sort of potential energy for learning / knowledge / reading)

‪2. An antilibrary should exist in both physical form (books on your shelves; books browsed but unpurchased at your favorite bookstores) and virtual form (in digital lists; in tweets and reviews scanned; in your memory).‬

‪3. An antilibrary should have many levels: books you have an urgent desire to read, books you definitely want to read someday, books you find intriguing but may never read, books you've lost interest in entirely‬

‪Categorize not only by topic but by priority / importance / status‬

‪8. We should all be more aware of (& deliberately apply) the many different levels of reading that exist — the spectrum from close reading to skimming a book quickly for major themes / ideas.‬

‪Different books + different contexts demand different approaches for optimal reading.‬

‪17. There aren't that many truly great books you definitely need to read.‬

‪While there are infinitely more good books than you can ever read in a lifetime, you can probably get to a surprisingly high portion of those that are both excellent & a good match for you personally.‬

‪24. Building your "read really big books" muscle is helpful for practicing sustained attention & deep engagement. Living with a text for months on end, whether a particular story or set of ideas, creates a special type of relationship!‬

45. You should have a "non-reading practice" — being intentional about not-reading certain books (just as some authors should not-write certain books!)

Abandon more books. Browse many; read few. Choose to engage w/ books & their ideas outside the text itself.

52. Best books I've read in the last year: Underland—Robert Macfarlane How to Do Nothing—Jenny Odell Go Ahead in the Rain—Hanif Abdurraqib Daemon Voices—Philip Pullman Carceral Capitalism—Jackie Wang So Many Books—Gabriel Zaid The Collected Schizophrenias—Esmé Weijun Wang

53. Best books I've read in the last 10 years: The Moonstone—Wilkie Collins Moby Dick—Melville Infinite Jest—DFW Pilgrim at Tinker Creek—Dillard Impro—Johnstone Time and the Art of Living—Grudin Le Ton beau de Marot—Hofstadter Death and Life of Great American Cities—Jacobs

72. There are many books we should know about for reasons other than the story or info (etc.) of the text itself.

Reasons like: important cultural context, influence on future books, significance to people you love… Such books are prime candidates for antilibrary inclusion!

Re: Ask HN: Are books worth it?

#303

Post by carapace »

enterabdazer wrote: post #292
carapace wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the missing piece is that this guy only publishes self-help books. If you omit them from your search for knowledge you might miss it entirely. (E.g. the wikipedia entry for this school of psychology is all about how it's a pseudoscience, etc.)

Jungian, by chance? Much of psychology (at least in the non-behaviorist arena) and self-help deal with ideas that are really grounded in philosophy proper. Philosophy is the original psychology and the original self-help. Philosophy is no luxury. It saves lives. It's a deep failure of culture that it isn't a core area of primary and secondary curriculum.

> Jungian, by chance?

Nah, Neurolinguistic Programming. The "guy" is Dr. Bandler.

> Much of psychology (at least in the non-behaviorist arena) and self-help deal with ideas that are really grounded in philosophy proper. Philosophy is the original psychology and the original self-help.

FWIW the origins of NLP are grounded in Chomsky's Transformational Grammar. That's not philosophy, of course, but it's something. (Computer language hierarchy stems from the same linguistic modeling.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformational_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy

> Philosophy is no luxury. It saves lives. It's a deep failure of culture that it isn't a core area of primary and secondary curriculum.

Oh I agree wholeheartedly!

I meant it's a luxury only in the sense that "Even God hesitates to offer anything but bread to the starving man."

Even then I don't deny that many a book of philosophy has seen more than one person safely through their long dark tea-time of the soul.

Re: Ask HN: Are books worth it?

#304

Post by brewdad »

johnchristopher wrote: post #261
carapace wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out my answers to the other sibling comments. Would you settle for quit smoking by a self-help book? ;-D Here's something that blew me away... My sister just quit smoking. From ten cigarettes a day to zero. We (her family and friends) are all so overjoyed. How did she do it? https://www.allencarr.com/ She read that book. That's all. When she was done, she was no longer smoking. Within a few days her sense of sm…

I had a friend who also read that book. I don't know if he picked up smoking again but I remember him telling that the book basically hammers it into you that smoking is bad for 150 pages and that you just have to give up smoking because it's so annoying to read about how bad it is.

Isn't that most self-help books? State your core idea in the first 5 pages, then fill the next 150+ pages with restatements of the same idea in slightly different ways.

Re: Ask HN: Are books worth it?

#307

Post by hola_mundo »

Books from major publishers typically undergo a merciless editing process that can take something pretty good and make it exceptionally clear, memorable, and entertaining.

This rarely happens for online content, which I suspect is one reason I retain so little of what I've read online: it just wasn't that great.

Echoing a couple of others: pick up whatever book looks fun or entertaining to you. No judgement.

Developing a habit of reading books should be the real goal.

The "best" book is whichever one you'll actually read.

Re: Ask HN: Are books worth it?

#308

Post by base698 »

exegete wrote: post #120
habosa wrote: post #87

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?

Got quite a few from here: http://worrydream.com/#!/Links

It's the book list from the guy who brought you "Inventing on Principal".

Re: Ask HN: Are books worth it?

#309

Post by base698 »

growlist wrote: post #93
tarboreus wrote: post #71

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…

> Thinking Fast and Slow I thought a fair amount of this book was debunked in one way or another?

What was debunked? As a primarily "system 1" thinker the book reasonated with me in a profound way. It explained why if I know or Intuit a solution, say in an interview it comes out of me boundlessly like lightning, where if I have to work through a solution I struggle. I have to work back wards from my intuitive answer to explain it.

Re: Ask HN: Are books worth it?

#310

Post by brightball »

I was a developer for about 5 years before I looked in a book for an answer on how to do something in a language I’d been using for years. Then I saw something else I didn’t know. And something else.

Ended up reading the whole thing and now, whenever I want to really learn a new topic or language I always go to a book for depth and understanding.

As a side effect, as I’ve gotten older I’ve found that history books are fascinating in the same way. Most people have very little understanding of the context around the history they know. It’s truly more interesting reading history than fiction in my opinion.

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