Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you suggest some books
_12 Rules for Life_ by Jordan Peterson is quite eye opening, he has an insightful view on many things.
Or alternatively: https://medium.com/@magicsebi/12-books-you-should-read-inste...
Ask HN: Are books worth it?
341–350 of 407 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are books worth it?
#342As a lot of other people are saying, yes, books are worth it.
I'm 19 right now, so I grew up reading paper books and interacting a lot with the internet and video games. Around when I turned 15 I pretty much stopped reading altogether. I was (and still am) very into CSGO and kind of just dropped reading literature for playing CS with my friends. While that was/is fun, dropping literature as a pastime left a hole in me that couldn't be filled by any video game, podcast, blog post, or even eBook. I only got back into reading fiction because my best friend here at uni was talking about how much she loved Agatha Christie, and I happened to have a compendium of 5 Hercule Poirot books that had been sitting on my bookshelf (and taken with me when I moved) for about 4 years. Now I can't stop reading (again).
Reading books (for me, fiction; for others, non-fiction) widens your understanding of the world around you, the perspectives of those around you, and most importantly your own imagination. Reading literature helps me creatively solve problems and come up with inspired ideas that would've been very difficult for me to come up with otherwise. It is something I would be incomplete without.
P.S. For me paper books are 100% superior to ebooks. The feel of holding, seeing, and smelling a paper book, especially an old paper book, is so comforting and impossible to replicate with an ebook. Though, to their credit, ebooks are nice if you read relatively quickly and want to read while on the road.
Re: Ask HN: Are books worth it?
#343It's pretty much the opposite. Stuff online, usually done for free, is usually vapid trash with facts often wrong because there's not enough money to do it right.
In contrast content from books is usually extensively researched and a wealth of valuable knowledge.
Also worth noting that the internet is a relatively new thing, so if you find yourself fascinated by a topic from the 70s or earlier you'll probably be much better off walking to your local library.
Re: Ask HN: Are books worth it?
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your last sentence is distasteful on so many levels. If you think a person is lying or can't be trusted to use the term "crippling depression" accurately, just say so. To paraphrase a sibling comment, you sound like a self-help guru yourself, albeit a spiteful one. You deride others' solutions and offer up your own: hard magic-less work. Hard work is as much of a racket as easy magic.
If you read my post carefully again you'll notice that I stress that sometimes there is no solution at all. I'm not a guru of any kind, because my entire point was that some sort of messianic figure helping you with your problems does not exist and that people should not put their trust into some sort of spiritual self-help authority figure, including me. And I'm not saying that hard work is a silver bullet because i…
> some sort of messianic figure helping you with your problems does not exist
FWIW, that's not what I was talking about, the guy I went to see is a hypnotherapist not a messiah.
> And my last sentence was not distasteful at all.
FWIW I wasn't offended. (I've had friends insult me to my face when bringing up personal history that is outside their worldview.)
> Depression is generally not solved by one-off sessions with life-coaches.
Right, and that is not what happened to me. The person who helped me is arguably the greatest living hypnotherapist on the planet.
Anyway, IMO you're right about the value and importance of hard work but wrong about books not being helpful.
Cheers!
Re: Ask HN: Are books worth it?
#345Yes. 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…
I've always wondered how non-spanish or even non latin american people can enjoy García Márquez. His books display great usage of the language and are full of historic references. I personally enjoyed his work after having read a lot of other books (expanding my vocabulary) and only after learning colombian history and not before PD: Before becoming a nobel laureate writer, he worked as a journalist for a newspaper.…
My latin in-laws shake their heads in pity because I can't 'get' García Márquez, even reading in Spanish.
Re: Ask HN: Are books worth it?
#346Yes. 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…
I've always wondered how non-spanish or even non latin american people can enjoy García Márquez. His books display great usage of the language and are full of historic references. I personally enjoyed his work after having read a lot of other books (expanding my vocabulary) and only after learning colombian history and not before PD: Before becoming a nobel laureate writer, he worked as a journalist for a newspaper.…
I find the writing beautiful even in translation. It always makes me wish I could read the original language. It does make me feel like I'm missing a lot of things, but even with those things missing I find that it's better than most other things I read.
I've had a very similar feeling when reading Russian authors like Gogol, Pushkin, and Dostoevsky.
Re: Ask HN: Are books worth it?
#347Yes, absolutely. Books contain a lot of good information. You're a slow reader, I'm an ADHD reader, therefore I find that audiobooks are a stellar way to read. I plow throw 3-6 audio books a month, I've got my overdrive app from my local library, plus hoopla and Audible.
In tech land, I find some books, like pragmatic programmer or design patterns. Tech books have the problem of being poorly written. Fiction books on the other hand and many business books have a tendency to be of really high quality.
A good publisher is Random House, they have a really good audio department too. I really enjoy Scott Brick as a narrator; also checkout authors like Nelson Demille, Tom Clancy and John Grisham.
Re: Ask HN: Are books worth it?
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
_12 Rules for Life_ by Jordan Peterson is quite eye opening, he has an insightful view on many things.
Or alternatively: https://medium.com/@magicsebi/12-books-you-should-read-inste...
Interesting that The Second Sex is included in this list, given that its author believed that women are generally too stupid to choose what's best for them in life.
> No woman should be authorized to stay home to raise her children. Women should not have that choice, because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.
— Simone de Beauvoir
Re: Ask HN: Are books worth it?
#349An observation from a book lover who has lately fallen into the self improvement subject, most of the books are not worth it. They all need to be either a blog article or a novella-size at best. They are usually padded up to reach the 300 page limit and seem like worth paying for.
It can be a disappointing ride. There seems to be mad rush to churn out books to capitalize on the obsession for productivity and high-achievers.
On the other hand, books in your area of interest, other than self-improvement, can delve into depths that blog posts will not have the bandwidth to achieve. They are a joy to read. Bon voyage.
Re: Ask HN: Are books worth it?
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For one, because he doesn't try to sell you anything. Publishers of philosophy, literature, history and science books are also trying to make a buck, eh? > Second, you don't get to "know" because you are hand-fed some hard proofs or figures. I don't understand this sentence. > You either know it already (and agree) or can see the point the parent is making, correlate it with your experiences and observations, and r…
> Publishers of philosophy, literature, history and science books are also trying to make a buck, eh? The parent however, we can presume, is neither of those things. And even if they were, they don't suggest you buy any particular work they sell in their comment, so the point still stands. > I don't understand this sentence. You asked the parent "How do you know?". This to be implies "where is your hard proof" - so I…
> The parent however, we can presume, is neither of those things. And
even if they were, they don't suggest you buy any particular work they
sell in their comment, so the point still stands.
Yeah, you're right. I went for a rhetorical rather than reasonable point there and flopped. Sorry.
> So, there's no point in asking how the parent knows, if by that you mean what's their objective, measurable basis of knowing that.
That's really all I was trying to challenge, that GP was stating their opinion as objective fact.
> I don't think anybody said that we can't solve problems by reading books.
Not to be petty but that is what GP said.
> most problems in your life can't be solved by reading a book, period. Self-help or otherwise.
Eh?
> What's said is that some self-help books are merely profit-driven, platitudes, silver-bullet formulas, that don't work, and don't solve problems for the majority of people who cling to them (which tend to accumulate such books, and run from guru to guru, and method to method over the years).
With qualifications I can agree with that. I know a few people like that, and there are definitely charlatans in the self-help field.
> Of course there's also solid advice in some of those books. Usually of the kind that everybody knows already -- but have trouble following. Much akin the Christian "be kind" etc.
Other people do get a lot of help from those kinds of books. YMMV, eh?
Cheers, well met.