Do you read?

I enjoy reading. I have actually devised a time table to organise all of my activities and reading takes most of the time (although not easy to stick to it).

I was wondering though if you read and by read I mean books. If so what are you currently reading and why? What is your most favourite book and why? How many books would you estimate you read a month and finally do you think all this reading is worth it, would it not be better if you spent your time doing something else and why?

Now I know that's a lot of question, I am not doing a study or anything, I am just curious to know what you guys (I assume slightly more intellectually curious that most) think about engaging in reading.

I'm a book collector, if that counts! Some months I only buy a few books, some months I will buy 30. Very few are technical. Most are non-fictional on topics such as marketing, PR, design, information theory, grammar and language, anthropology, social sciences, and art. I am not particularly good at finishing books but I read dozens of books each month in terms of pecking out chapters here and there where it seems appropriate.

I find it necessary to have books covering a wide range of topics - even those I have no practical use for - to act as a sort of "mental compost" to inspire me in my usual pursuits. I find that books on art, architecture, graphic design, medicine, and fashion all help me be more creative in other disciplines. This also goes for magazines. I'm no yuppie, but I subscribe to both Wallpaper and Monocle, simply for the inspiration.

Nope!

I really wish I could bring myself to sit down and read, but if its not in my feed reader (or Hacker News), then I'm probably not going to read it.

I've always had quite a short attention span and when I sit down, open a book and start reading, within five minutes I'm thinking of everything else I could be doing instead of sitting there doing virtually nothing.

Don't get me wrong -- I don't consider reading to be doing nothing, but it just feels that way while I'm doing it... so I have to stop and go do something else.

I have countless programming books and a lot of Terry Pratchett Discworld novels... and when I can get over my attention span, I'll hopefully sit down and read.

Probably too much (in that the expected utility of reading more books significantly drops off after a certain point). I own way too many books. about 1/3rd literature and non-fiction and 2/3rds science fiction. I can't bear to part with the really good ones. But the problem is that at 4-8 books a month my collection grows on average 50-60 books a year. Since i started when i was 8 or 9 I'm up to about 600 books (a couple reductions here and there) that i don't want to get rid of. this is a hassle for moving and for space planning.

But it is worth it. Science fiction authors and computer scientists (lots of overlap there) seem to be only people on Earth that have zero respect for bullshit. Ideologically, those are the people who raised me. One of the ways in which I've been very lucky is that I have pursued very few blind alleys compared to most people. I can go back to the material I consumed at a young age and not shake my head in disapproval at my younger self as many other people seem to do. My life has largely been a continuous iterative process of ever better approximations of reality with no restarts (so far, i might still decide to live in the mountains and contemplate the pebble).

I'm currently re-reading Joseph and His Brothers, a 1200-page heavy-weight monster of a book by Thomas Mann (himself a heavy-weight monster of an author).

Do I recommend it? Yes, but not for everyone. The preface itself is one of the heaviest essays on theology/philosophy out there, but the whole book is crammed with brilliant ideas/wisdom and is a masterpiece of literature (but it's heavy and the story moves fairly slowly).

Something lighter along those lines would be Narziss & Goldmund, by Herman Hesse - also heavy-weight, contemporary and compatriot to Thomas Mann, but capable of a lighter style!

But yeah, I love to read (and not just German literature... those are just the examples that spring to mind right now out of the countless ocean).

To answer your other questions...

What is your most favourite book and why?

What's your favourite movie? If you read any significant number of books, naming a single favourite is impossible - unthinkable, even.

How many books would you estimate you read a month?

It really depends on the books and the time of my life... sometimes I've finished a book in 3 days, but other times it's taken me months to get through a single book (such as the Thomas Mann brick I'm currently reading).

do you think all this reading is worth it?

I think life would be pointless without it. At the very least, it would reduce my mental freedom to not read books. I made an argument for that on my blog: http://inter-sections.net/2007/12/13/sapir-whorf-books-and-y...

would it not be better if you spent your time doing something else and why?

It really depends on what you're reading. If you spend your time reading Dragonlance novels (I've done that, it's nothing to be ashamed of, so long as it's a phase that passes), then yeah, you could probably do something better with your time. But books are still far and away the deepest and most fruitful repository of human wisdom that we have available to us. Sure, you can learn all you can learn from books, from your own life. But you'd be a fool not to climb on the shoulders of those giants who have come before us if all it takes is a few hours of comfortable, enjoyable time with a good book.