Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to read more books

scotto.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 310 posts

Re: How to read more books

#101

Post by rcarmo »

Eueudhsbsj32 wrote: post #57
rcarmo wrote: post #11

I have a checklist to go _back_ to reading 30-odd books a year, and right now the top 5 items are: 1. Stop messing about with AI 2. Stop doomscrolling/interacting on social networks (HN is within my 15m allocation) 3. Stop watching _any_ Youtube video that doesn't teach me anything 4. Gloss over my 200 RSS feeds, don't be a completionist 5. Put on classical music, not indie or radio It almost works. Almost.

> Stop messing about with AI I see a few comments about wasting time with AI. I'm curious what the gist of those conversations is about? I've found AI to be incredibly useful as a tool to nurture intellectual curiosity. It even improves my book reading experience. Before, when I didn't fully understand a technical detail the author had glossed over, I usually had to skip it, hoping it wasn't critical for understandin…

well, I created https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw, and as a result of that I have several permanently running agents and entirely too many projects going at once. That's _my_ "messing with AI"...

Re: How to read more books

#102

Post by dredmorbius »

hingler36 wrote: post #4

One of my main takeaways from this article is that the author ADORES Umberto Eco. Which is understandable.

Well, yes ;-)

I'm a bit surprised that the concept of the Antilibrary makes no appearance, however:

https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antili...>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antilibrary>

Re: How to read more books

#103

Post by kelvinjps10 »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #22

I have an almost-four year old child and not a lot of downtime. I used to listen to podcasts when I was doing dishes, cleaning the house, walking the dog, etc. I've mostly abandoned podcasts in favor of audiobooks. It didn't feel like they were benefiting me in any meaningful way—almost like they were just empty calories for my ears. I finally made it all the way through The Power Broker recently, which I've wanted t…

For me audiobooks are okay for non fiction but for fiction I need to read it to be able to immerse in the story and imagine the characters. Also no all non fiction it's okay either, for philosophy that's a little complicated I need to read it too.

Re: How to read more books

#104

Post by fl1pper »

tdiff wrote: post #97

The most distracting app for me is Telegram with numerous channels, which I find myself doomscrolling too often, and at the same with numerous crucial personal contracts. Really sad modern phones don't allow to set app's budget for custom interval, like 5 minutes in an hour.

I've ditched all Telegram channels and only kept a few I'm quite fond of (they post rarely anyway)

You could try ScreenZen or a similar app that help control nd reduce the time you spend on certain apps.

Nowadays, you can such apps in a few prompts and some minor tweaks :)

Re: How to read more books

#106

Post by brudgers »

Because success is an end unto itself, my plan to succeed at reading more books will begin by reading zero books.

Obviously the longer I spend reading no books, the greater my success will be. Time to install TikTok to the homescreen.

Zero to One, Baby.

Re: How to read more books

#108

Post by apparent »

WalterBright wrote: post #50
elAhmo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other apps too, such as Overcast, and ads on podcasts are really easy to skip .

Yeah, I can skip forward 30 sec, then back up, blech. It's just not worth it when you constantly have to interact with the podcast app. Scott Adams' podcasts were different. He inserted very few commericials, and they were short enough there was no reason to skip forward. I tried many other podcasts after he passed away, and they all were largely long, boring commercials. Yuck. I now listen to Pandora or Soma FM inst…

> Yeah, I can skip forward 30 sec, then back up, blech. It's just not worth it when you constantly have to interact with the podcast app.

Fortunately this can be done much more easily now, with headphone-based controls and smartwatch-based controls. It takes maybe 1-3 seconds for me to get through an ad break and be back to listening.

Re: How to read more books

#109

Post by gjenkin »

Good post. Reading when you're not doing something else - this is a good mindset. I've found that the more that I enjoy a book, the more time I have "not doing something else".

The key is getting immersed in a book in the same way that you might get immersed in a movie or a genre of music or some other thing that gets you in a zone. Fall into the rabbit hole. Joining r/bookclub or some other online book discussion group helps me fall deep into the rabbit hole. In lieu of an online book discussion group, chatting with my/your preferred LLM is a good tactic. I recommend finishing a chapter, then going to your LLM and saying "I just finished chapter 1 of Heller's Catch 22" ... that's pretty much enough of a prompt to get it to give you a synopsis with some questions to help you reflect on what you read.

Re: How to read more books

#110

Post by PsylentKnight »

jppope wrote: post #52
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #22

I have an almost-four year old child and not a lot of downtime. I used to listen to podcasts when I was doing dishes, cleaning the house, walking the dog, etc. I've mostly abandoned podcasts in favor of audiobooks. It didn't feel like they were benefiting me in any meaningful way—almost like they were just empty calories for my ears. I finally made it all the way through The Power Broker recently, which I've wanted t…

Audiobooks are just a different medium. I don't think people should pretend that an audiobook is a book. You process the two in completely different ways. This doesn't imply one is better than the other either. For me I don't like audiobooks because its very slow and spoken stories should have a different cadence, velocity, set of dynamics, and diction than a book should (check out "the moth" to see what I'm talking…

I agree that it’s a pretty different experience for fiction, where the subjective experience is everything and the narrator can color your experience a lot.

For nonfiction, I think the two mediums are virtually the same depending on the density of the book. Most differences come down to the fact that you’re more susceptible to distraction. Most nonfiction books are light and repetitive enough that I don’t think it’s a big deal

Post reply on HN