Atlas Shrugged.
Ask HN: What should I save for offline reading during 5 weeks without Internet?
41–50 of 57 posts
Re: Ask HN: What should I save for offline reading during 5 weeks without Internet?
#42Animal liberation by Peter Singer.
Re: Ask HN: What should I save for offline reading during 5 weeks without Internet?
#43The internet, including forums like HN, encourage tiny little "soundbites" of reading. How many internet stories do you read that are more than five minutes of reading? If you're like me, very few.
But "deep" reading, thinking about one subject or story for a long time--hours or even days--is very rare on the internet.
This has been talked about before on HN, and the effects are much debated. Here's one take on it. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1273705...
In any case, I would encourage you to take this chance exercise your deep-reading muscles. Read a long book. Read a hard book. Read a book outside of the genres you normally read. The goal is to read something very different than the internet, and something different than you're used to.
I'd suggest looking at a list of "great books" and picking out some that seem appealing to you, and picking out a few more that you have heard of but don't seem like your cup of tea. You'll grow in different ways with each type. Here's a list with a lot of variety: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/6.Best_Books_of_the_20th...
(I don't know where you're going to be, but if it's Uganda, you might want to pick up "The Last King of Scotland", which I enjoyed reading during my stay in Kampala.)
Re: Ask HN: What should I save for offline reading during 5 weeks without Internet?
#44Great question, and one that I asked just before going to Mozambique for 10 weeks a few years back. I'd just bought a kindle, which were not available outside the USA back then, and asked a few interesting folks I was chatting to at Foo. Here are my resulting first few kindle purchases:
The Match King
Heros Die (I bought the rest of them)
The city and the city
Every patient tells a story
Blindsight
Born to Run
Hot, Flat & Crowded
The Autobiography of Ben Franklin
The Hunger Games (!)
And on it went - asking for recommendations was a fantastic thing to do. I'd asked for fiction as I was going there to work and would be too exhausted at first to do much else.
So I do encourage everyone to give some names of books. And yes - do take a good camera, do take binoculars - Leica if you can afford them, and embrace the experience.
A few years later I went to Antarctica on a boat for 30 days offline. By then I had hundreds of books on kindle, and several devices to read them. This is basically a solved problem now. I did take Wikipedia in offline state, which was useful.
In decades previous when traveling I cared about weight and price per word and focused on "good" books - books that you know you should read but which need a bit of effort. When you are off the grid and in countries where there are few English books then it was a great way to read great books. But now the Internet is everywhere. It might be flaky, and it might be painful to access, but you'll be able to find access to buy and download books relatively easily.
Three recommendations, aside from the above which I enjoyed a lot.
Bill Aulet: Disciplined Entrepreneurship, covers the topic very well and generously references everything else.
The Circle by Dave Eggers paints a picture that's creepily familiar already.
League of Denial will have you shake your head gently and sadly at NFL and other contact sports.
Re: Ask HN: What should I save for offline reading during 5 weeks without Internet?
#45Read books you always wanted but wouldn't get around to with all the distractions available at home. Be it classics, political theory, maybe something light and scientific? Generally, whatever doesn't require additional materials.
Here are some titles of that kind I enjoyed.
Anabasis by Xenophon
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Antifragile by Nassim Taleb
Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman
The Son also Rises by Gregory Clark
Re: Ask HN: What should I save for offline reading during 5 weeks without Internet?
#46Why read/watch? I mean... maybe you can enjoy coding offline ? You can git clone many things... the linux kernel, the openbsd source tree, the bootstrap project, whatever you love. And then hack on it ! On my external HDD, I use to bring with me a Debian mirror and a CPAN mirror, so I can hack offline (building system scripts, etc). On the other side, if you want to take a rest of coding, there are free publications…
Who said OP is a programmer?
Well, I did made some assumptions, you're right on that.
kachnuv_ocasek did cite the relevant part which did bring me there.
I was a little bit selfish with my recommendation. I myself did start into programming just because I did use an open source desktop, by ethical interests, and I did want it to behave as I like and to learn about it. It did become my job and my income.
To learn to program if you don't know, nowadays, does not hurt to anybody with interest in progress as an actual person with a computer. Let's say it maybe brain exercise, the same than a sudoku or music.
Anyway you're right, I did make some assumptions, and maybe I could give a different recommendation with your question in mind.
Re: Ask HN: What should I save for offline reading during 5 weeks without Internet?
#47The internet, including forums like HN, encourage tiny little "soundbites" of reading. How many internet stories do you read that are more than five minutes of reading? If you're like me, very few. But "deep" reading, thinking about one subject or story for a long time--hours or even days--is very rare on the internet. This has been talked about before on HN, and the effects are much debated. Here's one take on it. h…
The internet, including forums like HN, encourage tiny little "soundbites" of reading. How many internet stories do you read that are more than five minutes of reading? If you're like me, very few.
Funny you should say that because one of the prime reasons I visit HN is because long form articles tend to be promoted more. For example, the article about autism that made top news today is 7.500+ words long.
Re: Ask HN: What should I save for offline reading during 5 weeks without Internet?
#485 weeks is a decent time: at first glance it seems like you'll need all sorts of materials. Seriously, it depends on how much free time you anticipate having and whether or not you could use a lot of that time having experience. All that said, I'm pretty sure you can survive on what my spouse and I view as our own travel pack: Bring a few physical books - I read 1.5 during a 5 day stay in Amsterdam and it was much mo…
I feel the exact opposite about physical books nowadays - they are nice to read, but they're practical only at home. When traveling, the bulk and weight matters a lot, and books are too heavy to lug around. Take a Kindle or something like that - it's smaller and lighter than any book; the full sized books can wait for you back in your home.
Re: Ask HN: What should I save for offline reading during 5 weeks without Internet?
#49Create several wikipedia books on topics that interest you.. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Book&book...
This is the first time I've ever seen this. I can already see myself using it a lot. I just created a book on blues music including a history of the music, technical details, and biographies of all the most famous players in about 10 minutes. Wikipedia has produced a 420 page book (PDF about 50mb in size) for me which includes all images, charts, and full attribution and I'm looking forward to reading it. This should be way more publicised.
Re: Ask HN: What should I save for offline reading during 5 weeks without Internet?
#505 weeks is a decent time: at first glance it seems like you'll need all sorts of materials. Seriously, it depends on how much free time you anticipate having and whether or not you could use a lot of that time having experience. All that said, I'm pretty sure you can survive on what my spouse and I view as our own travel pack: Bring a few physical books - I read 1.5 during a 5 day stay in Amsterdam and it was much mo…
I feel the exact opposite about physical books nowadays - they are nice to read, but they're practical only at home. When traveling, the bulk and weight matters a lot, and books are too heavy to lug around. Take a Kindle or something like that - it's smaller and lighter than any book; the full sized books can wait for you back in your home.
Unless you have an e-ink device like a Kindle it's much better to bring a physical book. When on holiday a lot of people seem to read outside and if you use something like an iPad for reading ebooks it'll be a nightmare. Not all physical books are huge. I've got two Hemingway novels sitting next to me which would last a few weeks if you were reading a few hours per day and they are compact (about 6" by 4") and very light.