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Why can’t we read anymore?

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Re: Why can’t we read anymore?

#151

Post by Singletoned »

Schwolop wrote: post #122

Part of the problem is articles like this. There were perhaps five interesting sentences of content in that entire piece, and several hundred entirely redundant words and personal examples used only to set the tone. If modern writers have such disrespect for their audience, is it any wonder some of that audience hasn't the attention span to stick with it? Older, serious, and timeless literature requires deep concentr…

My father once described Malcolm Gladwell as "that man who writes books that should be essays". I think that also sums up my feelings about this.

A particular bugbear of mine is when a non-fiction article starts by describing the weather or somesuch. If the opening line is "It was a warm summer's day when Joshua first..." then I just give up then and there.

There's no glory in padding.

Re: Why can’t we read anymore?

#152

Post by Nursie »

andrepd wrote: post #148
Nursie wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Older, serious, and timeless literature requires deep concentration because the authors use their thousands of words to express deep pathos that can't be trivialised. It takes practice to commit oneself to a book like that for long enough to get into a flow wherein it can be understood and appreciated. Literature that must be studied to be understood, that must be decoded, that the author spent years on, cramming e…

I disagree. If there is one thing that is effectively endless is books to read. If you read one book per week for you entire life you would barely scratch the surface. This means that there is an incredible variety of books ranging from the fun entertaining page-turners those books that you "need a degree" to understand. The thing is, just because a book has a higher entry barrier (and a higher payoff) doesn't mean t…

We shall have to agree to disagree then.

Literary analysis doesn't appeal to me in the slightest. The enjoyable part of the reading experience for me is engaging with the picture it paints, with the world it posits and the characters it places within it. I certainly enjoy reading books with more depth that The DaVinci Code, but I can think of little that would interrupt my enjoyment of reading more than stepping back and analysing 'clever' sentence structures.

I occasionally enjoy strategic board-games, in order to understand the emergent rules of play that come from the board and given rules. That said I have never really bothered with chess. I don't think chess is objectively inferior to other games though, I don't think the two are equivalent. Literature with deliberate, designed density of meaning comes across as intentional obfuscation rather than simple complexity.

Re: Why can’t we read anymore?

#153

Post by thewhitetulip »

Schwolop wrote: post #122

Part of the problem is articles like this. There were perhaps five interesting sentences of content in that entire piece, and several hundred entirely redundant words and personal examples used only to set the tone. If modern writers have such disrespect for their audience, is it any wonder some of that audience hasn't the attention span to stick with it? Older, serious, and timeless literature requires deep concentr…

I am not a huge fan of Medium.com, it has way too less content displayed per screen, way too huge font and one has to scroll all the way down to read anything, it is annoying , not to mention the huge images everwhere, which gives the images more importance than the content.

Re: Why can’t we read anymore?

#154

Post by Nursie »

borgchick wrote: post #15

I'm honestly a little surprised at some of the comments here. I thought most people on here would agree that many of us do suffer from this. I mean, how many of you actually read through the entire article, WITHOUT checking your email, or flipping to twitter/fb to tell the world about this good article you just found? I had to really force myself to read the entire article first, and not give in to that urge to get a…

>> I mean, how many of you actually read through the entire article, WITHOUT checking your email, or flipping to twitter/fb to tell the world about this good article you just found?

Like you it really took me some effort, I had to force myself to stay engaged, not skip over whole paragraphs and not flip to something else.

But I got there!

Re: Why can’t we read anymore?

#155

Post by hughmcguire »

Schwolop wrote: post #122

Part of the problem is articles like this. There were perhaps five interesting sentences of content in that entire piece, and several hundred entirely redundant words and personal examples used only to set the tone. If modern writers have such disrespect for their audience, is it any wonder some of that audience hasn't the attention span to stick with it? Older, serious, and timeless literature requires deep concentr…

out of curiosity (seriously) which were the 5?

Re: Why can’t we read anymore?

#156

Post by dunmalg »

mattmanser wrote: post #46
pdpi wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 15 years ago, I read a dozen of C++ books cover-to-cover. Can someone today get similar levels of knowledge jumping around quality blog posts and watching youtube videos? Not saying it's better or worse, but I'm willing to say that the understanding you'll get from blogs is going to be be different than from a long-form book. Books get the benefit of knowing where they left off one chapter, and picking it up on the…

Every single programming book in the world after you've read the first one: Chapter 1: Simple types (um, could have done this in a page) Chapter 2: Complex types (this too) Chapter 3: How you can compile from the command line (even though no-one in their sane mind does this in this language) Chapter 4: Inheritance (oh god, please stop) Chapter 5: Conditional statements (no, for the love of god stop) Chapter 6: Loops…

>Appendix: Listing every word used in the book in alphabetical order and on which pages each was mentioned.

That's the Index. The Appendix is where they list FTP and web sites that are long defunct, sample code for interfacing with a discontinued piece of hardware, and of course an ASCII table.

Re: Why can’t we read anymore?

#157

Post by [deleted] »

mattmanser wrote: post #46
pdpi wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 15 years ago, I read a dozen of C++ books cover-to-cover. Can someone today get similar levels of knowledge jumping around quality blog posts and watching youtube videos? Not saying it's better or worse, but I'm willing to say that the understanding you'll get from blogs is going to be be different than from a long-form book. Books get the benefit of knowing where they left off one chapter, and picking it up on the…

Every single programming book in the world after you've read the first one: Chapter 1: Simple types (um, could have done this in a page) Chapter 2: Complex types (this too) Chapter 3: How you can compile from the command line (even though no-one in their sane mind does this in this language) Chapter 4: Inheritance (oh god, please stop) Chapter 5: Conditional statements (no, for the love of god stop) Chapter 6: Loops…

[deleted]

Re: Why can’t we read anymore?

#158

Post by Someone »

mattmanser wrote: post #46
pdpi wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 15 years ago, I read a dozen of C++ books cover-to-cover. Can someone today get similar levels of knowledge jumping around quality blog posts and watching youtube videos? Not saying it's better or worse, but I'm willing to say that the understanding you'll get from blogs is going to be be different than from a long-form book. Books get the benefit of knowing where they left off one chapter, and picking it up on the…

Every single programming book in the world after you've read the first one: Chapter 1: Simple types (um, could have done this in a page) Chapter 2: Complex types (this too) Chapter 3: How you can compile from the command line (even though no-one in their sane mind does this in this language) Chapter 4: Inheritance (oh god, please stop) Chapter 5: Conditional statements (no, for the love of god stop) Chapter 6: Loops…

"Learn x in -1 days" books follow that pattern, but original ones?

Not this one: http://www.stroustrup.com/3rd_tbl.html Or this one: http://www.forth.com/starting-forth/index.html Or this one: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/toc/toc.html Or this one: http://jonaquino.blogspot.com/2010/04/table-of-contents-for-...

In general, once you know a few different languages and want to learn a new one, read the language spec or a good book on the language.

Good blog posts are an option, too, but those are hard to discriminate from bad ones, and run a greater risk of being incomplete (hm: here's and idea for a new product: a service that ranks blogs for accuracy, completeness and timeliness (K&R C is accurate and complete, but if you want to learn C now, it shouldn't be the only thing you read, and possibly not even a thing you read))

Re: Why can’t we read anymore?

#159

Post by logicallee »

mattmanser wrote: post #46
pdpi wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 15 years ago, I read a dozen of C++ books cover-to-cover. Can someone today get similar levels of knowledge jumping around quality blog posts and watching youtube videos? Not saying it's better or worse, but I'm willing to say that the understanding you'll get from blogs is going to be be different than from a long-form book. Books get the benefit of knowing where they left off one chapter, and picking it up on the…

Every single programming book in the world after you've read the first one: Chapter 1: Simple types (um, could have done this in a page) Chapter 2: Complex types (this too) Chapter 3: How you can compile from the command line (even though no-one in their sane mind does this in this language) Chapter 4: Inheritance (oh god, please stop) Chapter 5: Conditional statements (no, for the love of god stop) Chapter 6: Loops…

who would pay $25.99-$54.99 for any of these ten pages?

http://learnxinyminutes.com/ - the Java article is 1500 words :) and, I gather, sufficient to get started.

Re: Why can’t we read anymore?

#160

Post by will_work4tears »

officemonkey wrote: post #58

It's a skill. But unlike riding a bike, if you don't use it, you lose it. On the other hand, if you practice, it gets better. I started keeping track of my reading in 2011. Here's my history: 2011: 11 books 2012: 16 books 2013: 29 books 2014: 54 books 2015: 26 books (to date) I did this while not significantly changing my lifestyle. How? 1. I read to and from work. 45 min each way. 2. I read at lunch. 1 hr. 3. I chos…

Logging what you read is, oddly enough, a new idea for me. One I'll have to seriously consider doing. In 2003 I started college, and an exercise in a class I had we had to tell two truths and one falsehood and let the class guess the falsehood. I don't remember what the falsehood was or the other truth, but the truth one that everybody thought was the falsehood was that I had read over 2000 books.

I only know that I read that many because I owned that many books (and didn't own every book I ever read). I was 26 then, and reading since 5-6, so that's really only 10 books a year. The real number of books at that point might have been more like 3000 - but I did re-read a lot of the books I owned so maybe not.

Since this time last year, I've probably read 30+ books. Gotta love the Kindle and Kindle Unlimited.

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