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Art Garfunkel's Library

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Re: Art Garfunkel's Library

#101

Post by AlbertCory »

gnuj3 wrote: post #16
Loic wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or stop reading if you feel it is not worth your time.

Yes, this is something I had to learn over the years. I always had this notion that I HAD to finish something (book, movie) to be able to express the opinion on it. Now, if I dont enjoy it I just stop reading and when I’m asked what did I think of it I simply answer that I didnt finish because xyz. It gives you so much more time resulting in reading something you actually enjoy.

Right. More and more nowadays with non-fiction, I read a few chapters, realize I've already heard everything the author has to say, and drop it. Life's too short.

Re: Art Garfunkel's Library

#102

Post by jpmattia »

crb wrote: post #21

In 2020, Garfunkel read a book called "Hello Darkness, My Old Friend". I looked it up. It's not about him.

> In 2020, Garfunkel read a book called "Hello Darkness, My Old Friend". I looked it up. It's not about him.

It turns out it does involve him: It's by Art Garfunkel's college roommate, who goes blind in Junior year. (I have not read it yet, it's on my list.)

https://www.amazon.com/Hello-Darkness-Old-Friend-Extraordina...

Re: Art Garfunkel's Library

#103

Post by Thrymr »

dredmorbius wrote: post #92
janvdberg wrote: post #8

I love this! Everyone should keep a list like this (self-hosted). It also makes me a little bit sad, as there are SO MANY books and this shows that a lifetime of reading will only get you to maybe 2000 books. Choose wisely what you read.

A lifetime is about 4,500 weeks. For most people, a book is probably a multi-week investment, though lighter fare can go quicker. You can also skim, or read segments only, or quit bad books quickly. I recommend each of these where appropriate. There are roughly 300,000 "traditionally" published books printed each year in the United States (Bowker ISBN registrations), a million or three including self-published. The U…

> The most-read books of all time are, in rough order: The Bible, the Quran, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, all reporting (with various degrees of precision and accuracy) ~0.5 -- 5 billion copies)

Surely the Bible is among the most un-read books in history as well, with all of the copies sitting in hotel rooms and on family shelves unopened.

Re: Art Garfunkel's Library

#104

Post by irrational »

keymon-o wrote: post #27
irrational wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I’m surprised by people rewatching tv shows and movies, rereading books, etc. You have a limited amount of time before you die and an, effectively, infinite amount of material to consume. Most of it is dross, but enough isn’t that there is no time to revisit.

Would you apply that opinion to music as well? Yes, it is shorter and more practical type of media, but people tend to consume it until it "wears off". Other media consumption is much more demanding, complex and immersive and it is sometimes a drag to do it more than once, but it can be worth it if it made that deep impression on you. I don't consume a lot of media for the same reason of wasting my time, plus trial a…

I'm the wrong one to ask that question of. I don't ever listen to music. It does nothing for me. I probably have Musical Anodesia.

As for death, you can't consume any more material after death.

Re: Art Garfunkel's Library

#105

Post by lelandfe »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #91
lelandfe wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does keeping a record of things necessarily imply vanity? It seems to me that your problem was with your own feeling toward the list - “I felt proud about my list” - and not the list itself. Where does that feeling come from? It might be worth exploring.

Not necessarily. It depends on the purpose(s) of the list. What are the purpose(s) of keeping a lifetime list of books read?

Erm, keeping track of how far you are through an author’s works (I know a guy who did this to work through Michener’s entire catalogue over many years), seeing your reading taste evolve (I’ve been trying to read more non-fiction), graphing your reading over time (are you meeting your goals for yourself?) and thousands and thousands of other great reasons.

It’s not masturbatory to create goals for yourself, and lists are a great way to track those goals.

Having that data even allows future insight into things you haven’t even thought of yet.

Re: Art Garfunkel's Library

#106

Post by hamburglar »

AlbertCory wrote: post #100
user3939382 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First, does this work very well for technical books? I just laughed imaging a professional voice actor reading out a block of code in a stately voice, complete with all the punctuation. "public function getName(Person $user)" xD

See my comment above. I did exactly that with Inventing the Future . Maxwell didn't know how to read Mesa, of course, but I gave him the audio for how to read it. Just imagine what a CS professor would do if they read the code off a whiteboard, and do that.

Well, the difference is that there's no whiteboard. If you're reading code off a whiteboard, you can shorthand over obvious things like brackets and indentation and whatnot, whereas trying to get a listener to picture a piece of code just by verbally describing it would take a lot more. I agree with your conclusion in the other comment that a lot of code would become unwieldy, but small snippets here and there are ok.

Re: Art Garfunkel's Library

#107

Post by hamburglar »

mahogany wrote: post #97
hamburglar wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never really gotten into audiobooks, but my pace of reading paper books has fallen off considerably lately, since I've fallen into a pattern of simply falling asleep when I pick up a book. My girlfriend loves audiobooks because she can "read" while doing chores or walking or whatever, and reads constantly. So I've been considering trying that out, and I have questions for you. First, does this work very well for…

> Second, do you ever shake the feeling that having a book read to you is somehow qualitatively not as good as reading it from the page? Why would it be? I get where you're coming from, as I generally prefer reading over audiobooks, but it may be good to remember that story-telling began as an oral tradition. I don't see why reading a story would be superior to having someone tell you a story. I doubt The Odyssey was…

> I don't see why reading a story would be superior to having someone tell you a story. I doubt The Odyssey was a lesser experience before it was written down.

Well I don't think it necessarily has to be lesser, especially if it's designed to be verbally delivered, but it's a different art form, and it's not how most literature was created to be delivered. So it seems fairly obvious that you're going to lose something in the translation. The question is just whether or not that something that is lost is significant enough to care about.

Re: Art Garfunkel's Library

#108

Post by hamburglar »

hamburglar wrote: post #107
mahogany wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Second, do you ever shake the feeling that having a book read to you is somehow qualitatively not as good as reading it from the page? Why would it be? I get where you're coming from, as I generally prefer reading over audiobooks, but it may be good to remember that story-telling began as an oral tradition. I don't see why reading a story would be superior to having someone tell you a story. I doubt The Odyssey was…

> I don't see why reading a story would be superior to having someone tell you a story. I doubt The Odyssey was a lesser experience before it was written down. Well I don't think it necessarily has to be lesser, especially if it's designed to be verbally delivered, but it's a different art form, and it's not how most literature was created to be delivered. So it seems fairly obvious that you're going to lose somethin…

As an example, I've noticed when reading books to my kids that certain styles of writing lend themselves very poorly to being read aloud. An example is when the writer chooses to write pieces of dialog as alternating series of quotes missing directions like "Fred said" or whatever. Just literally what is said by each person in quotation marks. It's hard to read this aloud and convey who is saying what without trying to do funny voices or adding in the "stage directions" yourself.

Re: Art Garfunkel's Library

#109

Post by AlbertCory »

hamburglar wrote: post #106
AlbertCory wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See my comment above. I did exactly that with Inventing the Future . Maxwell didn't know how to read Mesa, of course, but I gave him the audio for how to read it. Just imagine what a CS professor would do if they read the code off a whiteboard, and do that.

Well, the difference is that there's no whiteboard. If you're reading code off a whiteboard, you can shorthand over obvious things like brackets and indentation and whatnot, whereas trying to get a listener to picture a piece of code just by verbally describing it would take a lot more. I agree with your conclusion in the other comment that a lot of code would become unwieldy, but small snippets here and there are ok…

For sure. I can't judge what a listener would grasp since I do have the text in front of me, but at least the code is mercifully short.

Re: Art Garfunkel's Library

#110

Post by dredmorbius »

Thrymr wrote: post #103
dredmorbius wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lifetime is about 4,500 weeks. For most people, a book is probably a multi-week investment, though lighter fare can go quicker. You can also skim, or read segments only, or quit bad books quickly. I recommend each of these where appropriate. There are roughly 300,000 "traditionally" published books printed each year in the United States (Bowker ISBN registrations), a million or three including self-published. The U…

> The most-read books of all time are, in rough order: The Bible, the Quran, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, all reporting (with various degrees of precision and accuracy) ~0.5 -- 5 billion copies) Surely the Bible is among the most un-read books in history as well, with all of the copies sitting in hotel rooms and on family shelves unopened.

Interesting suggestion, though it'd be interesting to see how that varies across titles with copies.

A book selling one copy which is never read would have a higher percentage-unread.

Otherwise, as total copies increase, the absolute magnitude of unread copies would likely increase proportionately.

Keep in mind that copies presented to multiple potential readers (as with, say, Gidion's Bible, typically found in hotel rooms) would likely have a greater chance of being opened at least once over its lifetime.

There's also the interesting question suggested: what book has the highest readers-per-copy ratio? And how should that be scaled by total readers? I'm inclined on general principle to suggest the ratio * log(n) where n is total copies produced. That penalises very low sales volumes, but discounts greater total print runs.

I'd suspect it would probably be a romance novel.

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