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How I Consume Books

mubaris.blog

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Re: How I Consume Books

#21

Post by te_chris »

Or just read reviews if you don't actually care about the book. The leading news papers and literary journals all publish reviews of most books.

This is just sad, especially the emphasis on consume.

Re: How I Consume Books

#22

Post by latexr »

Veen wrote: post #11
iserlohnmage wrote: post #9

The author tried to advocate a "practical view" of fiction books. When your sole aim is to extract some useful idea, why not read the abbreviated version or community reviews on Goodreads?

Because fiction is (in part) an exploration of ideas through their expression in narratives, characters, lives, history, emotions, settings, language, and so on. It's not possible to reduce the richness of that exploration to a summary, because you lose everything that made the book worth writing and reading in the first place. The author of the article fundamentally misconstrues what fiction is.

> The author of the article fundamentally misconstrues what fiction is.

Which, I believe, is the point the parent comment was making. They don’t seem to be advocating a read of the abbreviated version in general, just to the author of the post seeing as they seem to put fiction’s value on the idea.

Re: How I Consume Books

#26

Post by ThouYS »

thrower123 wrote: post #15
Barrin92 wrote: post #2

>his knowledge is small compared to non-fiction. Rest of the book is for your entertainment. And fiction does a good job of presenting the idea. To absorb the idea, it doesn’t require a thorough reading of the book (sometimes it does). For the same reason, I find audiobooks are a better medium for consuming fiction. By doing so, you also save your time. this is such a horrible take on fiction that I've seen popup in…

I have to disagree as strongly as I can. Vacuum up as much as you can, as quickly as you can. Breadth has a depth all it's own. If you narrow in on a handful of "great works" you're not going to get the references and implicit and explicit callbacks to other works, or understand the context of where it sits in relation to the rest of the canon. There are just too damned many good books out there not to sample as wide…

Exploration and Exploitation, as so often. If you explore much, you'll also learn more likely which books are worth diving into. (Or go for readers digest and similar stuff and then read the real book if the summary is any good)

Re: How I Consume Books

#28

Post by majos »

My approach to fiction is different from the author's, but there is a point where we agree: taking notes on books greatly improves the experience.

Before and during college I read a fair amount of fiction. Most of it I enjoyed in the moment, and sometimes I even experienced those deep-truth-feeling "whoa" moments. But even then they faded from memory within a few months. Eventually, I'd recommend the book to somebody but, when pressed for a reason why, struggle to produce much beyond "oh, it's just...really good...". This bothered me. If that book was so damn good, why couldn't I articulate even some of that goodness?

Solution: now when I read a book, I keep a written list on the bookmark of page numbers for quotes I like. After I finish the book -- or decide to stop reading it -- I go back and type those quotes up in a Google doc. An OK book might have one or two, a book that "speaks to me" might have 20. Even if the book is amazing, a dozen quotes usually provides a reasonable-enough sketch to jog my memory. Finally, I write a few paragraphs of thoughts about the book.

This sounds a little tedious, but keeping the list as you go is pretty easy. Typing up the quotes and writing some thoughts might take a half hour. And it seriously improves retention of why I liked or disliked the thing and makes the reading process more participatory. Now, when I recommend a book to someone, I can usually call back some of my notes and form a coherent reason. I'm also more likely to run into a situation and realize "oh, very smart author x wrote an illuminating paragraph about this in book y that makes a point way better than I could, let me ctrl-f my Google doc and fish that out". And this doubles by deepening my appreciation of what I've read.

It's like keeping a journal: stepping back, collecting thoughts, and analyzing can be a lot of reward for comparatively small investment, especially next to the amount of time reading the book probably took.

Re: How I Consume Books

#29

Post by coffeefirst »

Hemospectrum wrote: post #4

I was honestly looking forward to an explanation of what utensils to use, and what sort of wines to pair them with. As it turns out, lignin is not especially nutritious to human beings, so perhaps “read books” would be a more helpful choice of words. Obviously the implication is that you only read a book once, but I’m not sure I can get on board with that. I think I’ll go reread Red Dragon , which has a lot to say on…

I find a good book can pair exceptionally well with many wines. This doesn't change the fact that you're not supposed to eat them.
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