21–27 of 27 posts
Stop reading crap that forces you to skim. Start reading worthwhile things instead.
Do you read the documentation for every new tool/concept front-to-back before jumping into it? Probably not.
So many news articles start with "the big narrative"™. The authors seem like burgeoning/frustrated writers who are just practicing on us. I skim to get the details and toss all the narrative fluff. So many books are full of this fluff, you have to skim or its boring. The "respect" for the novel is a past time. When everyone can blog/cast/self publish people are not so impressed by the existence of a book. It is taken…
Filler "human interest" narrative ... I can very much do without.
The balance can be hard to balance, at times. Most often it's not, and the obvious filler is obvious. And tedious.
Worst is when writers omit relevant background in favour of useless filler. All too common.
Did anyone else find this article quite difficult to read? Perhaps ironically, I gave up by paragraph four.
Part of it is TLS's web design, particularly on mobile/tablet. I find multi-column layouts, especially where content fights with adverts and distractions (even just on-site elements) for attention, to be grossly suboptimal. Unfortunately, TLS fails both Outline.com and non-JS console browsers. I ended up copying text to a console pager to read it.
The style and content also contributes -- the review itself is ... eminantly skimmable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book
If you're going through a lot of material, the ability to rapidly assess quality vs. unrewarding content, and then rapidly extract as much value from that quality content as possible, is extremely useful.
An HN perennial, FWIW: https://hn.algolia.com/?q="how%20to%20read%20a%20book" See particularly discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12209446
And yes, there's the notion of reading simply for pleasure, in which case, for quality writing, time is its own reward.
That said, I feel like because I do so much skimming online, just for work and whatnot, going from one physical page to the next while reading a book does something great for my brain. When I read offline, if I have selected the right book, I don't ever feel the need to skim. All of the time I spend reading offline feels like a compensatory reaction to the cognitive twitching that takes place in the browser all day.
See also: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/02/08/reading-in-th...
Because we're talking about reading and non-fiction, here's a shameless plug for a non-fiction book club I'm putting together: https://strangers-club.com
Did anyone else find this article quite difficult to read? Perhaps ironically, I gave up by paragraph four.