How I Consume Books
mubaris.blog>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 recent times. 'Consuming' fiction as a sort of pokemon card collection and to 'acquire knowledge'.
Better read a few works of fiction deeply and genuinely for their own sake rather than trying to vacuum up books in the name of some shallow self improvement. This post reminds me of the guy with the lamborghini and the bookshelf in his garage.
Absolutely agree. Unfortunately this kind of "always optimizing" viewpoint seems to have spread like a virus over this past decade. It is sometimes difficult to remember that spending time to read/understand things slowly is not a waste of time, but an important way to appreciate the work of a master in a way that speeding through it at 1.5x on an audiobook simply will not provide.
Do we speed-walk through the Louvre to see the masterpieces as quickly as possible?
> Do we speed-walk through the Louvre to see the masterpieces as quickly as possible?
This cracked me up, because I actually did that. I only had a couple hours, and the size of the museum is almost overwhelming.
We often say in France that it's better to look at what part of the Louvre are of the most interest to you and only go to these ones. Even spending several hours in a row is no use as you will probably be tired in the end and won't appreciate what you'll see.
I too did this ... would not recommend trying to run through the louvre in 1 day. I was kind of "forced" to (only had 1 day and I guess a rare case of FOMO). Spend at least 2-3 days there. It's huge with so much masterpieces. The Mona Lisa was a disappointment.
I imagine the Mona Lisa is fantastic if you get to inspect it in close detail. Trying to poke your head over 100 flustered tourist, through a sea of arms, phones and cameras, is probably not the best way to appreciate it.
Exactly. Reading any good book and fully understanding it takes a lot more than a simple once-through hearing. Sure, you might catch the themes and be able to have a water cooler conversation, but the best books are the ones that aren't page turners; ones that you spend all night on, and only make it through 20 pages.
Besides, when I read something really good, like Hitchhiker's Guide, I usually flip it over and start it again!
The idea that consuming fiction is a waste of time always irks me. The entire concept of 'wasting time' is so contrived it makes my stomach churn. It reminds me of people who become a doctor for the money. You're mistaking the game for reality.. play whichever game you want but make sure you're doing it for the right reasons.
It's a consequence of absolutely every aspect of life or thought being commoditized in some form.
Right, and the enormous pressure constantly put on the average person by advertising and work to somehow be a super being: fitter, happier, more productive, etc, as the fella says.
> It reminds me of people who become a doctor for the money.
The flip side of that is that the career you want to be in very rarely looks like advertised; people going in for the money are the ones who end up the least disillusioned when they enter the job market.
>Sure, you might catch the themes and be able to have a water cooler conversation, but the best books are the ones that aren't page turners; ones that you spend all night on, and only make it through 20 pages.
Going to have to disagree with you here. I don't think you're wrong, but your stance is personal matter of taste that's somewhere between 20 pages per minute and 20 pages per hour.
I prefer fantasy and sci-fi (both YA and non-YA), because I like to explore the world building. I don't mind the simplicity of YA novels. I use reading as relaxing entertainment where I can shut off a few cylinders. Though I do enjoy heavier stuff like Sanderson's Stormlight Archives.
I'm pretty sure most fiction books I read don't have any deeper meaning. You make it sound like everything out there is some deep philosophical hard sci-fi. I would never want to read something where I spend the whole night just to make it through 20 pages. Sounds exhausting and not enjoyable at all.
> most fiction books I read don't have any deeper meaning
That's fine; keep doing what you enjoy. But there is life-changing fiction, so it is not as though there is nothing a person could choose to read that would be great.
Both you and the post I replied to seem to imply that fiction books without any deeper meaning cannot be good or great.
Both you and the post I replied to seem to imply that fiction books without any deeper meaning cannot be good or great.
They can be good or great entertainment, but that's not what is generally meant when educated people say that a book is great literature. The artistic value of a book is almost independent of how entertaining it might be.
(I say "almost independent" because people who care about the "deeper meaning" get great pleasure from taking their time to discover it.)
This is not what I meant to imply. While I prefer heavier reads, my point was that a cursory reading of any piece of literature pretty rarely results in a full consumption of it. The Great Gatsby is a pretty easy read, too, but it is steeped in symbolism that would be tough to fully interpret in a cursory read. Complexity != Quality
I think that the best books, including fiction, are ones that I find myself reflecting on later. Sometimes years later. I don't find that airport mysteries do that for me.
Although, sometimes I read those and enjoy them, mostly in an airport. No harm done.
I think what you get out of a book is more about the person reading it, and what they are looking for, than it is about the story itself.
Dr. Seuss's "Oh, the places you'll go" could be read by one person as just a whimsical children's tale. Someone else, though, might see it as an interesting allegory on the journeys that a person might face in their own life.
Likewise, I might look at a squirrel burying nuts in the ground, and see just a squirrel. But a buddhist monk might derive some great wisdom from watching the very same thing.
I know that I'm in minority, but could you tell me what do you find great about Hitchhiker's Guide? I find it ok-ish. It feels overly chaotic for me. Like it really tries to wave the idea of improbability at me and eventually shove it. Of course everything is exaggerated for comedic effects, but for me it's like it tries too hard. The result is very incoherent.
It reminds me of a few movies I enjoyed dearly when I was a kid. After a rewatch they seem like a bunch of good gags, that tell a miserable story. If I would judge the scenes by themselves, I would say they are nice. However if you put them in order, it seems forced to put a story together.
I had similar thoughts after reading Pratchett's The Colour of Magic. Though after I started reading The Light Fantastic it fell into place. I would say that those two books should be inseparable. Whatever happens in the first does not make sense until the second book. Now I can say that I enjoyed it more then Mort and Guards! Guards!, but at the moment it's all I read from Discworld, do maybe my opinion is yet to change. I wonder if it's the same with Hitchhiker's Guide. But I'm on 19th chapter of 4th book and although this one feels much better, whatever happens in previous three still does not make any sense.
I'll pass if you will tell me it should not make sense, that's figurative 'it' and I get it as it is. Because coherence is what makes a story for me.
Really, from my understanding, you're right: it should not make sense. It's pretty much an absurdist book, it was adapted from a radio show and was more or less just comedy sketches centered in a ragtag, nonsense setting. None of them really have much to do with each other, nor do they really build off of each other, but I find Douglas Adams writing and ability to come up with what he does to be endlessly engaging and uplifting.
You mentioned judging the scenes by themselves; this is how I view Hitchhiker's Guide, as a compilation of great scenes that each occasionally do have some great meta-commentary on the world at large, and almost all are funny and self-contained. There isn't so much "development" as there is a progression of in-jokes.
The characters are more or less used as puzzle pieces to fit into a scene; while they might not really "develop" so to speak, they are fun archetypes that are thrown into silly situations, and we recognize them by what they do and say. They don't compare to most novels or literature when it comes to character development, but it can often be a gag as well just how far they've come without developing whatsoever.
It definitely does try hard, and it definitely is incoherent. This turns it off to a lot of people, and that's totally reasonable. For those who essentially want to read Spaceballs, however, it is a work of art comparable to Plato's Republic.
It's comedy. Most sci-fi and fantasy novels are serious, so having a comedic bent is unusual, which is interesting.
Beyond that, though, comedy itself can be interesting because it looks at life from a different perspective. Much of comedy is based around the idea of looking at the mundane aspects of life, and getting a fresh perspective.
Why do we drive on 'parkways' but park on 'driveways'? etc.
We have governments, and bureaucracy in our daily lives.
What would that look like if you extended that concept to an intergalatic civilization? You'd have a race of bureaucrats that end up destroying our planet to make room for a new construction project.
It's common for sci-fi stories to focus on the fantastical and awe-inspiring aspects of the story, like teleportation and faster-than-light travel.
This, however, focuses on the mundane aspects of life. Yes, there are fantastical elements to the story, like 'improbability drives' and such. But the focus of the story is on the banalities of life. The daily quirks and joys and annoyances that affect us all.
Arthur Dent is dealing with local red tape, and the local pencil-pushers try to destroy his house to make way for a highway. His universe then grows dramatically as he learns that there is a vast universe out there, teaming with intelligent life. And guess what? He's still stuck dealing with bureaucrats that want to destroy his home.
Life isn't always about psychic powers and laser guns. Sometimes it's just about crushing on a girl that you like, and having her run off the with asshole with a better ride.
That's an interesting story, even if the asshole has two heads and the 'ride' is a spaceship.
Yeah ... HHGTTG is like a super extended standup routine or vaudeville act. Reading for "coherence" or "an idea" is missing the point.
It was a radio show originally
Books that set out to be comedy don't really work for me. HHGTTG is probably the best I've read but even that was just... tolerable. Biggest laughs I've had came from "normal" fiction, sprinkled in here and there. Dickens is good at that. Best laugh I've had from a book may have been from a set up chapter followed by a punchline first sentence of the next in Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora, a book that's otherwise occasionally funny but not at all a comedy. I had to put it down for a while to stop laughing.
By contrast, comedy's almost the only thing that works for me in silent film. And not just the slapstick (though that's great) but also visual-narrative comedy. That and mind-blowingly-large-scale spectacle, like the epics usually manage for some part of their runtime. Serious, personal drama? Nope. Books or talkies for that.
Except you won't even know what ‘own sake’ to look for if you don't have sizeable baggage accumulated. And most fiction doesn't need thorough reading, even that which is historically important. There were only a few Faulkners or Wallaces.
I just finished Marquis de Sade's ‘Justine’—what's so difficult about that book that would require me to sit down to read it? The pornography and torture? Or the wading of the heroine from one misfortune to another? There are only a few philosophical sections in the book, and it's not hard to think about them while they're recounted.
Guess what, Plato works fine as audiobooks. Because people were telling to each other arguments such as his, for ages—exactly the reason why you can't read or listen to Socrates, and probably part of the reason for the dialog format. There's always the pause button if you need a minute to mull over what you hear.
On top, narrator performances are sometimes delights in their own right.
And on the contrary, even Fry's excellent reading can't hide how in the Harry Potter series, topographical descriptions are often clumsy, confusing and claustrophobic, especially in dungeons or forests. Plenty of authors have this problem with places, doubly so with tight ones. Except for Vonnegut, who dances around physical descriptions like they barely concern him. Perhaps someone should've read those passages out loud to Rowling?
> As Stephen Frears, the director of High Fidelity, worked to translate the best moments of the Nick Hornby novel on which the movie was based, he found to his surprise that the best moments were the voice-overs, especially the direct speeches of Rob Gordon (John Cusack) to the camera.
> Frears said, “What we realized was that the novel was a machine to get to twelve crucial speeches in the book about romance and art and music and list-making and masculine distance and the masculine drive for art and the masculine difficulty with intimacy.”
> This is the case for most novels: you have to read seven hundred pages to get the handful of insights that were the reason the book was written, and the apparatus of the novel is there as a huge, elaborate, overbuilt stage set.
>>This is the case for most novels: you have to read seven hundred pages to get the handful of insights that were the reason the book was written, and the apparatus of the novel is there as a huge, elaborate, overbuilt stage set.
This is a pet peeve of mine in any type of art, especially installation art or sculpture where a clear and simple point can be quite literally expanded into a elaborate and overbuilt set that doesn't add to the impact. Or worse, obfuscates the original idea.
But then there's an explorative type of art where the method and the process is much more meaningful than the insight or punchline that the novel may have been built around. The Waves by Virginia Woolf, for example.
(edited to use my words more good)
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 a selection of them as you can.
Depends where you want to spend your time: on substance or on volume.
Either way, your lifetime will never be enough to cover everything.
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)
I was about to post the same view (though I hadn't bumped into Exploration vs Exploitation before).
One year I decided to blow through as many books as I could, and the next year I took my time and re-read the interesting ones much more closely. If I hadn't spend the previous year getting through as many as I could, I wouldn't have found even half of the interesting ones.
There is a middle ground between consuming as much as possible and carefully reading every book.
> the guy with the lamborghini and the bookshelf in his garage.
I wasn’t aware of this. Found it[1] and couldn’t last through the whole thing. Right next to it on the search results was a parody[2].
Would you not just have your engineering manuals and the shop manuals (the real ones ) for your cars.
I hate the 2-day book "Lambo guy", but this has nothing to do with him. Edit: "Hate" is giving him too much credit, but I do think he is profiting of fooling already confused and lost people.
I learned some important lessons in life from fiction books, which quite literally changed my life.
Good fiction reflects reality - that's why authors like Branden Sanderson will always be a complete joke, they don't understand anything meaningful "irl".
Right. God forbid you enjoy a book because of the characters and the story. Only philosophical, topical, and metaphorical works matter!
My favorite instance of this was an Amazon review that rated a book in part based on cost per page of text.
indeed, there are some acquaintances who consume books 'filtered' via blinkist ^^). all in the hope of claiming in their conversation circles of how broadly read they are.
Actually, a friend asked me why don't people read/listen to good summaries (like blinkist) but read the whole book? I read the whole book, but I have no answer for him. Many non fiction books have a single idea with many pages of examples. Say if you want to read the 7 habits of highly effective people, why not just read what those habits are? Why do you have to read through all the examples?
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 the topic of consuming.
This may not be the best forum for this, but I actually have a (what I believe to be) really good story about consuming books.
The first time I read Howl by Ginsberg, it was a copy given to me by someone who, as I look back now, was trying to guide my life away from its trajectory at the time. I was young, had, again as I look back now, an un-diagnosed mental illness, and was self-medicating through a combination of illicit drugs and terrible decisions.
This man gave me his copy of Howl that was from 1958. It was one of his most prized possessions. The gift came with a lecture, as did most meetings with this man, about my life and the life of the Beat poets back then. He expressed several lessons that have stuck with me to today. He demanded that I read the book that night and consider its themes.
There are times in your life when conscious decisions have an everlasting impact. I remember, I vividly remember sitting in my car - where I lived at the time - looking at that book after finishing a cold can of Dinty Moore beef stew. It was mid-October. The leaves were turning brown, but not fully brown yet. It was unseasonably warm, and the mosquitoes were bad enough that I had to use a t-shirt cut in half to cover the window opening, just so I could have some air movement without being eaten alive.
And there on my passenger seat was this book. Again, conscious choices. I heard Jim's words, how desperately pleading, but still forceful they were. I think he could see that I was actively trying to burn myself out.
So I picked up his, again, 1958 edition of Howl, and started reading. Jesus that poem. It's just the perfect thing that has ever existed. You can taste the sweat and shit and hate and love that Ginsberg poured into that poem. It's over 60 years old, but FUCK is it still so fresh.
I remember sitting in that car, just devouring that poem (metaphorically). I, for an instant, saw myself dying, and for what? Some weird anger I couldn't let go of about how my parents treated me when I was a kid? About how my life was seemingly unable to straighten itself out?
That book, and I cannot stress this enough, hit me so hard that I broke down. I cried. Ugly, snot faced, loud sobbing, just awful.
And I knew, at that moment, that I needed to get help. I knew that I needed to seek out someone, probably Jim (it was Jim) to help me. And I knew that my life would never be the same from that moment.
I knew that I had to remember this moment for when it got too hard to cope with 'straight' life. I knew that I needed to do something to be able to remind myself that change was now a part of me, not just something I was doing.
I ate the cover of the book.
I would love to read a book from you. That was beautiful, touching, and imminently relatable.
I'm grateful that you shared that. Even if the experience seems unfamiliar to me the feelings seem oddly familiar.
Wow, think I need to read that. (not that I'm in such a bad state, it's just a good recommendation)
Listening to an audiobook and reading a book are different actions that require different verbs. I don’t mind “consume” as a way to bundle them together.
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.
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.
I do the same thing. My reasoning is, if you're going to put dozens of hours into a book, or hundreds into a good series, an extra 20 minutes at the end to file away any good memories from that really isn't too much of a time expense in comparison. Sometimes it's even fun. I basically wrote an essay on the Stormlight archive (probably my favourite ever series) which is something teenage me doing my English Literature GCSE's would have gagged at the thought of.
This is off-topic but since you've obviously thought about it, why is Stormlight Archives good? I was pretty turned off Sanderson after Mistborn because there were some aspects I really didn't care for.
I read the Mistborn novels following my reading of Stormlight, and compared to the later I really struggled to get through them. They read more like teen-fiction in comparison.
There's been a stark improvement in his writing quality. The Stormlight Archive is much more robust in characters (granted the main protagonists can still get a bit angsty in places), incredible in terms of world-building (which of course is what Sanderson is really know for), and has a story line with enough plot twists and development to keep you entertained despite the page count.
I highly recommend it, but if the size of the volumes are bit daunting the Audible narrations are decent too. I flipped back and forth between the two, listening to it in the car and then reading from where the recording left off when I got home. I'm not normally a fiction buff, but I'm chomping at the bit in anticipation for the next in the series.
The 3 books total about 1.25 million words mind, so get ready for the long haul.
The general reason they're well liked is that they have deep and well thought out world building, while also being fairly fantastical. Characters aren't entirely realistic and sometimes parts of the books can drag, but they're true epic fantasy.
I'd still recommend Way of Kings to you, it's quite a bit different from Mistborn, and his writing has come a long way.
This is a really great idea; so simple but quite useful! Thanks for sharing!
> Most of the fiction books are based on the presentation of a concept or a group of concepts.
This is quite a narrow view of fiction. Story, relationships, worldbuilding, emotion, and language are just some of the reasons I read fiction (and I imagine, just some of the reasons many authors write fiction).
And not forgetting the sensawunder - I got into new age SF after I had run through the kids library at around 13.
Reading SRD, Ballard and so on
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.
Or just admit it your the sort of person that finds accountancy to racy for a career.
I disagree heavily with the author's understanding of fiction and absorption of ideas in fiction. Fiction IMO is best viewed as an exploration into a concept and not a presentation the way non-fiction is. In the way nonfiction describes the shape of a phenomenon, and is excellently riveting in its placement of the reader in the backdrop of whatever it describes- fiction walks the reader through edge cases and underbellies of the same world.
As an avid reader of nonfiction and fiction equally, the two cannot be read with the same eye to gain the most. If one were to continue with the consuming metaphor- it's very possible to eat fried rice with a shallow, metal spoon- but some authenticity is lost in the experience of eating even when it still reaches your mouth and your gullet just the same.
In college I let my roommate borrow a copy of a fairly long fantasy novel with a lot of scene building and heavy on foreshadowing. He returned it the next day and asked for the sequel, which is how I learned he was a speed reader.
I was appalled. Part of the book was wondering what every obscure comment five hundred pages ago meant and whether it would come back to bite people. It was like a murder mystery without the murders. If not for the anticipation, other bits if the story arc were actually a bit weak (like many authors, they don’t want an editor but desperately need one).
I never did figure out what he was getting from the story when he was getting through them in three or four hours.
I like the idea of fiction "as an exploration into a concept". I've seen a lot of people complain about Cixin Liu's Remembrances of Earth's Past trilogy because of plot holes or unrealistic elements, but I just appreciated the exploring how humanity might respond to an extra terrestrial threat, or what effects future technology, or disastrous climate change might have on human cultures. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and Neal Stephenson's Anathem also come to mind as unique "what if" explorations.
The whole point of fiction books is actually reading them! And we utilize completely different brain functions to read and understand fiction books which is very important in today's world (imagination, creativity, etc.), and hard to replace with anythinig else. It is not about "I know what the book is about"..
My mother was a librarian for 30 years and I gained a love of books from her; I just I wish I had more time to read.
Between my day job in Fin Tech, my sideline business in my handmade leather goods and with two children at primary school, I basically have ten minutes before I fall asleep in bed at the end of the day to squeeze in a few pages.
> I just I wish I had more time to read.
When I started working two days a week a colleague of mine said he was jealous and wished he could do the same. While he agreed that objectively there was absolutely no reason he couldn't actually do the same.
Isn't it about setting priorities? What stops you from for example spending less time on your side business and more time reading? Please don't take it as judgemental, I am really curious.
> When I started working two days a week a colleague of mine said he was jealous and wished he could do the same. While he agreed that objectively there was absolutely no reason he couldn't actually do the same.
Spoiler warning for a season 1 episode of Black Mirror: this is precisely the gut-punch realization delivered at the end of the "future" "sci-fi" episode Fifteen Million Merits. It is set in the future, and it is sci-fi, but it is not at all about the future or about sci-fi—it's entirely about now. A horrible, pointless, sterile existence—but where are the enforcers, if this is some kind of dystopia? Robot drones, cyborg lackeys of the system packing heat, sadistic future-cops? There are none. Not a single one. Perhaps the outside world was ruined so there's no escape? Oh, but no, it wasn't. It's right there. The episode's given us no reason to believe anyone who wanted to couldn't walk right out into it. But they don't. And neither do we (mostly).
Isn't the enforcer a lack of money for most people? You can "walk out" progressively by saving aggressively but it takes a while, if it's even possible. You can take a more extreme route but it's far from a trivial achievement.
It's largely the comfort and familiarity. Yeah you could walk away, but there's so much risk. So back to your stationary bike to make little pellet things for some reason, eating food out of a vending machine, while watching reality TV and decorating your virtual avatars using Merits you've earned at your job of dubious actual value, anxious always that you'll fall down a rung on the social ladder (while, of course, mocking those who have).
[EDIT] at least as the episode depicts it, which is very much a slice from a range of middle-ish class perspectives. Fussellian middle-class anxiety certainly appears (though not the full scope of it) and perhaps is most prominent, but there's more going on than just that. The episode's not trying to be about everyone, I don't think.
[EDIT EDIT] I think the key components of that episode are that 1) the system they live in is starkly meaningless, divorced from anything recognizable as value in practically any ordinary sense and in almost every single action they take, 2) nothing like a jack-booted thug, even broadly, ever features—the closest thing we get is "cuppliance" which is bad, sure, but given how passive it is and in the context of the rest of the episode, reads almost like an escape hatch for the writer rather than an intentional part of the thrust of the story, 3) an attempt at actual rebellion at the system is smoothly and efficiently coopted by the system—some clear ironic self-criticism from Brooker, that—and 4) our final shot reveals that they may well be able to just walk away any time they like.
(some people like to wonder whether the windows at the end are real or screens, but between what precisely they depict, which is not some remarkable vista or wilderness but a fairly ordinary one, and the context of the rest of the episode, I don't think there's a ton of ambiguity there)
If you can ever work it in, I recommend making an event out of it. I try to, at least once a month, head down to a cafe I haven't been to yet and read something I've been putting off. It's really cathartic for me at least, and gets me out of the house; I find that what little free time I have at the house outside my busy schedule usually gets squandered doing ???.
> I wish I had more time to read.
My wife doesn't like to read and gets really upset when I do. I have the time, but not the environment.
>My wife doesn't like to read
I get that, I don't understand people who do that, but I at least understand they exist.
>and gets really upset when I do.
Wait. What? Define for me, really upset. How is that okay? It's a harmless nothing hobby. How can someone (who is not a giant asshole) get really upset about that?
I do something similar to "incremental reading" when reading all books (minus fiction, which i tend not to read). I use kindle highlights and notes to keep track of important sections of the books as i am reading them. Every few days, I export all my current notes to Anki and review them every day. This allows me to retain almost everything I read in some form, and also allows me to read many books at one time, especially technical books, because the topics etc are fresh in my mind.
I am not inherently anti-fiction, but there are way too many non-fiction books out there that I want to read that I cannot find them time.
Do you have an automated way to export your notes or is it manual?Would love to hear more about your workflow.
It's totally possible to automate the process using Anki Connect (Polar Bookshelf does this). But I tend to do it manually because I like to add context and pictures when appropriate.
When Im using it to learn something like a new spoken language, pictures and sounds are very important. When I am using it to learn a new computer language, it is important to provide context and a good example/card to remember some specific programming syntax or feature.
> I find audiobooks are a better medium for consuming fiction. By doing so, you also save your time.
There should be a YMMV attached to this sentence because it's certainly not the case for me. The best that I get and retain comprehensibility of audio is 1.75x speed and that's still a lot slower than I can read the same text. Maybe the author meant that it saves time because you can do it in the car, whilst jogging/walking-dog, cleaning the house, etc. But in that case it's running on a background process (or at best time-sharing) which thwarts comprehensibility. YMMV
I found that as I listened to more and more audio books, I ended up increasing and increasing the speed of playback. 50 or so books in and a 2x speed is quite leisurely listening, which I increase if I find the pace slowing. I don't agree that comprehensibility is a fixed variable with regards to playback speed.
Fiction, among other things, is about learning empathy, multiple viewpoints and moral frameworks, and interiority. Some say, by the end of a good fiction work, you will know the protagonist more than you know anyone in your life because you will never have that level of access to another person's consciousness. These points, of course, aren't exclusive to fiction. But, fiction is exceptionally good at them. When I hear someone say they read only non-fiction, more often than not, they reveal an impoverished imagination.
Nuttall notes that "speed, enjoyment and comprehension are closely linked with one another" (1996: 128). She describes "The vicious circle of the weak reader: Reads slowly; Doesn't enjoy reading; Doesn't read much; Doesn't understand; Reads slowly. . ." (p. 127) and so on. Extensive reading can help readers "enter instead the cycle of growth. . . . The virtuous circle of the good reader: Reads faster; Reads more; Understands better; Enjoys reading; Reads faster. . ."
Thus, I would conclude that any activity, be it note taking or a similar endeavor, if proves to be disturbing the reading fluency of the agent, it could result in unintended secondary consequences, as such to foster an aversion to reading, supported by the deduction in reading pleasure and comprehension.
At the end, the agent could find itself spending less time reading, the main culprit being the very methods which it sought to maximize reading productivity, as such methods proved to be destructive for its reading fluency.
Any tips on how to handle reading through more technical books?
I find a common error when reading technical books is to focus on understanding everything deeply the first pass and going through all the exercises. In my experience this quickly leads to burn out and you give up on a book half way through.
Don't get me wrong, doing the exercises is important and (perhaps) essential for learning a subject, but the key is not to burn out too quickly. Very often some of the best and most important material is in the latter part of a technical book. So I recommend reading them like technical papers: in multiple passes. If you at least superficially read through the book cover to cover at the very least you'll have a map of the territory. Additionally, it's often the case that more advanced topics in a book give you insight into why the early topics are truly so important.
And while exercises are good, you'll learn even faster if you find a practical problem you want to solve related to the material. Most people on HN will say that you must do all the exercises or you can't possibly learn. But I've found the best tactic is to read a technical book until you hit something that scratches a personal itch. For example, maybe you'll be reading a book on deep learning and then late in the book come across a section on latent factors, a problem that you're interested in and didn't know about. Even though you skimmed most of the book until this point, if you want to implement this model you have to go back and really learn all of the pieces you need to build what you want.
What if you never find anything that really clicks with you? Then you're probably better off just skimming the book for now. The key part of that is "for now". Suppose you read through a stats book and nothing piques your interest, but you come across the idea that there is some way to run a test such that you control for variance between two groups. We'll perhaps in 5 years you'll come across a problem that requires you to do just this! Because you skimmed the book you'll at least know "statistics has a solution to this problem!" Then you can go back and really learn how this solution works.
Personally I recommend against doing every exercise in a book until you need to understand that material to solve a larger, more practical problem. The best way to learn anything technical is to solve a problem with it, but you can't solve a problem with a technique if you don't even know the technique exists, so keep reading!
One thing I learned (or maybe realized?) about math books especially is that they all follow a similar structure: a topic is presented with some proofs, followed by some sample exercises worked out step-by-step, followed, of course by practice exercises whose answers are available in the back of the book. One thing that helped me retain a lot of the material was to try to work the sample exercises on my own without looking at the author’s step-by-step instructions, just based on the description the preceded it. Once I was finished, I compared my work with his - I often found myself catching important concepts that way that I would have glossed over if I had just skimmed over the example.
I have a theory that I've made up for being not particularly quick by just throwing time and effort at the problem.
Get the book on your phone, and just read it every now and again and if it doesn't make sense, try to use it as a detailed study plan e.g. Many compiler textbooks emphasize the importance of instruction scheduling without necessarily teaching it very well, but now you know that you need to understand instruction scheduling from somewhere.
^ If I'm learning a new topic I'll usually grab one famous book and two more modern one's and alternate between books if something is vague/confusing
The Feynman technique is very effective.
At the end of each chapter/section, write a one page summary, in as simple language as possible, to teach a hypothetical new student what you just learned.
Even better if you can then compare what you just learned to other things you know to clearly separate them in your mind.
What exactly is your problem? Comprehension or remembering what you read? If it is comprehension then I would suggest picking up better book and/or a dictionary. For remembering what you learn. Practice!
what also helps with a technical book is to refresh what you learnt yesterday in the beginning on a session. You will remember things better and load the context.
Read "How To Read A Book", it has a lot of good techniques.
I honestly detest the overuse of the word 'consume'
drink mango juice, it'll ease the pain
You probably meant "consume mango juice" :)
how did this post even end up here? OP says he reads and takes notes. is this interesting or news to anyone?
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.
> Most of the fiction books are based on the presentation of a concept or a group of concepts. The concept that presented by the book is the knowledge you’re gaining. This knowledge is small compared to non-fiction. Rest of the book is for your entertainment.
What? Why would you think that the point of fiction is to coat a set of shallow ideas with a thick layer of empty-calorie entertainment?
> I like Fantasy and Young Adult stories.
Oh.
There are exceptions, but an awful lot of "I read so fast and just love reading and read like three books a week" stories end up at "oh, you mean YA and fantasy and slim, low-calorie business and self-help books. OK I guess."
I read some of that stuff too, but I wouldn't dream of using my speed at reading them (or anything, in fact, but especially those) as a point of pride. I'm old enough not to be at all ashamed of them and I'd happily talk about reading them, but no way I'd brag about how many books I get through if that's most of what I've been reading. I mean I can go grab some Goosebumps books and read like 10 of those in a day if I want. They have chapters and everything so that counts, right? Then I can get some shirts and tote bags and pins and bumper stickers telling everyone what a reader I am.
There are lots of sorts of books.
And if you're using that as your basis for what fiction is then you've got some learning to do, to put it mildly.
[EDIT] just to highlight a part you quoted again, this is so, so frustrating to read:
> Most of the fiction books are based on the presentation of a concept or a group of concepts. The concept that presented by the book is the knowledge you’re gaining. This knowledge is small compared to non-fiction. Rest of the book is for your entertainment.
No. There are certain kinds of fiction that, when done right, have you stopping at most every couple pages to think and absorb and reflect, if you're reading it in such a way that you'll get anything out of it. If you're reading it the way you read Terry Goodkind probably you won't, and you'll have a bad time, and maybe think it's "bad" and "boring" and so on. Just like listening to 80s top-40 pop music doesn't really prepare you to give a deep listen to Miles Davis, or Beethoven, or hell even Public Enemy, despite it all being music.
Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book
https://www.worldcat.org/title/how-to-read-a-book/oclc/90737...
This article was a bit infuriating-- not because of what the techniques are, but why they were presented. Here's an analysis at https://algodaily.com/lessons/how-to-consume-books-in-whatev...
> I like Fantasy and Young Adult stories.
What are Young Adult stories? Anyone have any examples? I am genuinely curious.
Young Adult stories are stories that are often where the protagonists are coming-of-age, still dealing with school or part-time jobs, parents are significant in their lives, etc. The themes are often coming-of-age, finding suitable mentors (and avoiding villanous mentors), new love, etc.
I'd suggest:
The City Of Ember
Akata Witch
The Hate U Give
The Sun Is Also A Star
There's also the ones most people know: Silverwing (more children's literature), Harry Potter, Holes...
Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin
One of the best works of fiction I've read as a child and still re-read today.
Harry Potter is probably the most famous example of YA.
Good Reads have a whole section for it: https://www.goodreads.com/genres/young-adult
Werewolves? Harry Potter?
I do not consume books. I read them
This is like: you can double the number of songs you listen if you fast-forward the player 2x!
So basically he takes notes
I just read them.
I'm trying to consume all these comments
I don't think anyone is trying to be mean/overly critical with their comments here. I hope you keep writing/submitting to HN.