Lessons learned after 300 books in 4 years
jovicailic.org
jovicailic.org
My advice for getting genuinely intelligent about a topic: read hard books, intensively, and leave the buffet-stats-counter stuff to those who just want to impress.
Yes, I did read a lot of light self-help books in the beginning, but their number in total is less than ~40.
It's totally not important how many books you read, but their quality, we agree about that :) That's why I mentioned it's better to read more times the same book, than more books on the same topic once.
"* It’s much better to read the best book on the topic 5 times, than to read 5 different books on the topic once."
Flat out no. Unless you're a freaking machine. Reading different books covering the same topic keeps me interested more. I don't mind the repetition then because I get the warm "I know that" feeling.
"* Eyes that pay read better than eyes that don’t. Eyes that pay more read better than eyes that pay less. In other words, when you pay for a book or a course, you’ll dedicate more to it, so you’ll get more value from it."
Total nonsense. I'm not paying my friends or the library to borrow their books. Next you'll be telling me hardback books transfer ideas better. Well, my e-reader has a hard case. And I paid 300 quid for it.
"* If you read ~1h (almost) every day, you’ll be able to read 60-80 books per year."
If you use all your idle time you can read a book a day. Cooking? You mean reading and cooking. Commuting? Reading. Sitting on the toilet? You get the idea. Waiting for the kettle? Seconds add up!
I agree with the rest.
I think it's really important to have time to think and make notes about what you read. Even re-reading the same books can often give you different insights, depending on your inner state, life circumstances, etc.
I respect your opinion on your points, and I'll not argue those. I shared my insights, based on my experience, and I wish I knew some of them before much earlier - it would save me a lot of time.
-Jovica
As for a book a day being overkill - you're right, I'm not going to keep this up next year. Normally I read ~80 books but last year I was unemployed for several months and ended up reading >200 even though I was busy looking for work (which involves a lot travel and waiting around which is when I got religious about using my deadtime rather than "killing" time with HN) and I thought fuck it, I'll give it a go at which point I got hired within a month but wanted to see if I can keep going. It's getting really busy with deadlines but I'm confident I can catch up during christmas. For people wondering: yes, I have no family.
Good luck with your quest! If you need some inspiration for books to read, check out this great list: https://sivers.org/book
Wow! What kind of books are these? How long do you spend everyday reading?
I don't know how much time I spend reading, it's almost never exclusive reading time - it's almost always multitasking with something else. I spent at least 4 hours today and it's only mid-afternoon here. Limiting my HN time seems to work and HN is the only social media I'm on. I always have at least two books on the go and one of them is an audiobook so I can keep reading when I'm cycling, doing laundry, etc.
I think the author has a point. Maybe re-reading a book 5 times is not better than 5 different books, but re-reading it at least once is still a good investment. First, it turns out one doesn't remember all that much from the book after the first read. Second - and more important - when you're re-reading the book, you benefit from having the overall big picture in your head already, so you can re-evaluate earlier parts of the book using your knowledge about the whole.
I agree that it is expressed in a too strong way for me. I will probably say that it is better to read twice the best 5 books in a topic that to read 10 on that same topic. Variety helps, but repetition is also good for retaining ideas. And for me the "best" books are the ones that present that ideas more clearly. The value of re-reading probably depends on how good is your memory and varies for each individual. I like the combination of re-reading with reading more on the same topic to get knowledge.
As you said, repetition is good to retain ideas. Also, I was able to get different ideas and insights from the same books, just based on my inner personal state, and my life circumstances at that point in time.
Even if it took 8 hours on average (which might be right, I never actually tried to measure this) you could still read 9 books a week with 72 hours:
( (24 * 7) week
- 40 work
- (8 * 7) sleep )
/ 8 hr/book
= 9 books
- "The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books I-II"
- "The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, books III-IV"
- "The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, books V-VII"
Even though these are genuinely the best books I've read this year and genuinely world-view altering that might be not what you're after. Here are 3 good books I'm happy to recommend instead:
- "Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945" by Tony Judt
- "A History of Future Cities" by Daniel Brook
- "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space" by Carl Sagan
(if you already read Pale Blue Dot which I appear to be late to the party on try "Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective" by Thomas Sowell)
And if you're after fiction instead:
- "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera
- "The Cunning Man" by Robertson Davies
- "East of Eden" by John Steinbeck
That's a nice round 10 recommendations so let me have a bonus one for year 2015:
- "The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics"
You will never read the news the same way.
And "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" by Samuel P. Huntington?
Also, Gleick: Chaos?
Oh, and for fiction the James S. A. Corey: The Expanse series, veeeery easy to read, normally funny, and quite clever.
Can't we make reading a lot more efficient than it is right now?
That's why I think is better to read the best books on the topic more times, than few other average books repeating the same stuff in different words.
Literature and verse? Harold Bloom's western canon list, whatever its faults, is pretty damn good and could keep one busy for a lifetime. If you want to mix in more works by e.g. women or more asian works or whatever, there are very good lists for that, too:
http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/whatbooks.html
(above includes Bloom's list)
Want to learn science and math from classics? The list from How to Read a Book should help, and St. John's College's reading list is public: https://www.sjc.edu
For a given topic, there's often a subreddit with a decent reading list in the FAQ.
Which topic(s) are you having trouble with?
Most lists just tell you which books are popular. I'd be reading nothing but Harry Potters if I followed those lists. I'm talking about choosing a book I will like. Not you, not the critic, not the public. Following these kinds of static lists doesn't really fair better than looking at the cover.
There needs to be some algorithm that can be applied to my books which is what I was hoping goodreads would do for me but their recommendations are a joke - they just recommend whatever goodreads author they're currently promoting regardless of what you like.
As for recommendation engines for fiction, I don't know any that don't have this conflict of interests you described with Goodreads. Personally, I tend to pick up books that are recommended by friends, writers I like reading and people on HN. There's way too much fiction to read all of it, but I try to aim for one (or both) of two separate types: insightful and genre-popular. Insightful, because I love to read new ideas, and genre-popular, because culture is pretty much defined by your ability to talk about it with other people.
- best books on <subject X>
- best books on <subject X> reddit
Look for titles most often mentioned/recommended by people in the <field X>.
I'm not proud of the number of books I've read. Actually, I would prefer that I've read less books, but that I've read more times the best ones (in my opinion).
I wonder what the perfect number is. For non-fiction, I guess you'll hit diminishing returns with most books in something like 5 iterations. But then again, I want to take a following challenge: pick one good fiction book, and read it 100 times. I've read (in Adler's "How to Read a Book", I think) that the way you understand and feel about a piece of writing will change profoundly after so many read-throughs.
For English it must be crazy, but I am not aware of a single one.
More importantly, the same material is interpretable in many ways. For example if you ask someone what is the main point of Orwell's 1984, you will usually hear something about surveillance. But to me, reading it as an adult, far more important is the idea that we need war as an outlet for our surpluses. That might be in the Cliffs Notes but it won't be in the first blog post on Google.
There are a lot of takeaways from Orwell's book, basically on how "Stalinism with English characteristics" might look, extrapolating from Orwell's encounters with actual Stalinists in Spain. Orwell is pretty much required reading for anyone who wants to be on the sensible left. But a need for war is not one of them.
(Brave New World has leisure industry as an explicit sink for surplus, though).
I confess I am an impatient reader, and many non-fiction titles I read feel padded out with unnecessary verbiage. I do wonder if the tools we use to write have some bearing on this. When using a computer to write, the ease of editing means it's much easier to just write and write and write.
Imagine if you were forced to write your manuscript by hand. I'm guessing the length of your non-fiction manuscript would be shorter, sharper and more to the point.
Imagine you wrote a typical 250 page non-fiction book that is padded out in the typical way. Just before publishing, you get fed up and edit it down to just 50 pages that convey everything without any fluff. Your publisher will tell you you're nuts and insist on publishing the 250 page version. Why?
Imagine you are shopping for a book on a topic. You find 6 such books in the store. 5 are the typical 200-300 page pieces. One 50 pages. They all cost the same. You don't have time or patience to investigate their relative quality. Do you A: assume the 50 page book is a low-effort blog series repackaged in print. Or, B: bet that the 50 page version is a high-effort careful edit? Most people choose A and I'd bet they are almost always correct in current practice.
Tldr: Short books look cheap. Customers assume they are ripoffs and don't buy them.
Clearly the details have to spelled out somewhere otherwise there would be no way to create a TL;DR version.
I don't think anyone has invented a lossless summary algorithm for natural language so you are inevitably throwing away details, perhaps important details.
Chapter 1: Tell a bit about the author
Chapter 2: Tell about the amazing thing someone has done because of "the technique"
Chapter 3: Tell about the authors path to discovery
Chapter 4: More stories about amazing things people have achieved(note by this point the author has never mentioned what their great one thing is
Chapter 5: Another bunch of stories about how great the author is
Chapter 6-12: More stories from people about how their life was changed by the author. Possibly a sales pitch for an online course.
Chapter 13: About 2 paragraphs describing something super simple "Start a mailing list"
Chapter 14-25: More stories
Here's an approach that has worked better for me: pick a complex question and try to answer it. For example, "Why did the Great Depression happen?" It turns out there isn't actually a simple answer (that everyone can agree on).
Rather than being an obvious truth, for me it is a grave mistake.
I rarely read a book a few times (but also: I am very slow (careful!) reader), and go back if I want to quote something verbatim, or lookup a number/reference. In book reading I prefer quality than quantity.
But what is crucial, rarely there is a single, obvious "best book". At the same time, reading only a single book leaves false impression that everything is known, there are no controversies, no different looks or approaches, etc.
Solution for that is pretty simple for very many fields:
Google:
- best books on <field X>
- best books on <field X> reddit
Read a few lists from sites, especially those frequented by people in that field. See which books tend to appear often in those lists. There, you have quite probably just identified the very best books for the <field X> the human race has to offer.
We ought to only read the kind of books that wound and stab us. If
the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head,
what are we reading it for? We need the books that affect us like a
disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved
more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from
everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea
inside us. That is my belief.
Franz Kafka- George R.R. Martin quotes
The reader doesn't 'live' squat, he reads about someone else's life. Watching cooking shows doesn't feed anyone.
A short (minor) spoiler follows.
One of the protagonists is married to a writer. He follows her advice about writing, and in the process of developing a character he manages to, well, instantiate a pretty much living version of that character in his own mind - a version that grows and thinks independently of its creator. He eventually gets emotionally involved with his imaginary creation, and later learns that it's something that happens to good writers, and that his wife has such a character "living" with her too.
What I wonder is whether it's really the case that good writers actually develop their characters to the point of them turning pretty much into tulpas? A kind of background thread in their brains, with separate micro-consciousness.
Hopefully he doesn't go the way of Robert Jordan or Frank Herbert.
The downside is that I find it harder to get time for building. It's easy enough to read at night in bed, but harder to concentrate on writing code.
The closest approximation might be Jorge Luis Borges with Tolkien with a dash of Neal Stephenson and Murakami.
At first I thought: I know what this is.
Then I thought. Wait... something's wrong here.
Then I thought. There is no way that is in the text. Can't be.
This was just the point where the rollercoaster is beginning the climb.
If you like complex and strange things, then this is for you.
Nothing like a NASA astronaut though.
In this light, 300 books in 4 years, seems quite a lot...
I agree with a lot of the author's takeaways. I'll try to add some of the lessons I've gotten out of it, that don't appear on his list.
In addition, I post my book reviews at http://juvoni.com/books
- Understand what a book is going to attempt to communicate before you read it, either by checking the table of contents, going through a summary, reading reviews or reading the back or inner cover of a book. http://juvoni.com/book/how-to-read-a-book
- You can read multiple books at a time and not get the narrative scrambled by doing context specific reading by time or location. For example only reading book A while in transit, reading book B before bedtime and only reading book C on weekends. The context specific memory will be attached to when and where you habitually read that specific book. http://juvoni.com/reading-multiple-books
- Not all book recommendations are made equal, even from friends. I use a concept called 'Book Purgatory', where book recommendations go to await judgment on whether they are worthy of your time and attention to read. I do not commit to reading any recommendation. It is only after I give it a review based on what I want or need from a book and the quality of it's reviews do I consider getting it. http://juvoni.com/book-purgatory
- Reading a lot of books when you have a full lifestyle is difficult, it's in you're best interest to stay organized and have a pre-defined list of books you want to read, and intend to read after you are finished and actively track the books you are currently reading. http://juvoni.com/trello-book-reading-management
- Identify your learning styles and device preferences and find books that are a good balance of right medium and comfortable preference. For example, I have a hard time reading history books but find them easier over audible, I also prefer to read books with diagrams as physical rather than e-books. http://juvoni.com/print-ebook-audiobook
- Understand why you read. http://juvoni.com/discovering-love-reading-read-read-smarter