Hacker News Reader

Comment by aaachilless | Hacker News Reader

Do many people have a hard time finding books to read? I have the exact opposite problem: I'm constantly overwhelmed by the tidal wave of books that is my to-read list. I'd give my right arm to be able to read 2x as fast as I do today.

View on HN

There's always another book to read. But the books that I remember years later, the real gems, are few and far between. If I had some even marginally better process for finding those than dumb luck, I'd be thrilled.

Out of curiosity, which books?

I don't have a full list, but some that I thought of when I was trying out this website were Foucault's Pendulum; East of Eden; Sometimes a Great Notion; A Man in Full; I, Claudius; and Anathem.

> Out of curiosity, which books?

There were two great discussions about this on HN last week:

Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14486657

Ask HN: Books you wish you had read earlier? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14477851

There must be some fundamental difference between the way you and I read, because I feel like I'm wading through a sea of gems when it comes to choosing books. Every once in a while I come upon a dud, but not often at all. And the duds are basically always very specific to my personal taste. For example, you mentioned Anathem as a gem, and I love Neal Stephenson and have read most of his work, but reading Anathem a couple weeks ago I was bored out of my mind.

Google search and Amazon reviews are actually excellent book-finding tools and I don't believe there's much value to be squeezed out of what they leave on the table.

Did you finish Anathem?

It was a brutal start for me, I didn't get into it until after the first 300 pages. Then it was fantastic. (I basically hate the overly descriptive setup because I don't really like wasting my time trying to visualize what the author is describing).

I didn't and for essentially the reason you described. The minutiae of the setting kept getting in the way of enjoying the story and the characters. Maybe I'll give it another go. Still, 300 pages is quite the hurdle.

I loved Anathem. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that I heard about the Long Now foundation and their work at roughly the same time. Stephenson's wanderings into tangential topics is annoying at times but I stopped judging and just read it like a stream of consciousness kind of thing and it worked out quite well.

Everyone I've recommended the book to has either been overwhelmed because of the size or bored because of the length.

I hesitated to include Anathem on the list because it isn't like the others. I didn't love it because it a masterpiece of the novel form, but rather because I found so many ideas in it fascinating.

Perhaps if I had a more comprehensive background in a couple of areas (math, philosophy) I would have already been exposed to many of them and wouldn't have enjoyed the book so much. But as it turns out I didn't and I did.

There's always a tradeoff between reading the next best book in your queue versus spending time sorting what the next best book would be. I certainly don't have the problem of not having a long queue of books to read, but always want ways to improve my sorting algo. I expect this might help me find lookalike books similar to my favorites, that might be more worthwhile for me to read versus my current queue.

I see what you mean. Something I've been doing recently to help with that problem is reading clusters of books that all relate to each other. For example, I'm currently reading a bunch of Hemingway's stories and next I'm gonna read a bunch of books centered on the American Revolution and the founding fathers. By clustering books the list I have to sort is much smaller.

Its a classic case of paradox of choice; having too much options makes it more difficult to pick any single one of them. The problem is not that I have hard time finding good books. I have hard time selecting which of the thousands of good books I want to read.

Reading the wrong books is worse than reading no books at all. Any tool that allows you to avoid 10% of the wrong books is worth it.

Despite having a formidable Mount TBR, I occasionally branch off into a genre I have barely touched and would like to read more of that genre (example I'm thinking of is horror after reading 14/The Fold). My to be read list is not a guidance, but a fallback :)

No but optimizing my queue is satisfying and much faster than actually reading.

I do i'm a picky reader and i stop reading more books than i finish cause I might not like the story.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com