Comment by kevindeasis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevindeasis | Hacker News Reader

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In 2019 I've read 100 books. Im not married nor have children, but I might have advice to share

If your goal is to just finish a book, you can listen to an audiobook at 3.5x speed.

Some books are easy, some books are hard. If you pick easy books you can go through them much faster

You have to pick your goals and priorities about what you want from the book.

I mostly read non-fiction books that are not heavy in academics. So most of them are not written to be lean if you know what I mean

Being able to tell people I've read 100 books was pretty cool but it was just a vanity metric to boost ego. It's pretty dumb to be honest. Theres better ways to consume a huge amount of information.

This doesnt apply to domains that require deep knowledge/learning ie: programming, engineering, sciences, math, algorithms, hobbies, etc.

Also things you learn from books are not a rule of law, which Ive noticed that is something people tend to forget.

Thanks for pointing out the fallacy of trying to read 100s of books, seems to come next to trying to read infinite jest just to check a mark or brag about it.

The reality is that the majority of non fiction books are written by authors with perverse incentives - as a writer you can mostly make money by writing a complete book, whether or not you have a books worth of things to say about the topic. My approach has been to try and read 1 or two books a year but make sure they matter. The few books I do read, I remember most of their good parts and find them valuable and rewarding. Almost all of my friends and colleagues who are self proclaimed voracious readers never seem the wiser from it, not like they can recount any specific instance of a book affecting their life or decisions in any way at least.

All of this is about non fiction of course, fiction books are a whole another animal!

I agree completely with most of what you said. The whole system of making books having a minimum number of words doesnt help at all.

And I agree with the fiction part, I know and have witnessed people who have been reading fiction throughout their whole life. As an adult, they enjoy and can easily finish a fiction book in one day. But most of them cannot do the same with non-fiction books. I am at the opposite. I can go through a non-fiction really fast, but would take forever and rarely enjoy reading fiction.

I do notice that too, that some books have really valuable insights and can kinda stand the test of time. Some are just like iterations of multiple books out there thats just retold in a different way

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