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Comment by frosted-flakes | Hacker News Reader

My experience matches those of others in this thread. I barely read anymore and find it difficul to focus. Largely, my tastes have calcified and narrowed quite a lot. I used to be an adventurous reader and always tried random books I saw on the library shelves, but these days I find it difficult to get into something new, and if I do read a book I've probably read it before.

I think if I just start reading it'll come back to me. Starting is the hard part. So like you I may as well start now instead of browsing HN. An hour a day is more than doable given how much time I waste here and elsewhere.

Good luck!

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One thing that seems to have helped some of my friends who have experienced the same issue of not wanting to read anymore is to find one particular book or style they liked before and go deep into that author's backlog or similar styles. And to add to that, don't be afraid of reading pulpy fiction; you're not trying to impress anybody with what you're reading, you're doing it for yourself. Enjoy it. Read young adult fiction, read Stephen King and James Patterson, read Beverly Cleary, whatever. As long as you're reading, you're building that bit of your attention span back, and you can move on from there to other things.

I fear there is a big subconscious element to it in "smart people" circles where it almost feels bad to be reading without learning.

I started reading Brandon Sanderson with this mindset and I'm loving it. Before I would only really read nonfiction but I would easily get distracted and didn't read much in practice. Now I'm reading like 100 pages a day and hopefully it improves my concentration. Even if it doesn't I'm really enjoying the books

Which books? I’ve only read his Wheel of Time books (the last 3 of the series). They were great, but I never picked up any of his other works.

His Mistborn series is a good place to start. Helped get me back into fantasy/sci-fi after a 15 year hiatus.

I'm currently reading the Stormlight Archives series, planning on continuing with Mistborn when I'm done.

Stormlight Archives are his latest and greatest. I'd recommend those if you were a wheel of time fan, or you could start with Mistborn. They're set in the same universe but it's not really necessary to have that background.

May I suggest the Expanse series. It’s I think a good “split the difference” book series. Not too pulpy, not too intellectually straining that I’m struggling to hold my attention like a Neal Stephenson book either.

I wholeheartedly second this recommendation. After struggling to read last year, I picked up the Expanse series and managed to break my rut. And the final book was released last month so you won't have to go through the months of waiting like I did.

> And to add to that, don't be afraid of reading pulpy fiction;

Amen. I have an unreasonably large collection of 40k books, they’re ace.

> I have an unreasonably large collection of 40k books, they’re ace.

Literally? That is, wasn't Ace the name of a "pulp" publishing house? Would be cool to have a collection of 40K of those... But I imagine even they never put out quite that many titles.

Games Workshop have their own publishing arm called Black Library, so ace reading but not published by Ace.

I strongly recommend this approach, it's exactly how I got myself back into reading. I started back by just picking up a super light read, then some fun novels from a couple authors I liked from back when I used to read a lot, and now I'm starting to branch out more again.

Like so many others in this thread I had completely stopped reading in favor of quick bites on the internet. One thing I've been surprised to notice with reading again is how deep the experience can be compared to an online article, even for a pretty light book.

So yeah, for anyone who misses books but is having trouble getting back to them, try picking up the first thing that looks fun, even of it's silly or easy compared to your favorite books in the past.

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