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Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

Lord of the Rings. An absolutely genre-defining work, but if you read it, it's really friggin slow and not at all compatible with today's attention spans. It's not a demand for quality, it's a demand to be endlessly entertained without having to invest the time or have the patience to wait for a backstory to unfold. Which is fine, I'm opening my phone to doom scroll for a second too, I just don't think it's quality that's being sought-after, but instant-gratification dopamine-inducting entertainment. It's bad. Until I took the time to retrain my. brain, I couldn't read books because I didn't have the attention span for them.

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I think it's more a matter of investment vs. payoff. I read TLotR from beginning to end once and I liked it, but it's such a time sink for so little payoff that I wouldn't do it again. There's so much else I could do with that time instead. I'd rather put the movies in the background while I do something else over the course of nine hours, or maybe reread a specific bit I liked. It's not about instant gratification, it's that we're no longer constrained in our media selection. 70 years ago you might have reread the books right after finishing them because you had nothing else to do. That's not true today.

The Return of the King is particular has a real structure problem. Multiple endings after the actual ending. And then really the final wrapup/epilogue is in the Appendix. The movie tried to clean a lot of this up--most controversially by axing the scouring of the shire--but still didn't wholly succeed.

To be honest, the scouring is one of my favorite bits because it shows how much the main hobbits have grown over the course of their adventure. I think the multiple endings thing worked better in the book for multiple reasons. For one, you could tell at any time that there was still a considerable chunk left to go, so the narrative didn't create any false expectation that it was about to end. But also, unlike in the movie where it does the usual swelling soundtrack and post-climax wrap-up like it's about to finish but then just continues and does it again, I feel like the book doesn't do a literary equivalent of that at all. It doesn't feel like multiple endings, but rather multiple conclusions to separate story arcs, which is something the books do all throughout. The book is just forced to cram several right at the end, because it has to finish somehow. It's unfortunate that the structure didn't translate well to the big screen, at least not without cutting things out.

I'm not totally convinced but it's been a long time since I've read the books and at least accept that a book is better able to weave together multiple threads and story arcs than a film easily can.

I never read lord of the rings. I read the hobbit though.

The Tolkien work I struggled with was The Silmarillion. I understand it’s not much like the others and was a posthumous publication, but middle school me struggled to stay interested enough with the way it was structured.

I believe the Silmarillion was really more of reference type book originally so yeah not particularly something you sit down and read all the way through.

I went through a Tolkien phase but, yeah, the Silmarillion was a dutiful struggle.

It's like an 80 year old book written with an archaic style of English. It wasn't even popular when it came out.

Most media from the 1930s to 50s isn't popular anymore. Taste move on. Idk if you can simplify this to attention spans.

Any tips for this retraining?

Don't rush to retrain yourself: consider whether things are enjoyable, or just engaging, and give it time.

Not GP here, but I've gone through a similar brain reset exercise recently. There's no good way to do it, because it's essentially just dopamine deprivation. Caffeine withdrawal, internet withdrawal, gaming withdrawal - whatever stimulus you're using, you take it away and suffer for a while.

Quitting my corporate gig has also been massively helpful - our big tech overlords were committing Guantanamo level atrocities on our minds via Slack overload, and I will never return to that kind of environment. I'm barely exaggerating.

If you're a podcast kind of learner, Huberman has an episode on this "dopamine fasting" concept.

Read a bit in bed before sleeping, make this a daily habit; leave all electronic devices outside of your bedroom. No screens in bed; let your mind learn to accept that.

Start with books you can focus on now, gradually move on to more complex works. Don't feel bad about picking a genre which really draws you in. You don't have to read Dickens on day one (although he is a great writer, older works ask a lot in terms of focus and frame of reference, including some understanding of society back then and there), and it's fine to indulge in Young Adult fiction if that works for you (Harry Potter not too demanding to read, and pretty good too).

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