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Whenever I real long-form books, my mind will occasionally wander into other areas, while my eyes keep reading on. I'll have to continually go back and re-read what I feel like I've just read. This isn't just an internet-fueled lack of attention, it's how I've always read, and how I image most people read most of the time.

The difference is with a website, you can go investigate your immediate thoughts rather than committing to the re-read. It is lazier, maybe. It's probably not great if you want to learn something in depth and stay focused on it for long periods of time.

Typical mind fallacy is thinking that the way your mind operates is automatically how everyone's mind operate.

Well, I'm no freak of nature, either.

Wouldn't say it's about being 'normal' or a 'freak.'

If you haven't cultivated the habit of reading, it's not effortless (like most things). When things aren't effortless (or close thereto), its easy for an undisciplined mind to wander.

If it's something that you value, you will do it enough that it becomes effortless. Perhaps the author missed that point?

Though your point about cultivating the discipline is applicable, not all brains process data the same way, and its possible the posters habit is a factor of biology not effort.

"I'll have to continually go back and re-read what I feel like I've just read."

This is me.

"and how I image most people read most of the time."

I wish I knew if this were true. I've always felt that I have some sort of "disorder" or some form of ADHD or something that causes my mind to wander anytime I try to read a book. I'm a terribly slow reader for this reason (at least when it comes to books -- internet articles, for some reason, don't seem to have this same effect on me), and as a result, I've not read too many books at all. I mostly get my information in smaller bursts.

Come to think of it, whenever I see what I consider super long articles posted on HN, and a ton of discussion about how great the article was, I feel terribly inadequate that I can't read said article in less than an hour (or more). Short articles I'm fine with, it's the longer ones -- and books -- that I struggle with.

And it's certainly not the result of any "conditioning" from reading short internet articles all the time -- I've been like this since long before the era of blogs and HN.

Would love it if someone could shed some light on this.

Not for me, when I read I get lost in the book and it gets dark outside, the cats come and sleep on me, the street lights go on and I look up at 10pm and I've read half a novel.

It's a sense of peace I get from few other things in life.

This, or even watching a slow paced movie (the kind more common before 1990) is incredibly refreshing break from the modern distraction filled world.

Funny you should say that I watched terminator the other day in prep for the new one, forgotten how slow relatively action films used to be, I kinda miss that sometimes.

As I've gotten older and have less free time and there's so much more content out there, one practice I've come to accept is reading the wikipedia page and plot synopsis for a book/movie before starting watching something. In the same way I read HN comments before deciding whether to read the original article often times. Before wikipedia I would read the last chapters of books first.

I'm more worried about my time being spoiled than the plot being spoiled, and after all a good movie/book is even better the 2nd time around. This has allowed me to commit to watching or reading things I never would have before as I'd get bored (read: worried this is a waste of my time) 10 minutes into a slow moving movie.

But how does just reading the synopsis indicate if something is any good? Wouldn't you be better just looking at the IMDB score? Or are you looking out to avoid things with 'dumb' endings?

I love a well paced but slow film... some of them feel almost dream like, like poetry.

There's something awesome about the way you really get "into the universe" when you spend hours reading a book or binge watching a tv show. All of the events and characters are fresh in your brain and you see the connections you may have missed if there was a night's sleep and a day's work in between.

> > "and how I image most people read most of the time."

> I wish I knew if this were true.

I think it really depends on the book (or part of the book) you are reading. Often the start of a book will be designed to grab your attention, but its possible to lose interest part way through the book, or have to concentrate harder to finish chapters.

Its common - my high school English teacher told us about it way back many years ago.

The traditional three act structure means books and movies often start with plenty of action, pause the pace in the middle, where characters mostly talk or walk or think or remember rather than doing action stuff, and build up to a big climax with faster pacing at the end.

It's a very popular structure. But now that everyone seems to have ADHD, it's being replaced by episodic structures which end each chapter with a cliff hanger.

Episodic structure isn't new, but quite a few savvy writers have discovered it's a better fit for ebook publishing than traditional long form.

Look into nootropics.

You have summarized most of my experiences and observations of my reading habits.

I have tried reading long novels and I have rarely been able to read them efficiently with concentration the whole way, at first I would well up with a lot of self hatred when my friends could read the same books in lesser amounts of time, remembering a lot of interesting details and hold very insightful discussions about it later. I blamed myself for not having better concentration, for feigning interest in books and hundred other accusation that were only partly true.

But, I persevered and found that I could read short texts, remember them pretty well, think about them for some days and largely absorb the idea. I changed my reading habits. I started reading short stories, essays, academic papers and smaller technical books, but providing a lot of to time to reflect upon the material just read.

I stopped focusing on the book count and purely on maximizing the amount of impact produced by reading something.

I think there are two reasons I read. 1, i need to know something. This may be a pressing work concern, or just a genuine interest in something. A few weeks ago i read 40 pages on cocktail ice. 2, the author is really compelling. I've read quite a few novels that are just hard to put down.

I'd bet, you have no trouble with those cases. You may rifle through tech documentation till you read the paragraph or 10 that are relevant to your problem, but that part you can just breeze through. Because it matters I'd also bet there are a few books or stories you have no trouble with because the author has really drawn you in, and you care about what's happening, and it matters. If not, take a look at hemmingway or maybe chuck palahniuk. they both put a lot of effort into making short powerful stories. Survivor or invisible monsters might be worth a read.

Other stuff, well, my tolerance really depends on my level of curiosity. If i'm feeling particularly curious, i can read some pretty boring stuff, but not for a long time. Sometimes deep insights are hidden in boring words.

Anyway, you're not weird. People have different defaults. Most stuff i kind of grind through, and don't really soak up the full meaning. On the other hand, most writing is pretty bad, and isn't really worth that much effort. The vast majority of stuff is just rehashed restated rewritten copies of copies that contain enough essence of the original to give you a hint of that dopamine rush.

This sometimes happens to me if I am not in the mood, need to be doing something else, or if the book is badly written. Some text books need to be read with concentration.

But if something is good, it is more like a trance - I'll 'come to' hours later and need to be prodded with a stick if you want to interrupt me.

"Whenever I real long-form books, my mind will occasionally wander into other areas, while my eyes keep reading on. I'll have to continually go back and re-read what I feel like I've just read."

When that happens to me while reading a book often enough I decide the text is not for me and move to another book.

"The difference is with a website, you can go investigate your immediate thoughts rather than committing to the re-read. "

Funny, I would describe my most engaging readings of a book precisely by this sort of associative experience (unless it's fiction... which I don't actually read that much anymore).

That definitely sounds like a very mild but treatable form of language disorder to me. It might be too mild to be of interest to language disorder clinicians, but maybe you could try 'treat' yourself by setting up a long-term plan of progressively 'harder'/longer reading materials. Check out for instance Pearson's Developmental English series [1]. Might seem arduous and pointless; but if it increases your ability to read long-form comfortably, it could make an enormous difference to your life.

[1] http://www.pearsonhighered.com/educator/course/Advanced-Read...

> I'll have to continually go back and re-read what I feel like I've just read.

That's a feature, not a bug.

Limit your first reading to basic understanding of the plot and setting; ignore exploration of "deeper" themes until subsequent re-reads.

What I'm saying is that my eyes simply scan the words while I think of other things. There's no comprehension there, I'm just losing my place in the text.

Not saying you have it, but this is a common symptom of ADHD.

I'd recommend the book Driven to Distraction, it's pretty informative!

"I'll have to continually go back and re-read what I feel like I've just read. "

This happens to me sometimes, but its rare and usually means I'm tired or not interested in the subject matter. If I'm interested I'm glued to the page and won't break concentration for hours.

> 15 years ago, I read a dozen of C++ books cover-to-cover. Can someone today get similar levels of knowledge jumping around quality blog posts and watching youtube videos?

Not saying it's better or worse, but I'm willing to say that the understanding you'll get from blogs is going to be be different than from a long-form book.

Books get the benefit of knowing where they left off one chapter, and picking it up on the next. Unless you're reading a long series of posts on the same blog (which, in the limit, approaches reading a book), reading blog posts will lack that continuity, and I find them inferior for building up a basic understanding of a topic. What blogs do really well, IMO, is for teaching you well-isolated techniques, or other such limited-scope ideas.

Your experience with C++ And Golang are in no way, shape or form comparable. If you've been doing C++ for 15 years, Golang is a comparatively small learning curve. You just need to pick up on a few syntactic differences and you'll be at that basic level of competence that books will give you, and you're ready for the single-topic, specialized learning that you'll get from blogs.

Every single programming book in the world after you've read the first one:

Chapter 1: Simple types (um, could have done this in a page)

Chapter 2: Complex types (this too)

Chapter 3: How you can compile from the command line (even though no-one in their sane mind does this in this language)

Chapter 4: Inheritance (oh god, please stop)

Chapter 5: Conditional statements (no, for the love of god stop)

Chapter 6: Loops (right, I'm skipping some chapters)

Chapter 15: Trangonian Complex Pulsar boofs and why you should use them for everything (even though no-one does and never will because they suck)

Chapter 16: How to make a program (this chapter should have been the entire book)

Chapter 17: How to debug (lots of hand waving and no actual details on how to actually debug the program)

Appendix: Listing every word used in the book in alphabetical order and on which pages each was mentioned.

CD: With a 3 year out of date IDE, possibly abandoned, and if you're really lucky some fairly benign malware

Back in the day that was every dèlphi book to a tee.

It looks like you only read Deitel & Deitel books.

>Appendix: Listing every word used in the book in alphabetical order and on which pages each was mentioned.

That's the Index. The Appendix is where they list FTP and web sites that are long defunct, sample code for interfacing with a discontinued piece of hardware, and of course an ASCII table.

"Learn x in -1 days" books follow that pattern, but original ones?

Not this one: http://www.stroustrup.com/3rd_tbl.html Or this one: http://www.forth.com/starting-forth/index.html Or this one: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/toc/toc.html Or this one: http://jonaquino.blogspot.com/2010/04/table-of-contents-for-...

In general, once you know a few different languages and want to learn a new one, read the language spec or a good book on the language.

Good blog posts are an option, too, but those are hard to discriminate from bad ones, and run a greater risk of being incomplete (hm: here's and idea for a new product: a service that ranks blogs for accuracy, completeness and timeliness (K&R C is accurate and complete, but if you want to learn C now, it shouldn't be the only thing you read, and possibly not even a thing you read))

It was a joke.

who would pay $25.99-$54.99 for any of these ten pages?

http://learnxinyminutes.com/ - the Java article is 1500 words :) and, I gather, sufficient to get started.

I'm with you 100% on this. To me blog posts and internet articles are really good for getting insight into a particular issue you're currently having, or a to be exposed to a bit of interesting trivia. I find books to be far superior if you want to maximize your knowledge ingestion for a given set of time.

I once tried to give somebody my C# 4.0 In a Nutshell book when I upgrade to the 5.0 book. "Why do I need that, I can just look at MSDN?". Hrmm.

"Why do I need that, I can just look at MSDN?"

MSDN has all of it, everything that should be documented. It is easy to get lost, not knowing what and how much should be taken first. The value of a book in such case is to have its author as your guide (as in a tutorial, if you will, but a little bit more than that).

I cannot count what I have read. Growing up (6-12) I had no access to digital tech, apart from a BBC micro, no television, no comics, no games other than chess. The only available recreational activities were reading or spending time outdoors.

I did both in droves, often simultaneously, and it was bad enough that I'd often be caught reading a book under my desk in class. Mind, the school library only comprised "literature" - no kids books, Harry Potter was a gleam in jk's eye, it was Tolstoy, Homer, Proust, Euripides, Dickens, whatever a nine year old is supposed to read.

Come to think of it, reading in class was only punishable by the book being confiscated until the end of class. I remember in my miserable year of middle school in the U.S. being caught reading, and they not only confiscated the book but suspended me. It was a serious infraction in their eyes, as you were only allowed to read pre-approved books on school grounds.

Perhaps people don't read because educational systems for the most part actively discourage it. Initiatives which focus on getting kids to read more tend to be about appearances and metrics, not kids reading. They also tend to turn reading into this exotic, "other", task/chore in the minds of most due to shit like "you must read 500 words tonight" - I remember in 7th grade kids bursting into tears in response to that sort of thing, so well had their aversion therapy taken root.

Me, I'd ban kids from all except the most primitive digital technology until their teens, as well as all other sources of manufactured "fun". Reading is fun, but we have forgotten this. Now it has to be loud and sparkling and expensive, or it's just not fun for our crack-addled minds.

I remember along with one or two others being allowed to read on my own as we where so much faster/better at reading than our peers. I had a raeding age of 20 at 10

Thease days we would be forced into the Ofstead approved learning outcomes - or alternatively gotten rid of to game the schools figures

> you were only allowed to read pre-approved books on school grounds.

Wow, that is just horrendous.

Yeah. Spending a year in the US education system was an eye-opener. Sciath (Science/Math) and Soclish (Social Studies & English) were the two topics. "Elite" school, 7th grade. Mindbleached kids, conformity was king, everything, everything resulted in hysterical breathlessness. Couldn't get out of there soon enough.

They really didn't know what to do with an 11 year old who would sit there reading Aristotle in ancient greek under the desk - apart from suspend me, repeatedly, and breathing a big sigh of relief when I told them to stick it and went back to school in the UK - they admitted that they would have expelled me had I not left... which reflects the American approach to problem solving - if you can't figure it out, pretend it doesn't exist.

When I was an introverted teenager I read 500 books in one summer. My mom tracked them all in a notebook because she wanted to know just what exactly I was reading.

To this day I have zero difficulty finishing a book. My problem has always been stopping. I'm practically clinically unable to disengage from a book once I've started. Enough so that I have to meter my reading to prevent myself from disappearing for months on end. Not even the internet has made a dent in that. In some ways I wish I were a little more like the author. It would be nice to not feel a little worried when I start a book that I'll go so deep I'll miss something in the world around me.

Umm, 500 books in one summer? Yeah right! What kind of books? Were they long? That's over 4 books per DAY! I don't think so.

why, because you haven't done it? your tone certainly doesn't convince me you have much else as a point.

Well, no, I don't have MUCH else as a point. If you're reading that fast you probably not going to read as well. Obviously we're not going for perfect retention here but still. That's a ridiculous amount of text to go through in such a short span of time. I feel like at that point it starts being less about reading and more about adding numbers to a list. But I digress.

No, I was a huge bookworm as a kid and I read almost as much as that in the summers. It wasn't about racking up points, just pleasure reading. When you are reading for fun and not for learning, you can go for a lot longer without getting tired and skip all the boring parts. It's not that much different than burning through an entire season of your favorite TV show, or through an entire single-player game, in a weekend.

You're assuming zaphar reads/comprehends the same way you do. I can't read that fast period, and if i'm reading fast don't comprehend as much, but I have first hand experience with how good zaphar's comprehension is when he is reading very fast. It has some to do with how deeply he concentrates by nature, something he was born with that I wasn't.

The sizes varied but most of them were fiction. One day I read seven in an evening. It's not that special. It was the result of a highly insular life spent not doing much other than read.

Seven books in one evening? I cannot fathom such a thing. Were these "books" of the comic variety perchance?

Nope, I believe they were teen mystery books probably about 100-200 pages long. I read pretty fast.

Wish I could read that fast...

I dunno, I think 4 books per day is do-able if the books are shorter and are an easy read. When I was about 13 I read Red Storm Rising from cover to cover in a day. I checked Amazon just now and it's 830 pages in paperback form.

Years later I spent hours getting through the first few chapters of Godel, Escher, Bach. It was such slow going, and required so much thought, that I ultimately gave up.

It is quite possible to read 500 books over 100 days as a secluded teenager if one is reading mostly 200-300 page books and most of the books do not require perfect attention to detail.

A proficient reader can easily read 2 pages a minute, so lets say 1200 pages/2=600 minutes, so 10 hours a day. Seems quite doable for a bored teenager without a computer/tablet/phone/outside activity.

I don't think I ever did more than 3 books a day, but still possible to do what OP said.

I think many/most of us has have read a page turner in one late night session.

Well, I guess you are right. I doubt the speed would be consistent over 10 hours but I can easily imagine a bored teenager could sleep 7-8 hours and read most of the rest of the time. So the number drops from maybe about 500 words per minute to something less than that. And that still allows some great comprehension.

Yep, I had a similar problem and had to deliberately not read more fiction because I had to study engineering and stuff. Now, with the busyness of life, its a lot easier though. Like you said, the introversion may have made it more attractive to just escape into the excitement of a fiction book.

"15 years ago, I read a dozen of C++ books cover-to-cover. Can someone today get similar levels of knowledge jumping around quality blog posts and watching youtube videos?"

That's a real problem. You can't write and sell a book for a fast-changing language. (Go may have stabilized enough for a printed book. A useful Rust book is impossible right now.) A writer and publisher can't invest the time and effort to produce a book that will be obsolete when it ships.

This is why it would be neat to have the book in an online format that can be updated from time to time. Something more than a blog, manual or wikipedia. That's in case one wants a book NOW and wouldn't want to wait until the language stabilizes.

Check out O'Reilly early release books.

Over the years, I've found myself naturally reading fewer and fewer technology-specific books but more and more books on concepts and fundamentals. I find that the internet has the most up-to-date and well-organized information about specific technologies, but that the "classics" do a much better job of motivating and explaining deeper material than typical internet resources.

Thanks for the trivia about Art Garfunkel! I do much the same thing on Goodreads, but I started fairly recently, so I'm sure I'm missing a few.

It depends.

People used to read 500 page books on compilers. Would you read an equivalently long blog article on compilers?

With the Internet we've gained the ability to more readily acquire knowledge in little bits at a time, over a lot of areas. But most of us are incapable of reading a really huge article in depth. And thus we get more shallow levels of understanding, but across a wider range of topics. This explains a lot of arguments on the internet.

> But most of us are incapable of reading a really huge article in depth

It's not a "capability", it's a skill. The problem is it's becoming less and less important in everyday life for most people, which in turn makes them abandon its training. As with most skills, without training you become worse at it with time.

I'm not sure if that's good or bad thing that you can now learn without having mastered this skill. Is the understanding you gain via lots of small chunks of knowledge worse than the one you get from reading The Dragon Book? I don't know; looks like a good topic for research in cognitive science.

Personally I do like reading long and involved texts, but I too learned to enjoy it before the Internet became popular. I don't know if I'd be equally interested in such texts had I started just a few years later.

You mean, have I read these books when the entire thing is put on the web? Yes.

> With all that said, I'm not convinced that people "should" read long form books. I read all those books because I personally enjoyed it. I just can't say with confidence that others should do the same or they will be "missing out" on some unquantifiable intellectual nirvana.

Isn't the point is that the author of the article actually does enjoy reading books. And feels it's helpful for him personally? And that despite that he'd not managed to read in a satisfying manner for years; because he'd let him get to "addicted" to short term distractions?

I feel with the author; I still manage to read more than five books, but there's weeks were that's not the case. To a large degree because I let myself get distracted in a similar way. Without it being beneficial to myself or others.

When I was a teenager, I had time to read constantly. Now that I'm an adult, with a job that demands long hours, a wife and kid, and responsibilities, my entire day is blocked out hour-by-hour in the calendar. I simply have no time to pour through a 1,000 word article let alone a 500 page book. I don't even watch movies anymore. It's quicker to just head to Wikipedia and get the gist of it. Quite honestly with 90% of media out there today, the 2 sentence summary is enough.

>With all that said, I'm not convinced that people "should" read long form books. I read all those books because I personally enjoyed it. I just can't say with confidence that others should do the same or they will be "missing out" on some unquantifiable intellectual nirvana.

This "unquantifiable intellectual nirvana" was used to be called "civilization".

You won't get very many perspectives from pre-1995 without reading books, though.