
The Bookish Life: How to Read and Why - diodorus
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/11/the-bookish-life
======
StrictDabbler
As I read this piece I was able to predict the direction it would go and the
evidence that would be presented for each opinion. By the end I had been
neither surprised nor enlightened by anything presented in it.

The author likes old books, dislikes digital reading devices and audiobooks,
dislikes most things written since his own birth unless they were written
about the western canon or by people trained entirely in the canon, is
uninterested in reading books from other cultural traditions, and is
completely self-satisfied with his extensive and erudite form of intellectual
provincialism.

It is an infuriating piece that describes a small mind that looks large to the
consciousness inside it. I would propose this alternate subtitle: "How Reading
the Western Canon Allowed Me to Achieve an Entirely Unremarkable Relationship
with Culture and Thought"

If you haven't read the article yet I'd recommend you not bother.

~~~
komali2
Similar thoughts here. Furthermore, the author's writing style is annoyingly
old fashioned and unnecessarily long.

>Like the man—the fellow with the name Solomon, writing under the pen name
Ecclesiastes—said, “Of the making of many books there is no end; and much
study is a weariness of the flesh

Why not just "Solomon, writing under the pen name 'Ecclesiastes', said..."?

> I recall some years ago a politician whose name is now as lost to me as it
> is to history who listed reading among his hobbies, along with fly-fishing
> and jogging.

What was the point of this? Why not just "reading is my hobby"?

> But for the road to acquiring the body of unspecialized knowledge that
> sometimes goes by the name of general culture, sometimes known as the
> pursuit of wisdom, no map, no blueprint, no plan, no shortcut exists, nor,
> as I hope to make plain, could it.

Had to read this 3 times to parse the grammar.

~~~
edflsafoiewq
There always seems to be someone on HN willing to bemoan any prose style that
aspires above the perfect perfunctoriness of API documentation.

~~~
confounded
Orwell would have written _superb_ API documentation.

(Even if every deprecated end-point was described having a faint smell of
boiled cabbage.)

------
jl6
Western education drills into us the mantra that reading books is virtuous. It
certainly is something that children need to learn how to do, like eating and
sleeping. But like eating and sleeping there are limits to the benefit you
will get from reading books, and I don’t think this is widely recognised. The
prevailing opinion still seems to be that reading is unreservedly Good For
You.

Why do I say that? Because reading is ultimately a form of consumption. The
quality and quantity of that reading matters, just like it does for eating and
sleeping. Someone who spends all day reading isn’t necessarily in any better
position than someone who spends all day playing video games.

Don’t get me wrong, I do love and recommend reading books - but the right
amount of the right stuff.

~~~
Emma_Goldman
There is a big difference between 'reading for pleasure and self-education',
and 'reading for a specific purpose'. I agree that one can do too much of the
former but I'm not so sure about the latter. There's plenty of academics and
writers, of all stripes, who would not be able to do what they do if they did
not spend most of their time reading.

------
ggillas
The best reading breakthrough I had was to eliminate my need to complete a
book.

If I've lost the plot, I throw the book away. If I've got the advice author's
gist, I move on.

It's allowed me to enjoy reading fiction again, get to the books I need in the
moment, and move faster through my reading list.

~~~
elboru
I learned to do that not too long ago, I started reading Asimov’s Fundation
trilogy, but I struggled picking the book from my desk every single time, I
was supposed to love it, everyone loves Asimov, so I had to love it too, but I
just couldn’t, I felt guilty. Then I realized that the point of reading a
novel was to enjoy it, if I was not enjoying it then I was just reading in a
pretentious way. Since then I only keep reading if I like what I’m reading or
if it will help me in any way.

~~~
Nav_Panel
Honestly... I grew up reading Asimov, but I didn't read Foundation until my
20s, and I was... underwhelmed. I still adore his short stories (I often re-
read them and discover something new), and I have fond memories of his Robot
Detective novels and the standalone book "The Gods Themselves". But I also
didn't love Foundation. So, don't feel bad.

------
burtonator
OK.. .shameless self plug.

[https://getpolarized.io/](https://getpolarized.io/)

We announced it here the other day but we specifically designed it for people
very very serious about reading.

For me I put all my books in it and everything is manageable, I can go back to
them, see what I've read, keep all my notes in one place, etc.

~~~
stepvhen
Perhaps I missed it, but i didn't see anything about physical copies, i.e. it
seems this is focused (exclusively?) for the ditigal reader. Is that the case?

------
eatonphil
I wrote (what I consider to be) a slightly more accessible post last month on
the same topic after I really picked up reading books four years ago.

My argument is that reading is a must for profressionals to learn and remember
the ability to distinguish biases, trends, novelty, etc.

Furthermore, I don't recommend "literature" as a starting point but must-read
books in your field. It can be easier to start because the material is closer
and because it doesn't feel like reading was a waste of time.

Afterward diversifying to economics, psychology, domestic and foreign history,
management, etc. and fiction become easier to make time for and easier to see
the benefits.

[http://notes.eatonphil.com/why-and-how-to-read-
books.html](http://notes.eatonphil.com/why-and-how-to-read-books.html)

------
internet555
That was a pretty good essay but some of the words were too big and I didn’t
know them

------
tapanjk
> How can one know if a book is ­interesting until one has read it; memorable
> until time has or has not lodged it in one’s memory; rereadable until the
> decades pass and one feels the need to read it again and enjoys it all the
> more on doing so?

Well, 'interesting' is an opinion that an individual forms after having
experienced something. In other words, there is no way for someone to not ever
read an 'uninteresting' book. They must first read, to find out.

~~~
farazzz
“If an interesting book exists but there is no one to read it, is it
interesting at all?”

------
eksemplar
I think the premise that you can’t obtain a list to be cultivated is extremely
wrong.

That’s exactly what happens in a danish gymnasium, where the content is meant
to enlighten as much as educate, and the difference between choosing the
“regular” humanism route takes you so much further than one of the technical
routes.

I know because I took the technical route and I married into a family who took
the humanities. I’ve spent years catching up on philosophy, art, history,
psychology and culturally important fiction, and I’m still not really part of
the cultivated conversation when they really go at it.

I don’t mind, they can’t talk math or engineering or even business management,
but they’re all very similar because they followed a list.

I’ve often wondered why there aren’t any easily available lists on the
internet, because it’s really just the works you’d go through in your four-
five year path, that’s shared among all humanities.

Obviously there is a difference between reading platon on your own and reading
it in a curated environment where you can discuss its meaning with your
teacher and your peers, but don’t tell me those teachers couldn’t compile you
a list.

I think the real issue is that we killed blogs. A route to cultivation isn’t
going to pop-up in a Facebook discussion, and if it is, then it won’t be
searchable. And teachers or members of the humanities in general, seem to be
much less likely to have an online jourbal which covers their professional
life than people in tech. I read a news paper with a books section, and you’ll
see this exact issue covered often in regards to new works, but those articles
are only available on print or in an online archive you have to pay to access
or even search in.

So the lists are absolutely there, we just can’t access them outside of our
educational system or closed discussions had by the people who wouldn’t need
the list.

~~~
shanehoban
If you were to create a list based on your readings, I'd be very interested in
having a copy.

~~~
eksemplar
With my rant, maybe I should, though the majority of it would be Danish works
as I’m Danish.

Until that I can recommend Bill Gates lists, it’s a really great resource for
modern international works. Some of the recommendations in gates notes are
very humanitarian, but others, like Sapiens, have made it into the book shelf
of most cultivated people I know and I only read it because it was recommended
in gates notes.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
I'm not a big reader but I've read a fair few books I saw on Gates Notes and
they've all been right up my street ("Sapiens" included). Great
recommendation.

------
mcguire
" _This is the first of your three free articles for the month._

" _READ WITHOUT LIMITS_ "

Irony, thy name is this website.

------
person_of_color
Is there a way to quantify the positive benefits of reading? I would like to
track it just like any other variable (body fat, resting heart rate, etc.)

~~~
TheDong
The benefit of many things is neither well understood nor objectively
measurable.

How do you track the value of friends? The value of meditation?

Heck, how do you track the value (negative or positive) you get from reading
this site?

Each of those things affects your mental state in some way, but we have no
good way to directly track mental state.

We can track the effect of a good mental state by observing that one is more
productive, or marks higher on a happiness scale, but those are second-order
effects and there will always be many confounding factors.

We still can't evaluate intelligence nor longevity well enough to track any
changes in those regards, and that is likely the area you would need to
evaluate for tracking the impact of reading.

If reading makes you feel more content or more knowledgeable about subjects,
or if anecdotally things you read seem helpful in conversation or in life,
that's probably as good as you'll get.

I personally think that attempting to track and optimize even the most minute
details of life is ultimately detrimental, but that's a rant for another time.

~~~
person_of_color
Tracking mental state - that's a good idea!

