

A new system for reading - restreitinho
http://restreitinho.com/reading/

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claudius
> Respect the attic.

I always found this about the single most obvious faux-pas of Sherlock Holmes
– if you give your brain enough time to properly organise the data, it does
have (nearly) infinite storage. Choosing carefully what to read and what to
ignore only leads to less information, in turn making it more difficult to
build links between different ‘information islands’ and hence retaining said
information more easily.

> Basically, if I don’t instantly fall in love with an article/book/blog, I
> stop reading and move on.

I don’t know the definition of ‘fall in love’ here, but this sounds rather
dangerous as well, as it makes it more difficult to learn actually _new_
things and supports living in one’s own little bubble of information.

> Getting informed is a means to an end, not an end in itself. And life’s too
> short for bad information.

But how to decide whether a given datum is ‘bad’ or ‘good’ information before
consuming said datum and linking it up with the rest of your memory? Maybe it
looks utterly senseless at the time you first read it, but it might well be
missing piece linking two large and so far separate areas together.

~~~
Vivtek
Yeah, that always bugged me about Holmes. He specifically restricted his
fields of knowledge to things that could help him solve cases - so how did he
know this in advance? He had encyclopedic knowledge of the muds of England,
for example, but Watson was shocked to find he had never heard of the
Copernican system of cosmology. So it's damn fortunate he was never engaged to
investigate anything involving an astronomer, right?

~~~
chewxy
That was just A Study in Scarlet. Which a lot of scholars think Holmes was
more-or-less trolling Watson. In the Valley of Fear Holmes remarked that all
knowledge was useful to him

source: I distinctly recalled using this as an argument against my dad when he
told me to focus :P

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blowski
> 30 pages is enough.

By this definition, you could end up filling your life with airport thrillers.
War and Peace has barely introduced a character by page 30, let alone got you
hooked.

~~~
1123581321
I hope I am not seeing something in the essay that isn't there, but I don't
think the 'hook' must be solely intra-textual a la new criticism/close
reading. Part of the appeal of War and Peace or Brothers Karamazov is that
it's a great book and an adventure to read. A mind prepared this way for an
epic should be hooked on the world-building establishment in the early pages.
It's still possible to decide it's not the right time to read a classic since
the reader might not have the historical context or a large enough vocabulary
or few enough distractions to get through dry but rewarding texts. The
difference between classics and informational writing is that the classics
should be put aside for later since there is no summary or conclusion that
provides the useful takeaways, and the material is timeless.

~~~
blowski
I do totally agree. The characters are some of the most beautiful ever
written, and I spent days and days in a hammock unable to tear myself away
from it.

But if I judged the book after just 30 pages, I probably would have said that
it was dry and boring with too many characters, and too little happening.

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jole
It makes sense for me. Btw, I was always wondering how it is possible that
there are no books on teaching how to code under 100 pages.

~~~
restreitinho
Sarcasm? :)

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jole
No no, not at all. Maybe I wasn't clear enough. Sometimes I get frustrated,
when f.e. I want to get concepts of a new programming language, and learn it
fast. I can't understand that f.e. it's so hard to find a good book/guide in
under 100 pages. But ok, that's for the technical books.

So, no sarcasm, I agree with you about the first 30 pages :)

~~~
StavrosK
<http://www.korokithakis.net/tutorials/python/>

And, in five-page book form! <https://leanpub.com/learn-python>

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laichzeit0
First 30 pages seems a bit too constricted depending on the book size. I like
to flip through the whole book while randomly reading a few pages here and
there to get a "feel" for it.

~~~
restreitinho
Yeah I had a great input about skipping that number and focusing on, say, 30%
of the total book. 30 pages in a 1000 pages book is nothing. I also find that
process of skimming the following pages to get a feel of it quite effective.
That's how I "went through" Tim Ferriss's "4-hour workweek", which quite
frankly is not a book for me. Not sure if there are fans here, no harm
intended.

------
_pmf_
> If the bird is the word, three must be the number.

I can't help but liking an essay that starts like that.

~~~
restreitinho
Ahahah thanks. :)

