
Choose your reading carefully - bootload
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/jan/19/three-thousand-books-choose-reading-carefully
======
adamconroy
For me it should be careful not to forget about reading books. From ages 10 to
24 I would have averaged at least one book a week. Then my internet addiction
surfaced. Since then I have probably averaged 2 books a year, but at the same
time I have probably read more words on average per week than before. The
problem is that 80% of what I read on the internet is piffle or at best mental
chewing gum. I've recently started reading books again and I cant believe I
had forgotten how rewarding it is. No time to read anyone else's comments
sorry, I'm going back to the engaging story of Karl Ove.

------
intopieces
I mostly disagree with this article. Reading only what you like is not a
challenge at all. The real challenge is reading works that you disagree with,
with ideas that make you think and change your perception. In the age of
predictive searchand targeted advertisements, the last thing we should be
doing is encouraging people to stay within their own bubble.

~~~
peteretep

        > The real challenge is reading works that you disagree
        > with, with ideas that make you think and change your
        > perception.
    

I think you're wrongly conflating enjoyment and agreement.

I subscribe to The Spectator, which is an exceptionally well-written, urbane
and articulate equivalent to Fox News. I disagree with almost everything I
read in it: it's Islamophobic, classist, popularist, chauvinistic, misogynist,
and I occasionally throw it against the wall in disgust, but I _enjoy_ reading
it, because it's well written and well argued. It's challenging, and it forces
me much out of my comfort zone, and I enjoy having my thinking challenged, and
I enjoy the silent arguments in my head with the authors.

Conversely (and ironically, given the source) I stopped reading The Guardian.
I agree with most of the politics, but it's so _whiney_. It's often poorly
written, poorly argued, and snipey.

The article suggests reading books you _enjoy_, not ones you agree with, and
the difference is important.

~~~
alexhawdon
I can identify with this.

As is typical when I started college (UK college; 16 year's old) I became more
politically engaged and found my views tended toward the left. I read the
Guardian but before long realised that sagely nodding along to their 'right-
on' articles wasn't doing anything to expand or challenge my world view so
switched to The Times. My views on some subjects changed and now I'm afraid I
too find the whiney, hand-wringing tone of the Guardian ( _especially_ Comment
is Free... dear God.) a massive turn-off.

------
mindcrime
I agree with the sentiment of this post, but strangely enough, I can't recall
very many books that I've read, that I consider a complete "waste" to have
read. Even the books I didn't enjoy quite as much, I usually gained something
from reading. And the thing is, you never _really_ know ahead of time what
will click for you and what won't.

And then there's the issue of "why" do you read. Are you reading for
enjoyment? Well then give me Dean Koontz, Stephen King, Lee Child, David
Baldacci, Vince Flynn, Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, Charles Stross, etc. all day
long. Are you reading for social commentary? Then read Ayn Rand, Tom Wolfe,
Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, etc. Are you reading to "improve your mind"
or "broaden your thinking?" Great, read David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon,
etc.

Classics? Sure, read classics if they have value to you. I don't think anyone
should feel compelled to read classics just because somebody said they "ought"
to have read them. This is where my "life is too short filter" kicks in. I'll
read works I anticipate liking, or anticipate gaining _some_ sort of value
from. I won't waste my time reading something for no better reason than to
satisfy the whims of some judgmental, pretentious asshole.

~~~
kevinskii
At the risk of sounding like a pretentious asshole, over the past few years
I've been reading the classics I was forced to in high school and college and
hated at the time, along with many "new" ones. Now books like _Moby Dick_ ,
_The Brothers Karamosov_ , and even _Pride and Prejudice_ are oddly just as
entertaining as the works of Koonts, King, etc. This might simply be because I
love fiction but hardly ever read it anymore. Or maybe the relative excitement
of everything simply increases as I become more boring in my old age.

~~~
firebones
There are a couple of things going on here.

First, when you're young, your life experiences in the world are less varied,
so you can fail to appreciate many of the more subtle interactions in those
works which you pick up on when you're older. That's why the classics offer so
much re-readability. You're a different person each time you read them, and
bring different perceptions and knowledge to bear. It's also why fantasy and
science fiction has broader appeal, especially when you're younger--the real-
world experience matters less, and it is the creation of these worlds that
sets much of that background context that you're missing at those ages.

Second and similarly, the more you read, the better reader you become. This
applies to artistic media like movies too. I remember the difference between
my ability to follow the plot in movies as a kid versus as a young adult
versus as an adult. Subtext and complications not appreciated at a young age
become much more apparent the more "good" stuff you watch.

Take something like "Miller's Crossing". I saw this when it first came out and
focused mostly on the acting and the events unfolding, but didn't really get
into the motivations and missed a couple of the implications. Watching it
again more recently, a whole new level opened up. I wanted to share it with my
high school kid to broaden his horizons a bit, but I realized that even those
plot points I took away the first time would require explanation because he
doesn't really have enough experience inferring implied motivation of
characters.

It seems like the "classics" become classics because they are written to
appeal to all of these levels and can be revisited many times. Perhaps
introducing these at a young age simply gets that first exposure out of the
way, even if all the subtext is lost.

------
WalterBright
These days I no longer feel compelled to finish a book I started.

Most books really aren't worth the time to read.

~~~
ytturbed
I have to agree. Sometimes I think I'm not disciplined enough. But every now
and then I start a book which is so interesting and vital that I'm compelled
to go all the way through at top speed, with later re-reads. I'm thrilled and
altered as a result. That's what reading is like for me now. Unfinished books
no less than unordered books are part of the search and nothing to be ashamed
of.

~~~
lugg
I wish somebody taught me this in highschool.

I'd be a very different person than I am today.

------
SwellJoe
Oddly enough, I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and it was Octavia
Butler novels that made me think about it (which the author of this article
mentions as something she'd like to spend more time on). It struck me that
it's taken me nearly half my life to get around to reading Octavia Butler; how
that happened for a rabid scifi fan, I don't know. But, she's amazing, in the
same class of writer as Asimov, Herbert, Atwood, Clarke, and Bradbury.

Though I also like Joseph Heller...so, I probably won't choose Butler over
Heller, but I'll continue to read both, until the supply has run out.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
Heller does not have that many titles. Catch-22 is a towering work but the
others are still all good.

------
placebo
Books are just one aspect of the larger question of how to prioritise what you
spend your time on given a limited life span. It's good to refresh that
question once in a while...

------
tmuir
After reading a string of books that basically did nothing for me, and then
reading a book that completely enveloped me and messed with my head (House of
Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski), I've made a a point of giving books about
50-100 pages to grab my attention, and then moving on if I'm not interested.

I do seek out books from lists like "100 greatest books of the 20th century"
and similar, but it doesn't bother me in the slightest to say that War and
Peace was dry, repetitive, and completely uninteresting, or that Ulysees' and
Gravity's Rainbow's prose were so incoherent, I couldn't make it even 50 pages
in either book. On the other hand, The Brothers Karamozov is easily one of the
top three books I've ever read, so I don't think its an aversion to classic
literature in general.

I think using other people's opinions of books is a good starting point for
finding books to read. But I derive no enjoyment whatsoever from knowing that
someone else likes the music, or books, or movies that I like, so why should I
feel guilty or question my tastes when I disagree with even the most highly
regarded opinions?

~~~
acjohnson55
At the same time, some books take a while to develop. The first third of
Catch-22 was a struggle for me. I found it painfully slapstick. Once I finally
got into the groove, the second third was a joy. But the final third was
absolutely brilliant.

~~~
tmuir
I think I'd rather miss out on a few slow developers than constantly hold on
to false hope that something will get better. It seems to me that the latter
is much more common than the former. Being more selective will result in
reading more books, and hopefully enjoying more books.

------
gdubs
Interesting how things keep coming back to Carl Sagan's Cosmos recently -- I
don't have the exact episode at hand, but he makes this point while standing
in the New York Public Library. Pointing to a shelf of books, smaller than one
might imagine, he says something along the lines of "The trick is knowing
which books to read."

------
thret
"I only enjoyed about 700. The other 300 were books I felt I had to read;
classics that everyone told me I was a fool to miss..."

Classics are just the books that millions of people, over dozens of
generations and hundreds of years, have enjoyed more than other books. Of
course that is the list you should start from.

~~~
learc83
I don't think that's true at all. Sure many classics are great, but what is
and isn't considered a "classic" is dictated to a large extent by what
literature teachers choose to teach, and it is heavily biased towards what
literature teachers find enjoyable.

Classics definitely aren't picked because millions of people over dozens of
generations have enjoyed them more than other books. If that were the case,
high school students would spend a year just reading Agatha Christie.

And I can count on one hand the number of science fiction and fantasy books we
read in high school and college literature classes (1984, Brave New World, and
Fahrenheit 451).

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
The criterion isn't 'enjoyable' \- it's 'improving.'

There's a strange belief that reading certain books will _make your mind
better._ (For ''better', read 'more middle class' \- at least, that's how it
works in the UK.)

It may even be true:

[http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/07/reading...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/07/reading-
good-book-make-better-person-nathan-filer-costa)

There's an entire series of books by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu where
he pulls apart culture as a symbol of status and social distinction. He's well
worth reading on the topic. (But being middle class, I would say that...)

A lot of people miss the fact that literature is about teaching moral lessons.
If you read books about novel writing, you'll see that some recommend that you
start with a premise - which is a moral point you want to make.

You can then use the writing to dramatise the premise. This is more persuasive
than stating it outright as an opinion, and also gives the book a focus it
wouldn't otherwise have.

This is a slightly old-fashioned view now, but I think it applies to many old-
fashioned classics - maybe not so much to modern fiction, a lot of which is
either escapist or nihilistic or horrific for the sake of it.

1984, Brave New World, and F451 all have a strong premise, IMO.

~~~
ashark
As a mostly-sic-fi reader who later broadened his horizons to include lots of
classic literature, I think a lot of sci-fi fans don't have a great sense of
how "good" sci-fi writing compares with the sorts of things that end up in the
literary canon. Often the basic craft of the writing isn't even up to the
standards of a typical "canonical" work (see: Asimov, with his hopelessly flat
characters and dialogue), let alone the finer qualities that take a work from
"a fun read" to _sublime_.

~~~
learc83
This is pure hogwash. Literary fiction is just another genre of fiction, not
something that stands above other genres. There are serious literary authors
who have branched into genre fiction who agree with me. Read over this
interview with Michael Chabon [1].

This is like complaining that music from the 80s is so much better than music
from today because you've cherry picked a few dozen gems from an entire
decade.

[1] [http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/27/entertainment/ca-
cha...](http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/27/entertainment/ca-chabon27)

~~~
RobertKerans
No, it's more like complaining that a very small set of music cherry-picked
over a very long period of time, from hundreds years of music, is better than
the majority of music from today. Which isn't a complaint, it's a
straightforward observation. The parent didn't say 'literary fiction' in
general.

~~~
learc83
No it's exactly like complaining that there is no good music being made today
because the average new song isn't as good as the best song from the 80s.

My complaint is that in most cases people are comparing average Science
Fiction to the best of Classical Literature, but this tells you nothing about
the best of Science Fiction.

Sure the average Science Fiction novel isn't as good as the best classical
literature. But that's not the implication of the original comment. The
implication is that Science Fiction is inferior--it's meant for entertainment,
not capable of holding up to serious literature. Science Fiction is merely
enjoyable, not _sublime_.

------
austerity
So she was already reading while driving and _then_ started reading
compulsively. That's some serious book addiction.

I'm an exact opposite of the author: can never pick a book because of fear it
won't be "worth my time" and end up looking at pictures of cute animals
instead.

------
edpichler
Living in a abundant world, I know that I will not have time to enjoy it all.
My strategy is to prioritize.

I realized that I will not have enough time to read all the books I want,
watch all the Youtube videos I like, play all the games I want, do all the
things I wish.

Every time I finish something I ask to myself "What is the most important
subject to me at this moment", and I watch, read, play about it.

If I'm on a cinema, or reading a book that I realize it's not good or I'll not
like, or just lose interest, I simply leave it, because life is too short for
bad books, or bad movies.

------
known
If you don't read a newspaper you are uninformed. If you do read a newspaper,
you are misinformed.

------
peteretep
I feel very lucky to have been brought up in a house where reading was never
fetishized, or necessarily encouraged, but my parents and siblings did it
incessantly.

Reading was a leisure activity, rather than some kind of moral imperative. As
a result, I tend to ditch books I'm not enjoying after ~ 50-100 pages, and I
tend to reread books I've enjoyed a lot.

I used to have a slight issue with continuing to read books where I wanted to
know what happened, but wasn't enjoying them. Films too. Wikipedia plot
summaries have solved this!

------
sireat
In the end it does not matter whether you re-read A. Christie's complete works
thrice and did not finish Brothers Karamazov or vice versa.

Personally, I have a hard time not finishing a book, for example I can't
decide whether I want to continue reading Gone Girl past half. This book is
written cleverly yet somehow disappointing after the first big twist(it came
too early imho).

One strategy I employ is reading three or four books at a time, one sci-fi,
one mystery, one science, one philosophy one political and so on.

------
jasim
It's not that you expect anything in particular from this particular book.
You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of
anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the
expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from
journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know
that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst. This is the conclusion you
have reached, in your personal life and also in general matters, even
international affairs.

What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other
field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful
pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of
books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn't
serious.

So, then, you noticed in a newspaper that "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler"
had appeared, the new book by Italo Calvino, who hadn't published for several
years. You went to the bookshop and bought the volume. Good for you.

In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you
were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way
through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which
were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you
know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend
for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes
Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To
The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer
girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books
That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But
Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them
and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others
You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're
Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can
Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read
Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the
fortress, where other troops are holding out: the Books You've Been Planning
To Read For Ages, the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success, the
Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment, the Books You
Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case, the Books You Could Put Aside
Maybe To Read This Summer, the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your
Shelves, the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not
Easily Justified.

Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array
that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but
this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long
Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread and the Books You've Always Pretended To
Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them.

With a zigzag dash you shake them off and leap straight into the citadel of
the New Books Whose Author Or Subject Appeals To You. Even inside this
stronghold you can make some breaches in the ranks of the defenders, dividing
them into New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Not New (for you or in general)
and New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Completely Unknown (at least to you),
and defining the attraction they have for you on the basis of your desires and
needs for the new and the not new (for the new you seek in the not new and for
the not new you seek in the new).

All this simply means that, having rapidly glanced over the titles of the
volumes displayed in the bookshop, you have turned toward a stack of If on a
Winter's Night a Traveler fresh off the press, you have grasped a copy, and
you have carried it to the cashier so that your right to own it can be
established.

\-- If on a Winters Night a Traveller, Italo Calvino.

~~~
onedev
This is beautiful...I don't know why, but it is.

~~~
dnr
If you think that's good, you should read the whole book (and all the books
within it). It gets much better.

------
zimbu668
To any Brits reading this, "pasties" means something very different in the US.
Google image search will show you the difference.

~~~
lmm
The Guardian is a British newspaper, I'm pretty sure the author is using the
British meaning.

------
hiperlink
It reminds me of a somewhat similar article from NPR:
[http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2011/04/21/135508305/the-...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2011/04/21/135508305/the-
sad-beautiful-fact-that-were-all-going-to-miss-almost-everything)

------
facepalm
To me it is a very difficult problem to discover good books to read. At
present I am without a good book.

How do you go about it?

~~~
ryan-allen
[http://reddit.com/r/books](http://reddit.com/r/books) is a good start!

edit: also check out
[http://www.reddit.com/r/suggestmeabook](http://www.reddit.com/r/suggestmeabook)
and make sure to explore the sidebar suggested subreddits

~~~
facepalm
Thanks, checking it out right now!

------
nsomaru
There's a great essay by Schopenhauer called "On Thinking for Yourself" which
deals with this and related themes. I'll post it here for your benefit (from
the great Penguin translation titled "Essays and Aphorisms":

On Thinking for Yourself

1-- As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small
but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it
will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not
thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by
comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession
of your knowledge and get it into your power. You can think about only what
you know, so you ought to learn something; on the other hand, you can know
only what you have thought about. Now you can apply yourself voluntarily to
reading and learning, but you cannot really apply yourself to thinking:
thinking has to be kindled, as a fire is by a draught, and kept going by some
kind of interest in its object, which may be an objective interest or merely a
subjective one. The latter is possible only with things that affect us
personally, the former only to those heads who think by nature, to whom
thinking is as natural as breathing, and these are very rare. That is why most
scholars do so little of it.

2--

The difference between the effect produced on the mind by thinking for
yourself and that produced by reading is incredibly great, so that the
original difference which made one head decide for thinking and another for
reading is continually increased. For reading forcibly imposes on the mind
thoughts that are as foreign to its mood and direction at the moment of
reading as the signet is to the wax upon which it impresses its seal. The mind
is totally subjected to an external compulsion to think this or that for which
it has no inclination and is not in the mood. On the other hand, when it is
thinking for itself it is following its own inclination, as this has been more
closely determined either by its immediate surroundings or by some
recollection or other: for its visible surroundings do not impose some single
thought on the mind, as reading does; they merely provide it with occasion and
matter for thinking the thoughts appropriate to its nature and present mood.
The result is that much reading robs the mind of all elasticity, as the
continual pressure of a weight does a spring, and that the surest way of never
having any thoughts of your own is to pick up a book every time you have a
free moment. The practice of doing this is the reason erudition makes most men
duller and sillier than they are by nature and robs their writings of all
effectiveness: they are in Pope’s words: For ever reading, never to be read.

3-- Fundamentally it is only our own basic thoughts that possess truth and
life, for only these do we really understand through and through. The thoughts
of another that we have read are crumbs from another’s table, the cast-off
clothes of an unfamiliar guest.

4-- Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting
someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show
how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would
go if you followed their guidance. – You should read only when your own
thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the
best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin
against the Holy Ghost; it is like deserting untrammelled nature to look at a
herbarium or engravings of landscapes. It may sometimes happen that a truth,
an insight, which you have slowly and laboriously puzzled out by thinking for
yourself could easily have been found already written in a book; but it is a
hundred times more valuable if you have arrived at it by thinking for
yourself. For only then will it enter your thought-system as an integral part
and living member, be perfectly and firmly consistent with it and in accord
with all its other consequences and conclusions, bear the hue, colour and
stamp of your whole manner of thinking, and have arrived at just the moment it
was needed; thus it will stay firmly and for ever lodged in your mind. This is
a perfect application, indeed explanation, of Goethe’s lines: Was du ererbt
von deinen Vätern hast, Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen.*

For the man who thinks for himself becomes acquainted with the authorities for
his opinions only after he has acquired them and merely as a confirmation of
them, while the book-philosopher starts with his authorities, in that he
constructs his opinions by collecting together the opinions of others: his
mind then compares with that of the former as an automaton compares with a
living man. A truth that has merely been learnt adheres to us only as an
artificial limb, a false tooth, a wax nose does, or at most like transplanted
skin; but a truth won by thinking for ourself is like a natural limb: it alone
really belongs to us. This is what determines the difference between a thinker
and a mere scholar.

5-- People who pass their lives in reading and acquire their wisdom from books
are like those who learn about a country from travel descriptions: they can
impart information about a great number of things, but at bottom they possess
no connected, clear, thorough knowledge of what the country is like. On the
other hand, people who pass their lives in thinking are like those who have
visited the country themselves: they alone are really familiar with it,
possess connected knowledge of it and are truly at home in it.

ctd...

~~~
nsomaru
(ctd from parent)

6-- A man who thinks for himself is related to the ordinary book-philosopher
as an eyewitness is to an historian: the former speaks from his own immediate
experience. That is why all men who think for themselves are in fundamental
agreement: their differences spring only from their differing standpoints; for
they merely express what they have objectively apprehended. The book-
philosopher, on the contrary, reports what this man has said and that has
thought and the other has objected, etc. Then he compares, weighs, criticizes
these statements, and thus tries to get to the truth of the matter, in which
respect he exactly resembles the critical historian.

7-- Mere experience is no more a substitute for thinking than reading is. Pure
empiricism is related to thinking as eating is to digestion and assimilation.
When empiricism boasts that it alone has, through its discoveries, advanced
human knowledge, it is as if the mouth should boast that it alone keeps the
body alive.

8-- The characteristic mark of minds of the first rank is the immediacy of all
their judgements. Everything they produce is the result of thinking for
themselves and already in the way it is spoken everywhere announces itself as
such. He who truly thinks for himself is like a monarch, in that he recognizes
no one over him. His judgements, like the decisions of a monarch, arise
directly from his own absolute power. He no more accepts authorities than a
monarch does orders, and he acknowledges the validity of nothing he has not
himself confirmed.

9-- In the realm of actuality, however fair, happy and pleasant we may find
it, we are nonetheless always under the influence of gravity, which we have
continually to overcome: in the realm of thought, on the contrary, we are
disembodied minds, weightless and without needs or cares. That is why there is
no happiness on earth to compare with that which a beautiful and fruitful mind
finds in a propitious hour in itself.

10-- There are very many thoughts which have value for him who thinks them,
but only a few of them possess the power of engaging the interest of a reader
after they have been written down.

11-- Yet, all the same, only that possesses true value which you have thought
in the first instance for your own instruction. Thinkers can be divided into
those who think in the first instance for their own instruction and those who
do so for the instruction of others. The former are genuine thinkers for
themselves in both senses of the words: they are the true philosophers. They
alone are in earnest. The pleasure and happiness of their existence consists
in thinking. The latter are sophists: they want to appear as thinkers and seek
their happiness in what they hope thereby to get from others. This is what
they are in earnest about. To which of these two classes a man belongs may
quickly be seen by his whole style and manner. Lichtenberg is an example of
the former class, Herder certainly belongs to the latter. __

12-- When you consider how great and how immediate is the problem of
existence, this ambiguous, tormented, fleeting, dream-like existence – so
great and so immediate that as soon as you are aware of it it overshadows and
obscures all other problems and aims; and when you then see how men, with a
few rare exceptions, have no clear awareness of this problem, indeed seem not
to be conscious of it at all, but concern themselves with anything rather than
with this problem and live on taking thought only for the day and for the
hardly longer span of their own individual future, either expressly refusing
to consider this problem or contenting themselves with some system of popular
metaphysics; when, I say, you consider this, you may come to the opinion that
man can be called a thinking being only in a very broad sense of that term and
no longer feel very much surprise at any thoughtlessness or silliness
whatever, but will realize, rather, that while the intellectual horizon of the
normal man is wider than that of the animal – whose whole existence is, as it
were, one continual present, with no consciousness of past or future – it is
not so immeasurably wider as is generally supposed.

* What you have inherited from your forefathers you must first win for yourself if you are to possess it.

 __Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99), aphorist and satirist. Johann
Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), theologian, philosopher and man of letters.

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mhartl
I suggest restoring the original title of the article, which is "Three
thousand reasons to choose your reading carefully". The purpose of preventing
titles from beginning with numbers is to get rid of things like "10 things you
need to know as an entrepreneur", but in this case the number refers to the
number of books, so the pattern has overmatched.

~~~
firebones
It looks like your suggestion caused this to be flag killed or something. It
was on the front page, now it is nowhere to be found in the first 600 entries.
Glitch in the algorithmic matrix?

~~~
stolio
currently #13 on the front page

~~~
firebones
Dang. If I'm logged in, it isn't anywhere to be found. If I'm not logged in,
it is indeed #13.

I must have posted to this thread too much?

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wallaceblack
Life is definitely too short for "We Should All Be Feminists" by Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie.

