
Lessons learned after 300 books in 4 years - 300
http://www.jovicailic.org/2016/11/lessons-learned-300-books-4-years/
======
quinndupont
This person is either reading the lightest self-help type of books, or not
really "reading" these books. I'm an academic, and my only job is to read
books (and articles, etc), and I do my job at least 12 hours a day, 7 days a
week, and I don't even read this many books.

My advice for getting genuinely intelligent about a topic: read hard books,
intensively, and leave the buffet-stats-counter stuff to those who just want
to impress.

~~~
300
After reading ~10 different authors on self-help, you realize they're all
saying the same thing. So no, your assumption is not true.

Yes, I did read a lot of light self-help books in the beginning, but their
number in total is less than ~40.

It's totally not important how many books you read, but their quality, we
agree about that :) That's why I mentioned it's better to read more times the
same book, than more books on the same topic once.

~~~
soperj
So over 10% is self-help books.

------
Paul_S
I decided to read a book a day this year. So far I'm ahead at 336 and here are
my counter opinions.

"* It’s much better to read the best book on the topic 5 times, than to read 5
different books on the topic once."

Flat out no. Unless you're a freaking machine. Reading different books
covering the same topic keeps me interested more. I don't mind the repetition
then because I get the warm "I know that" feeling.

"* Eyes that pay read better than eyes that don’t. Eyes that pay more read
better than eyes that pay less. In other words, when you pay for a book or a
course, you’ll dedicate more to it, so you’ll get more value from it."

Total nonsense. I'm not paying my friends or the library to borrow their
books. Next you'll be telling me hardback books transfer ideas better. Well,
my e-reader has a hard case. And I paid 300 quid for it.

"* If you read ~1h (almost) every day, you’ll be able to read 60-80 books per
year."

If you use all your idle time you can read a book a day. Cooking? You mean
reading and cooking. Commuting? Reading. Sitting on the toilet? You get the
idea. Waiting for the kettle? Seconds add up!

I agree with the rest.

~~~
nathan_f77
That sounds impossible to me. How can you possibly read one book every day,
unless they're extremely short? I could imagine this being true if you
dedicate something like 8-12 hours per day, but how do you have time for that?

~~~
Paul_S
That's what I thought too but no, it's totally doable (I am doing it after
all) and the average page count according to goodreads is 357. I have no
family, I work a 9-5 at a multinational and my only other hobby is bouldering.
I use every spare moment to read. If you added up all your spare time every
day you'd be surprised (clearly). It's not evenly distributed - I usually
catch up over the weekend when I have loads of free time (2 days). Also it
doesn't take 8 hours to read a book (at least not every one, fiction is pretty
quick). Not even an audiobook (which are slower even when you speed them up
x2.5)!

Even if it took 8 hours on average (which might be right, I never actually
tried to measure this) you could still read 9 books a week with 72 hours:

( (24 * 7) week

\- 40 work

\- (8 * 7) sleep )

/ 8 hr/book

= 9 books

~~~
kayoone
How about cooking, laundry, daily hygiene etc. It would be really hard reading
all the time while doing that.

------
amelius
I'd like to see some research on how much redundant and unnecessary
information is in typical books. I have the feeling that the essence of most
books can be simplified to the size of, say, an average blog post.

Can't we make reading a lot more efficient than it is right now?

~~~
300
I love your thought, and I tend to agree. There's way too much redundant and
unnecessary information in typical books.

That's why I think is better to read the best books on the topic more times,
than few other average books repeating the same stuff in different words.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Fortunately - and this is something I see many smart people around me not
realizing - we live in the day and age where it's trivial to identify and get
_the very best_ books humanity has produced about any given topic. That is, as
long as you can read English.

~~~
Paul_S
How, please tell me. I'll pay you for that list. Do I have to sacrifice my
firstborn for this?

~~~
ashark
For most technical, scientific, and mathematic topics, it's usually very easy
to find the next best book to read with a google search or two. Starting on or
strengthening long-forgotten Calculus? Probably get Spivak. _Et c._ This might
get tougher as you approach a field's state-of-the-art, but by then "what to
read next" will often come from a journal, not a book.

Literature and verse? Harold Bloom's western canon list, whatever its faults,
is pretty damn good and could keep one busy for a lifetime. If you want to mix
in more works by _e.g._ women or more asian works or whatever, there are very
good lists for that, too:

[http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/whatbooks.html](http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/whatbooks.html)

(above includes Bloom's list)

Want to learn science and math from classics? The list from How to Read a Book
should help, and St. John's College's reading list is public:
[https://www.sjc.edu](https://www.sjc.edu)

For a given topic, there's often a subreddit with a decent reading list in the
FAQ.

Which topic(s) are you having trouble with?

~~~
Paul_S
Not any topic in particular. Things in my own field I can judge myself and I
don't really get to chose anyway but I'm talking about general reading.

Most lists just tell you which books are popular. I'd be reading nothing but
Harry Potters if I followed those lists. I'm talking about choosing a book _I_
will like. Not you, not the critic, not the public. Following these kinds of
static lists doesn't really fair better than looking at the cover.

There needs to be some algorithm that can be applied to my books which is what
I was hoping goodreads would do for me but their recommendations are a joke -
they just recommend whatever goodreads author they're currently promoting
regardless of what you like.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I didn't realize you're talking fiction. The "algorithm" I applied works best
for nonfiction, because those you choose by objective criteria.

As for recommendation engines for fiction, I don't know any that don't have
this conflict of interests you described with Goodreads. Personally, I tend to
pick up books that are recommended by friends, writers I like reading and
people on HN. There's _way_ too much fiction to read all of it, but I try to
aim for one (or both) of two separate types: insightful and genre-popular.
Insightful, because I love to read new ideas, and genre-popular, because
culture is pretty much defined by your ability to talk about it with other
people.

------
aestetix
It sounds to me like the author of this post is going for quantity over
quality. In the realm of book-reading, that's almost always a losing
proposition.

Here's an approach that has worked better for me: pick a complex question and
try to answer it. For example, "Why did the Great Depression happen?" It turns
out there isn't actually a simple answer (that everyone can agree on).

~~~
TeMPOraL
Quantity can actually help you here - for complex questions, you want to get a
feel of the answer-space first, instead of picking a single point on it and
exploring it thoroughly.

------
stared
> It’s much better to read the best book on the topic 5 times, than to read 5
> different books on the topic once.

Rather than being an obvious truth, for me it is a grave mistake.

I rarely read a book a few times (but also: I am very slow (careful!) reader),
and go back if I want to quote something verbatim, or lookup a
number/reference. In book reading I prefer quality than quantity.

But what is crucial, rarely there is a single, obvious "best book". At the
same time, reading only a single book leaves false impression that everything
is known, there are no controversies, no different looks or approaches, etc.

~~~
ci5er
For me, for a new field, I never know which is the "best" book. And whichever
it is - it's not complete; there are additional nuggets to be found, maybe in
the corner of a minor chapter, in many/most of them. I will read ~100 to just
get a feel for the lay of the land. This is because I don't know what I don't
know and certainly don't know enough to pick the best! And then go back and
re-read (with more directedness) 10~20 of them, and then settle in and make
1~5 of them my touch stones for re-re-reading over time. This last bit is
because I have a leaky brain, and I need to refresh it from time-to-time.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _For me, for a new field, I never know which is the "best" book._

Solution for that is pretty simple for very many fields:

Google:

\- best books on <field X>

\- best books on <field X> reddit

Read a few lists from sites, especially those frequented by people in that
field. See which books tend to appear often in those lists. There, you have
quite probably just identified the very best books for the <field X> the human
race has to offer.

~~~
ci5er
Well, sure. Those are the conclusions of people who have already formed their
own mental structures. Somehow. That part is not shared. Or maybe they haven't
read the books available themselves; there's a shocking number of humans
willing to publish their conclusions based on ... sometimes nothing. ("You'll
love this book! It's the best! Trust me!") I find that (for me) that the
process of forming my own mental structures from the fire-hose to be useful.
Partly because what a beginner needs and what an expert recommends often don't
line up. Experts have forgotten what it's like to be a beginner.

------
pmoriarty

      We ought to only read the kind of books that wound and stab us. If
      the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head,
      what are we reading it for? We need the books that affect us like a
      disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved
      more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from
      everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea
      inside us. That is my belief.
    
                Franz Kafka

------
dankohn1
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives
only one.”

\- George R.R. Martin quotes

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
G.R.R.M. writes well, and I'm a long-time paying customer, but that phrase is
advertising bullshit.

The reader doesn't 'live' squat, he reads about someone else's life. Watching
cooking shows doesn't feed anyone.

~~~
chillwaves
Does it have to be "advertising bullshit"? Maybe GRRM sees reading differently
than you do? For someone who has devoted their life to writing, that is a
sensible perspective.

~~~
TeMPOraL
There's an interesting thread in Dark Forest by Cixin Liu (second book of the
Three Body Problem trilogy (yes, I know I'm being boring constantly
recommending them here but these are _really good books_ )). I actually wonder
whether it's a real thing.

A short (minor) spoiler follows.

One of the protagonists is married to a writer. He follows her advice about
writing, and in the process of developing a character he manages to, well,
instantiate a pretty much living version of that character in his own mind - a
version that grows and thinks independently of its creator. He eventually gets
emotionally involved with his imaginary creation, and later learns that it's
something that happens to good writers, and that his wife has such a character
"living" with her too.

What I wonder is whether it's really the case that good writers actually
develop their characters to the point of them turning pretty much into tulpas?
A kind of background thread in their brains, with separate micro-
consciousness.

------
jyriand
300 books in 4 years, basically it's one book per week if my math is correct.
But still it seems like some kind of consumerism, where the main goal is to
scrape together as much information as possible, hoping that you can use some
of it in the future.

------
jdswain
I'm actually trying to read less and do more. So instead of reading about
compilers I'm building some. It feels like a slower way of learning sometimes,
but it's exposed lots of places where I thought I knew how things work but I
actually didn't. It has also taught me more than reading alone would.

The downside is that I find it harder to get time for building. It's easy
enough to read at night in bed, but harder to concentrate on writing code.

------
internaut
If you aren't worried about the quantity of books you're getting through, and
want a challenge, read The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe.

The closest approximation might be Jorge Luis Borges with Tolkien with a dash
of Neal Stephenson and Murakami.

At first I thought: I know what this is.

Then I thought. Wait... something's wrong here.

Then I thought. There is no way that is in the text. Can't be.

This was just the point where the rollercoaster is beginning the climb.

If you like complex and strange things, then this is for you.

------
somberi
May I ask how you get the time and how you are able to read a book under a
day?

~~~
webreac
When I was student in french "classes preparatoires" (between 19 and 20yo), my
binom was fond of books. He read between 2 and 3 books per day when most
pupils had difficulties to cope with workload.

~~~
steveeq1
What does "binom" mean? Is that a typo? I tried looking it up online, but
don't see anything.

~~~
Pamar
See also this:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_(polynomial)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_\(polynomial\))

------
WheelsAtLarge
I would add that it's important to put what you read into action. Also,
summarizing what you read makes you think about what you read. Your less
likely to forget. I learnt this after many forgotten books.

------
mayermail1977
Interesting. The first point resonates with the famous quote made by Bruce
Lee. "I fear not the man who has practiced 10000 kicks once, but I fear the
man who has practiced one kick 10000 times."

~~~
johnnydoe9
That works for the kicks but not the book on a single topic though IMO, not
only would reading the same book more than a couple times be boring but you
wouldn't learn a whole lot.

------
ianaphysicist
The recommendation to take notes is helpful. I prefer to make my notes
directly in the book. This has the added bonus of making a book's value much
clearer to me when it comes time to cull.

------
chegra
It would be interesting to see the list of actual books read.

~~~
Paul_S
If you go to goodreads you can find thousands of people reading ~80 books a
year with their lists publicly available. If you want to see what software
engineers read just click on a popular software book and keep clicking on
profiles that have read it until you find one with enough books.

------
koga-ninja
300 books in 4 years is pretty good. My reading speed is 60 pages an hour with
comprehension, though I can Zoom through with less.

Nothing like a NASA astronaut though.

------
hemantv
For me personally how do you get list of best books. We have just too much
books but finding out good ones is difficult process.

------
PetoU
imho usually the best books, are those complex ones, which I read for 4
months. Because after every page, 15 new questions arise, where settling them
takes time, and then internalization of that wisdom takes time as well. And I
don't even mention, that best books get better after re-reading.

In this light, 300 books in 4 years, seems quite a lot...

~~~
300
This is very true for some types of books. For example, I am not able to read
Dostoyevsky or Carlyle fast. For some sort of books, I even feel like I need a
nap after 30 mins of reading, as I feel that my brain gets tired :)

------
amitkakkar2010
Great. You learn a lot after reading books good work.

------
juvoni
I've read around 250 books in 4 years.

I agree with a lot of the author's takeaways. I'll try to add some of the
lessons I've gotten out of it, that don't appear on his list.

In addition, I post my book reviews at
[http://juvoni.com/books](http://juvoni.com/books)

\- Understand what a book is going to attempt to communicate before you read
it, either by checking the table of contents, going through a summary, reading
reviews or reading the back or inner cover of a book.
[http://juvoni.com/book/how-to-read-a-book](http://juvoni.com/book/how-to-
read-a-book)

\- You can read multiple books at a time and not get the narrative scrambled
by doing context specific reading by time or location. For example only
reading book A while in transit, reading book B before bedtime and only
reading book C on weekends. The context specific memory will be attached to
when and where you habitually read that specific book.
[http://juvoni.com/reading-multiple-books](http://juvoni.com/reading-multiple-
books)

\- Not all book recommendations are made equal, even from friends. I use a
concept called 'Book Purgatory', where book recommendations go to await
judgment on whether they are worthy of your time and attention to read. I do
not commit to reading any recommendation. It is only after I give it a review
based on what I want or need from a book and the quality of it's reviews do I
consider getting it. [http://juvoni.com/book-
purgatory](http://juvoni.com/book-purgatory)

\- Reading a lot of books when you have a full lifestyle is difficult, it's in
you're best interest to stay organized and have a pre-defined list of books
you want to read, and intend to read after you are finished and actively track
the books you are currently reading. [http://juvoni.com/trello-book-reading-
management](http://juvoni.com/trello-book-reading-management)

\- Identify your learning styles and device preferences and find books that
are a good balance of right medium and comfortable preference. For example, I
have a hard time reading history books but find them easier over audible, I
also prefer to read books with diagrams as physical rather than e-books.
[http://juvoni.com/print-ebook-audiobook](http://juvoni.com/print-ebook-
audiobook)

\- Understand why you read. [http://juvoni.com/discovering-love-reading-read-
read-smarter](http://juvoni.com/discovering-love-reading-read-read-smarter)

