
Just Read the Book Already - howsilly
https://slate.com/culture/2018/08/reader-come-home-by-maryanne-wolf-reviewed.html
======
Taylor_OD
I've gone from reading 10 books a year to reading 25+ books a year over the
last few years. Mostly I've cut down on my screen time. I am on a computer all
day for work but once I go home I try to spend as little time as possible on a
computer.

What do I do now? Come home, do yoga for 15-30 minutes, make tea, meditate for
10 minutes, read for 15 - 50 minutes. Then I'll allow myself to do other
things that may occupy my time.

I'll admit that as a single man without kids I have a lot more freedom over my
schedule but this is very similar to my morning routine. At the minimum I've
got 30 minutes of reading and 20 minutes of meditation in my day every day.
This has done wonders for my ADD brain.

The other big thing is focuses on books I know I'll enjoy. For me that means
Sci-Fi fiction novels and Magical Realism books. Also if I find myself not
wanting to pick up the book then I'll move on from it.

Right now I'm reading alternating Murakami book, Vonnegut books, and books
from The Sparrow (Mary Doria Russell) series. Are they all at the level or War
and Peace? No. But I enjoy them and that's what maters.

P.S. I've got a kindle paperwhite which is IMO the best e reading device I've
ever used. It sits in my draw while paper stack up around my house and near my
bedside. It just doesnt feel the same. It's great for when I'm going to be
traveling and need a few novels but dont have the space in my travel bag.

~~~
ma2rten
I don't read a lot because I have ADHD which makes it hard to focus. Do you
also have that problem?

~~~
smt88
I had a problem focusing on reading until I started just listening to books on
Audible while doing chores or taking walks. The physical activity occupies my
mind enough to allow me to focus on the content.

~~~
heurist
Same here. I listen while driving, cleaning, and walking my dogs and am able
to focus much better on the content of the book. I went from struggling to
finish 3-5 paper books per year to completely finishing 20-30 audiobooks per
year. I am often disappointed with the limited selection on Audible for things
I am interested in, though.

~~~
pnutjam
I read epub and let my phone read them to me using TTS.

~~~
heurist
Are you happy with the voice? Would you be able to listen to it for 2-3 hours
straight or would the computer voice become grating?

~~~
tough_luck
Try ivona tts kendra voice. It was available on play store but not anymore so
you'll have to workaround to install it.

------
Bucephalus355
For fiction I read e-books.

However for all technical books, things like O’Reilly, No Starch, etc, I
always buy physical. The decision to do that has very much 10x my learning.
Even when it comes to long documentation (MySQL is an astounding 5,000+ pages)
I’ll usually print out portions to cover if it’s reasonable.

I don’t know why this has increased my learning so much. The best I can come
up with is that memory is based on some kind of spatial geography + other
stuff. As I’m working on something, like configuring a CentOS server to a
lengthy CIS Security Benchmark, I can recall in books what the page looked
like, where I was when I read it, the feel of the page, and the part of the
text I underlined in pen. Very strange.

~~~
Rotdhizon
In my current job I have a lot of downtime, which means I can do whatever I
want for a few hours a day. I try to read but I find it so difficult. I don't
know what it is about reading ebooks but I can't hold my attention on them for
more than a few minutes at a time. I have a few physical books in my desk that
I can focus on very well, but they aren't the ones I need right now.
Considering ebooks are typically half the cost of physical books (also that
most ebooks can be obtained for 'free' through some medium), it's hard to pull
the trigger on getting a physical copy.

~~~
toomuchtodo
If you buy from Amazon, some books fall under their "Matchbook" program, where
if you buy the paper copy you receive the ebook version for free or small
additional cost ($2-3).

~~~
jamespo
O'Reilly used to do this until they ditched their online store

------
gobblegobble2
It's easy to blame the internet, but for me the biggest reason why my deep
reading capacities suffered was college. If every semester you have to grind
thousands of pages, the art of skimming and superficial reading is necessary
survival tool. Writing papers with short deadlines quickly leads to fishing
for quotes and references in source material. After few hard years of college
it's difficult to get back to old reading habits, even if it's just fiction in
leisure time.

~~~
lev99
My reading habits suspended during college for skim culture, and rebounded
every break from school and fully recovered after graduation.

------
Raidion
Problem I have with books is that it's much harder to justify the "time" to
get lost in books. When I was a kid, I was near the top of the school's
reading program and devoured books. But now, when I do have time on vacation
or sick, I'd almost much rather read something that's educational-ish. It's
hard to justify the X hours falling into a fantasy world, though it's still
almost as fun as it used to be.

Practically I think I have more "ties" to the real world, with a job, family,
etc, and it's harder for me to stop worrying about those things long enough to
slip inside the mind of a character in a book.

~~~
bitwize
If you have to _justify_ it, you're doing it wrong. Your free time is your
playground. Take half an hour -- or ten minutes -- each day and enjoy those
fantasy worlds. They might refresh you.

~~~
twoquestions
Hard disagree there.

Your 'free' time is valuable currency, and every minute must be invested as
productively as possible, or you'll lose to someone else who does in this kill
or die monkey knife fight economy
[[https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-
moloch/](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)].

(edit: corrected link. Thank you!)

~~~
phlakaton
Ah, but read to the end of the essay:

"So be it with Gnon. Our job is to placate him insofar as is necessary to
avoid starvation and invasion. And that only for a short time, until we come
into our full power."

To give everything of yourself over to Gnon/Moloch is to deny Elua, who Scott
names the god of art, science, philosophy, love, niceness, community,
civilization. One might add to that: the god of play, of gardening – of
reading.

------
alexhutcheson
I think most people are too committed to finishing books that they start.
Changing my attitude about this has made a huge difference in how much book
content I actually read.

Until pretty recently, if I found myself reading a book that I found boring,
or too dense, or hard to get into, I would just get "stuck". I wouldn't be
able to pay attention for long enough to make real progress, but it would
"block" me from starting any other books.

Now I just abandon the book and move on to a different book that I haven't
started reading yet. It makes a huge difference in my "book throughput", and
reading books cover-to-cover is overrated in any case.

~~~
Ftuuky
So much this. The wake call was Naval Ravikant on a podcast (Tim Ferriss I
think?) that said something like "don't be afraid to stop reading a book if
you're not enjoying it. If it's non-fiction it's okay to skip for the relevant
chapters".

------
DubiousPusher
I have had a similar experience but I don't blame the internet. I blame my age
and a growth of my own critical thinking. It used to be that anything an
authority told me was "great writing" was great writing. This of course
included a wide array of 18th and 19th century writing. But as I've read more
I've come to the conclusion that while writing of that era is full of many
woderful plots, observations, philosophies, etc, it mostly is not great
writing. And a good portion of the ideas illuminated in that writing have been
better presented in later writing. So I have a develop an extreme intolerance
for 1) naval gazing in writing and 2) complexity. Your thoughts can be
complex. Your use of the comma however should not be.

This is not an intolerance for complex ideas or difficult subjects. It is the
same reaction I have to a set of bad instructions. That is to thrust them away
and try for myself or find another source.

Edit: A little more succinctly, I trust authors less. I have less faith that
because you've published a book you have something worth saying. I believe
less that wrangling with your abstruse language will yield a reward worth
struggling for. So when I encounter difficulty, I discard the coconut and seek
an orange.

~~~
fredsanford
Are you able to get through books by Tolkein, Robert Jordan or Terry Goodkind?

I wonder because as I've aged I don't have the patience to sit through a
description of every blade of grass in a meadow...

~~~
DubiousPusher
Never read Goodkind. I don't think I could read Jordan anymore. Just kind of
got over high fantasy a bit and don't find it all that rewarding. With
Tolkien, I used to view "The Hobbit" as pretty good and TLOTR as his magnum
opus. Now I'm convinced it's the other way round.

Generally, I'm very much the same. Let's set the scene quick and get the
characters doing stuff. I used to see intricate scene dressing as a skill now
I see it as an indulgence. There are too many period films, mini-series and
series with beautiful sets and costumes etc if I really want that. There I can
marvel at them without much addition time cost.

~~~
fredsanford
>> Never read Goodkind. I like his Sword of Truth books, the whole Confessor
magic user thing leads to some good dynamics. He falls down in his 80 pages of
character introspection... For me anyway. I used to reread this series every
few years but now I end up putting books down when the blades of grass start.

>> Let's set the scene quick and get the characters doing stuff

Yes. Please!

------
DanielBMarkham
Wow, do I feel this pain. As both an author[1] and a book-lover, I've been on
both sides of this divide. People just don't consume books the same way they
used to.

As a reader, I find I have to slowly re-introduce deep reading -- even if I've
just been away for a week or two. I usually do this by getting a physical book
and a physical distraction device, usually my phone. I go to a place where
there's nothing else in the room.

Then I read as much as I can until I feel "bothered" (beats me what the
correct adjective is here. "Bored"?) At that point I pick up the distraction
device and poke around: Twitter, Facebook, HN, and so on. I make an effort to
put it down. Eventually I succeed, then back to reading.

Over a period of many cycles, my reading time gets up to close to an hour
long. But it's a struggle.

I don't think I could do it with an e-book reader. In those things, they put
the distraction stuff just a click away. Hell, they'll sell you more
distraction stuff you can play the millisecond you get bored with the text.

What I'd like to know is whether I'm some weird outlier or whether many other
readers are going through this same process.

As a book writer, I tried as hard as possible to plug into a feedback loop
with my readers. I ran beta groups, I emailed extensively to find out what
worked and what didn't. All of the communication, as far as I could tell,
collapsed into some version of "Make it take five minutes so I can go consume
more material" Hey, I'm with you, but some things can't be covered in five
minutes. Some things require a narrative and background for you to make sense
of it, dear reader. What to do then?

(Add: Had one beta reader assure me that he already understood all the stuff
around the first third of the book and I was wasting his time. So I jumped him
directly to the second third. He was completely lost. I thought about cross-
indexing the book to show how each part was used later, but what the heck
would that accomplish, aside from reassuring myself that the text was needed?
It is a frustrating problem from both sides.)

1\. Shameless book plug: [https://leanpub.com/info-
ops](https://leanpub.com/info-ops)

~~~
amelius
> Then I read as much as I can until I feel "bothered" (beats me what the
> correct adjective is here. "Bored"?) At that point I pick up the distraction
> device and poke around: Twitter, Facebook, HN, and so on. I make an effort
> to put it down. Eventually I succeed, then back to reading.

I noticed myself doing this while watching a movie. Even at suspenseful
moments, I press "pause" and pick up my phone to browse around HN and
Facebook. After a while I continue watching, but then five or ten minutes
later I'm back on the phone.

~~~
bitwize
Video games do this for me. I don't know how kids these days spend hours
playing Fortnite. A few rounds of that and I need a break.

------
sidstling
For around ten years I didn’t read much, not because I didn’t want to, I
certainly did, but because it takes too long. I get up at around 6am, get home
from work at around 5pm and then I have daily chores mixed with family stuff
for 3-5 hours. Not much left after that, and I’m not good at setting fixed
hours for specific hobbies, so reading a whole book just didn’t work out for
me.

I soon found that even if I managed to pick a book up, it’d have to be really
great for me not to start questioning if it was worth the time.

I did take a few courses related to work, where I had to read books and
articles, but I don’t count those because they were part of studying, so
reading them had a specific purpose of getting me good grades at whatever
certification/examination came with the course.

Then a few years ago I started listening to audiobooks, and it’s really
changed things. Now I “read” one or two books a month. Sometimes it’s stuff
like Sapiens, other times it’s the new world of Warcraft novel, but both kinds
have really improved the quality of my life. I do have two hours of commute
each day, where the audiobook fits in perfectly. I used to fill it with music
and podcasts, but for me the books have been a huge improvement exactly
because of the depth.

~~~
ryandrake
I’m kind of in your camp. Back when I had a lot of time, I used to read a lot.
But it’s such a low bandwidth communication, and books seem to have so much
useless filler material. I tried e-books but failed. If I listen to them while
I’m doing something else like commuting, I don’t pay attention (since I’m
trying to not get killed on I-680), and if I listen while I’m not doing
anything else, I fall asleep. Still waiting for someone to invent that The
Matrix style “download into my brain” technology.

~~~
ksdale
A year or so ago, I decided I wanted to read all of the "best" books so I
found a few lists of the best literature in English from the past few hundred
years and read a few dozen of the books that showed up on most lists, and I
realized that really well written books aren't nearly as low-bandwidth as a
lot of more pulpy type books are.

Obviously I didn't enjoy all of the books on the list, but even the ones I
kind of slogged through felt like they contained more... knowledge (wisdom?)

I'm also really into sci-fi and fantasy, so I've been working my way down
awards lists like the Hugos. The books on these lists also seem more high
bandwidth, with the bonus of giving you exposure to a bunch of different
authors who have mostly all written a bunch of stuff that's similar to
whatever won them the award.

~~~
dantheman0207
N. N. Taleb always says you shouldn’t read any books that are less than 200
years old. If a book survives for 200 years it must have something genuinely
valuable to say.

I think this is good advice. I try to follow it for the most part, but
obviously I don’t apply that to technical material. Still, I bet if you read
Euclid instead of O’Reilly you’d end up a pretty good programmer.

~~~
gassiss
I've read some of Taleb's books and while I find him very smart and with very
valuable insights, I'd rather take some of these extreme things he says (like
what you pointed) with a grain of salt.

------
jihadjihad
Nothing too revelatory here, but I can certainly agree with the ideas
presented. So many of us are used to a constant, reliable dopamine drip while
reading things on the internet that larger texts _bore_ us. The conclusion at
the end of the piece is right, though--it just takes willpower.

Choosing delayed gratification in the form of good, rich, long-form writing is
a lot like choosing a balanced diet. The benefits of traipsing through
difficult texts may not be readily apparent but doing so invariably pays
dividends for years to come.

~~~
rayiner
I find the new trend of long form articles infuriating. Just get to the point,
without all the rigamarole! Is there an actual benefit? Or is it just
something people say?

~~~
bitwize
Long articles are fine but -- remember five-paragraph essays from
grade/primary school? Good, because many online journalists seem to have
forgotten them.

The thing about the five-paragraph essay is its structure scales well to
longer articles. You state your main idea up front, then spend a bit of time
elaborating on that main idea, then you wrap up. Online articles are like --
they pick a source, say, a college professor or someone with a new book out.
Then they spend half the article or more talking about their source's early
childhood, failed marriage and/or relationship with their dog, anything that
might have a loose tenuous relationship with the main idea. THEN they hit you
with the main idea, then they pad out their essay with quotes from the source,
whom by now you have "gotten to know". It's infuriating, but I guess the idea
is to tease a main idea with the headline, then keep you slogging through
barely relevant detail long enough to show you quite a few ads before wrapping
up with stuff that relates what was teased to you, even if the body doesn't
justify the headline. Clickbait, in other words.

~~~
SilasX
I agree -- I wouldn't mind long articles as much if they got the main points
upfront. But the _New Yorker_ s of the world don't do that. They're obsessed
with starting _in media res_ with some anecdote that gives painstaking details
about the subject's mannerisms or appearance or fashion sense.

When I want people to summarize links they post, it's not because I have a
short attention span or categorically refuse to read them. It's because I want
to know the broad sketches of what it's claiming so that I know _whether_ I
need the extra detail (sorry, "color") it provides vs. whether it's citing a
study or argument I'm already familiar with (or is even a relevant point to
make).

------
paulpauper
A lot of non-fiction books have a lot of filler. No need to read 300 pages
when a wiki articles or PDF gives you important points

~~~
tapanjk
I have to agree with "a lot of filler" part of your comment. This must be a
result of the expectation that publishers set for authors regarding the
minimum expected length of the book. I found that I would stop reading many
books past the first few chapters because then the repetition sets in. The
first few chapters deliver the core message and then the author is forced to
extend the narrative to deliver the expected word count.

In any case, I find reading a physical book to be more enjoyable and effective
(in terms of retention and recall) than reading on a digital screen.

~~~
ghaff
Publishers are part of it but basically there's a whole economic and
distribution system built around books being 200+ pages. Arguably consumers
"should" be willing to pay as much for a 75 page book as a 400 page one for a
given level of quality (whatever that means) but they're not. So you end up
with a large class of non-fiction that pads out ideas which probably deserve
something more than a 3,000 word magazine article into a 75,000-100,000 word
book because that's what's required for everyone to get paid (however little).
And ebooks don't really change that because very little of the cost is in
physical distribution.

------
itaintreddit
I blame math. In mathematical prose (proofs in particular) every word down to
the articles (a/the) matters. Non-technical prose is usually (necessarily?)
bloated with extraneous info and many irrelevant words/sentences (and often
paragraphs). I don't have patience for that anymore. I skim an article to find
the main point the author trying to make and if I can't find it by the mid
point of the page, I simply leave the page/article/site.

~~~
paganel
> In mathematical prose (proofs in particular) every word down to the articles
> (a/the) matters.

You might like Flaubert, who was a perfectionist when it came to the words he
had to put down on paper. From the wiki
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Flaubert#Perfectionist...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Flaubert#Perfectionist_style)):

> Flaubert famously avoided the inexact, the abstract, the vaguely inapt
> expression, and scrupulously eschewed the cliché. (...) Flaubert believed
> in, and pursued, the principle of finding "le mot juste" ("the right word"),
> which he considered as the key means to achieve quality in literary art.

------
sevensor
Is it possible that losing one's taste for Hesse is simply a result of age and
career choice? Critics, professional readers, have a very different mission
than casual readers like me. It's their job to sift through great piles of
words to find what's important. I have no such burden -- I've found that time
and exposure to the internet have made me more interested in challenging
books, not less.

------
finder83
I do wonder a lot about the root causes of this. Personally, I'm working on my
Master's degree and am reading about 300-400 pages a week, and still enjoy
reading novels if I have any spare time or during the summer. I don't have
this issue, have no problem with deep focus, and am a computer programmer
during the day so am constantly consuming computer-based media.

What I DON'T do is watch TV. We don't own a TV, don't have a netflix
subscription any longer, and I see movies about once every 3-4 months. I do
watch Youtube, but not ads...I wonder how much of an attention problem while
reading is actually internet related and how much is media related.

This is completely non-scientific, but I feel like your body adjusts to what
you train it to. Media and TV in particular train you to appreciate
interruptions, shallower and half-hour to hour-long stories. The internet and
mobile trains you to however you use it...if it's facebook, maybe reloading
the feed every 30 seconds isn't the best thing to train your attention? But
there is plenty of deep reading content on the web as well.

------
decisionfiction
In the digital world of brainless games, and binge watching media it is very
hard to focus on reading as our minds are being trained to get most amount of
information in as compressed way as possible. While commuting on trains of NYC
I tend to look around and see 9/10 people are either playing some no brainer
games or watching something while listening to music. Hardly would we find a
reader involved in his/her kindle or a book or even reading on phone. I am
guilty of binge watching a show endlessly sinking in my couch (even while
working). I think rather than fighting whether we are reading a device or a
physical book the important point is that we keep reading and promote reading
to our next generation with all mediums available (book, kindle, mobile,
messengers...) and whichever is the most convenient for them.

------
ChuckMcM
Interesting read (no pun intended). I find that it is hard to read something
when I'm thinking about other things, which is to say my mind wanders into
other areas while reading so I lose track of where I am. But on the flip side
when I'm fully engaged I have a hard time stopping reading and that can lead
to some late nights where resting/sleeping would have been a "better" use of
my time.

My biggest challenge has been with what I consider poorly written
documentation for things. If I'm really busy and just want to use something to
get one thing done, but can't because I have to read the documentation
thoroughly in order to understand the special way a particular tool works, it
can be excruciatingly difficult to force myself to read that.

~~~
CaptSpify
> I find that it is hard to read something when I'm thinking about other
> things, which is to say my mind wanders into other areas while reading so I
> lose track of where I am.

I do this too, so I've started keeping a small notebook and pen in my bag.
When my mind starts to wander, I write my thoughts into the notebook. I don't
know why or how it works, but getting the thoughts onto a page gets them out
of my head, which lets me focus.

------
forgottenpass
Perhaps ironically, it's pablum like this Slate article killing my ability to
read. The onslaught of digital publishers cranking out vapid nonsense and
pushing it far and wide means I only skim. This article is 2k words and I've
got shit to do today.

The only thing I can read cover-to-cover is fiction. Often documentation and
emails if I'm convinced they're useful. Anything else my brain gets stuck in
skimming mode and I have to concentrate harder on reading every word than the
content itself.

------
Udo_Schmitz
_Whenever he tried to read anything substantial, Carr wrote, “I get fidgety,
lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. … The deep reading
that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”_

100% describes me. Haven’t found a solution yet.

------
eatonphil
Am in my twenties, hadn't read a book for fun since I was eight (nothing
outside of school).

Two things got me going reading books again: 1) not getting that much from
blog posts and not learning enough from coworkers and 2) friends I looked up
to who read much more than me. Three years ago I forced myself to read 2
technical books. Two years ago I read 8. Last year I read 40 and this year I'm
on track for 50+ (33 so far).

At first I could only make myself put in time to read advanced books on
programming and architecture. But in time I was able to force myself to read
(older) fiction as well as books on economics, finance, psychology,
management, writing and history.

These days it's easy enough to keep myself on track because I feel like I'm
losing ground to myself if I don't keep reading. There's so much to learn and
while I can never get it all, I've internalized the drive.

I cannot recommend enough reading about psychology, history, finance and
programming/architecture/management to fellows in tech. These topics apply so
clearly and frequently in life/at work.

If you're curious I'm on Goodreads with this username.

~~~
creep
Hey bud, I've never lost the drive to read and learn new things, but I
definitely have trouble organizing everything I _want_ to be learning/reading.

Usually I have a fiction book going at all times. Keeps me sharp, interested,
engaged, even if I don't feel like being "productive". But apart from that,
there are so many things I'm working on, I feel a bit muddled.

Do you have any advice for a dude like me? How to know when to read or do
what? Especially when you don't have a preference at a particular moment in
time?

~~~
eatonphil
The first few books I read were from lists I found online aggregating
suggestions on HN and Reddit. After that I'd just make a note of any books
referenced in ones I read that I liked and branched out. After a bit you have
no end to books you want to follow up on.

~~~
creep
That appears to be my same problem.

------
pnathan
I've never had a druthers to read the Big Novels. I've usually found them
almost pointless. Which is probably more on me than any other thing. Always
have preferred books with a bit of sparkle and imagination - great science
fiction or fantasy - interesting in the worlds built and the characters in
them. E.g., Jim Butcher and Seanan McGuire are nearly automatic buys right
now.

As I've gotten older, my tolerance for blather has dropped like a stone,
though. And some authors _blather and yammer_. E.g., a certain popular author
lovingly details the military details of his space ships, which is really
irrelevant to pretty much the entire rest of the book. Wish he'd keep that
stuff in his private notefiles.

For non-fiction, I am, when I have the time, gripped by it to a great
degree... although I confess I straight up fell asleep the other weekend.

I also note that my attention tends to wander a lot more than it used to when
I'm bored. Some of this I attribute to the US national mood; some of it I
attribute to Sturgeon's law and my increased sensitivity. And some of it I
attribute to the dopamine hits social media gives us. I also wonder about
experience and pattern matching - I'm 34, not 14. I've seen a fair bit of
stuff before.

Another thing that I want to remark on - the non-fiction world is, simply put,
a fascinating place that can be explored at will, to arbitrary depths, at this
point. Fiction authors have to compete with, e.g., people on Twitter talking
about their sessile spiny oysters and showing pictures of them off. If I was a
_hair_ less sleepy this morning, I might have spent 20 minutes learning about
spiny oysters - where in 2004 I might have read a fiction paperback instead.
So perhaps, in a certain subset of the population, we're all turning into the
people who would have read the encyclopedia for fun, with its short articles
on fascinating topics.

~~~
Rainymood
>As I've gotten older, my tolerance for blather has dropped like a stone,
though. And some authors blather and yammer. E.g., a certain popular author
lovingly details the military details of his space ships, which is really
irrelevant to pretty much the entire rest of the book. Wish he'd keep that
stuff in his private notefiles.

What blathering is to some, is worldbuilding for others. Personally, I read
all 5 GoT books (the first three were the best, the last two were meh) and
GRRM is really good in describing food ... man my mouth always started
watering reading those passages of banquets and feasts.

------
bradhoffman
So what I am hearing here is that practicing reading will help develop that
skill of deep reading? I remember in High School when I used to run through my
History textbooks and loving the process, remembering most everything I
encountered. Now (5 years later), I feel this block in my mind that prevents
me from going deep on those topics. It's hard to describe, but it feels like
the material isn't being absorbed... Somehow it's getting stuck in my short-
term memory and not making it much further unless I really study the material.

------
samirm
I disagree with most of what she says. I know I spend too much time online,
but at the same time I don't have any problems getting lost in books. Just
last week I devoured Name of the Wind (600+ pages) in a matter of days, even
though I ultimately didn't particularly like it.

It seems like she has trained herself to read a certain way and then blames
the world around her for her own actions. Spending time online doesn't have to
affect your reading behaviour, especially if you practice self awareness.

~~~
loriverkutya
And probably you are missing the fact, that way how you read is established
when there were no internet around.

~~~
samirm
I'm not sure if this is supposed to be directed at me or a general comment,
but the internet was most certainly there when I started reading. In fact I
hated reading when I was in middle school. It was only in my last couple years
(of school) that I really started to enjoy it.

------
Pimpus
When you are a digital addict, it is no surprise that you cannot sustain focus
and attention. "Deep reading" is going to seem like a chore when your brain is
craving the dopamine hits it's used to. I've had a lot of success using apps
to limit my computer usage, like Cold Turkey (no affiliation). I can block
specific sites, apps, or freeze my whole computer on a schedule. Would
recommend it, let me know if anyone knows of a libre alternative though.

------
sampl
Short plug: your local library has thousands of books, all free to borrow.

Many libraries let you listen to unlimited free audiobooks using the Libby app
(honestly a life-changer for me).

~~~
emodendroket
I doubt the cost is the barrier for most of us here. Reading books isn't a
very expensive hobby even if you buy them all.

~~~
cossatot
It depends on the books and your rate of reading. I spend about $100/month on
books which is often only 2 or 3. I can't always justify spending more. I
would agree with you in the case of fiction, as the books are cheaper and
better represented at libraries. But non-fiction is expensive, and I read a
lot of technical and niche nonfiction.

~~~
emodendroket
I see. I mostly read history and fiction. I read a lot of technical books when
I was trying to become a programmer but now it's often the last thing I feel
like reading.

------
emodendroket
I started really reading a lot a few years ago and I have to say that it's
mostly a matter of practice. If you are used to reading dense texts and not
anxious about how many books you "have to" blow through, you can slowly and
calmly read a book and you'll finish it sooner than you think. I actually am
reading the book mentioned in the article, War and Peace, and rather enjoying
it.

------
hfdgiutdryg
_I now read on the surface and very quickly; in fact, I read too fast to
comprehend deeper levels, which forced me constantly to go back and reread the
same sentence over and over with increasing frustration.” She had lost the
“cognitive patience” that once sustained her in reading such books._

I had a similar, but opposite problem most of my life since computers came
along. In high school, I started reading technical books on programming. Along
with my textbooks, of course. Around my junior year, I realized that I'd lost
the ability to just smoothly flow through 'light' text. I'd obsessively rescan
paragraphs if I'd missed a single word.

About once a decade, I'd realize that I'd lost the ability to read fiction for
pleasure and make it a point to redevelop the skill. My last bout was reading
everything by Murakami.

Maybe her mind is just wandering, because in my opinion the key to fiction is
allowing yourself to skip minor details and let your brain figure it out as
you go.

------
abootstrapper
Speaking of unnecessarily difficult, the writing style of this article, by
itself, seems to be trying to prove the author’s point.

~~~
asdffdsa321
The article was excellently written and worth the time to read & digest. Your
comment is beautifully indicative of the shallow "garbage in, garbage out"
point the author made at the end.

------
jacknews
I think she has a very valid point, since I didn't finish the article at all,
and merely hopped over various phrasea in the first couple of paragraphs
before feeling compelled to post here, and then move on to other stuff.

Semantic dyslexia, perhaps.

------
dash2
It's small point, and doesn't invalidate her overall argument, but Hermann
Hesse probably just isn't a very good writer, and as an adult, Ms Wolf
realised this.

------
kashyapc
Recently I began reading the glorious P.G. Wodehouse (his books with the
inimitable Jeeves and other characters) as a breather from the non-fiction
work I read. After a serious day with dry technical work, it's incredibly
pleasant to read Wodehouse and retire into the night.

As the back cover of my current book, _Thank You, Jeeves_ , says: "Wodehouse
always lifts your spirits, no matter how high they happen to be already."

------
Svoka
Reminds me of Bob Newhart's "Stop It" sketch. People with good self control
don't have problems focusing.

------
SZJX
I think the so-called effect of the digital age is totally overblown. It's
easy to write headlines about it and make everybody panic, but I don't think
people in ancient times were that much of avid readers either. In fact the
general literacy and the average time spent on reading by the population
definitely increased massively, if anything. The ancient populace didn't have
computers or TV to occupy themselves with, but they had plenty of other games
and entertainment activities all the same. Bear in mind that reading and
writing was never natural to human beings until very, very recently.

Also, it's true that reading whole books is one way to get information. But
plenty of great writers/readers have used reading methods where they distill
the essence of the work or actively search out portions to put their emphasis
on, and it worked out great for them. I was guilty of reading plenty of
newsletters too seriously or reading through whole articles from the beginning
to the end, even though reading on might produce very little additional
information whatsoever. Now I have learned to better focus my energy:
sometimes I skim the headlines, sometimes I skim the first and last paragraphs
of an article, and I've already got 70% of what they have to say. Of course
one might say that reading books can be something different to reading lower-
quality news articles, but in the end time is really limited and "actual work"
is something that gets done with your own hands, your own exploration and
experience, not by reading and talking. This holds especially true for
engineering work. One can't conceivably read whole reference manuals end to
end without having actually built something serious with the tools being
discussed. That's just pure procrastination, not real learning. Of course
there are really well written or foundational books that deserve to be read
cover to cover, accompanied with practices, and if one is reading for leisure
on their spare time it's also totally fine to enjoy every line of a fiction.
But I guess in terms of "getting things done", emphasizing "complete reading"
instead of "getting the essence and doing" can be a bit misleading.

tl;dr: I think if there's anything worth emphasizing in this age of
information explosion, that is "just get real shit done already" instead of
"just read the book and lose yourself/procrastinate potentially endlessly".
This is something that has cost me very dearly and I'll ensure in the future
to avoid this trap as best as I can.

------
watwut
The biggest obstacle for my reading after I got older was to find books that I
would find interesting.

As I had less time, I did not enjoyed filler action/sci-fi/etx books anymore.
And to this day, I did not found consistent source of interesting books for
adult me. Some manga came close, but the rest I rarely cared to finish.

~~~
Kagerjay
Same here, ive read between 100 to 200 fiction fantasy books it feels like
I've seen every plot variation by now. It gets stale after awhile. Same
applies to video games too.

Also once you've read some of the best authors in the genre everything else is
just less impressive

------
kuwze
I think there is a huge difference between reading fiction and nonfiction. One
is tied to reality, the other is a socially accepted temporary delusion. I say
this as someone who loves fiction in all forms. I wish I had only read
nonfiction growing up.

------
cheez
I read about 30 minutes a day, using the following approach:

1\. Kindle

2\. Prepare lunch and dinner such that I have about 15 minutes of waiting time
each time.

3\. Read during this waiting time

After two days of reading this way, if I am not enjoying the book, then I drop
it and move on.

------
coldtea
> _Wolf resolved to allot a set period every day to reread a novel she had
> loved as a young woman, Hermann Hesse’s Magister Ludi. It was exactly the
> sort of demanding text she’d once reveled in. But now she discovered to her
> dismay that she could not bear it. “I hated the book,” she writes. “I hated
> the whole so-called experiment.” She had to force herself to wrangle the
> novel’s “unnecessarily difficult words and sentences whose snakelike
> constructions obfuscated, rather than illuminated, meaning for me.”_

"Demanding text"? "unnecessarily difficult words and sentences"? "snakelike
constructions"?

Who described the book as such, Beavis and Butthead? Herman Hesse is at the
young adult fiction level of difficulty (and in Europe has been traditionally
read by adolescents).

------
nicklovescode
I found it funny that immediately following the article (at least on mobile)
were the worst clickbait ads “10 questions to figure out your mental wealth!”

~~~
zeveb
[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock)

This is an excellent ad-blocker, available for Firefox, Chrome, Edge & macOS
Safari. It's well worth using; the only time I see clickbait is when I use
someone else's computer.

~~~
0xffff2
Not available on iOS AFAIK.

~~~
zeveb
Pity — it works great on Firefox on Android.

------
hrktb
> The narrative action struck her as intolerably slow.

> She had, she concluded, “changed in ways I would never have predicted. I now
> read on the surface and very quickly; in fact, I read too fast to comprehend
> deeper levels

Here she lays the blame solely on her, but I would think that it's also a
writer's skill to hook the reader.

It takes two to tango, and if she felt the narrative was so slow she started
to skim the sentences and ended up missing the deeper parts, perhaps the book
could have used some trimming, better pacing, or a different approach to
present the subject.

I feel that while we tend to read faster in general, we also read a lot more
volume than the previous generations and I genuinely think we are pretty
optimised to understand a lot very fast.

There is a ton of last century news articles or magazines that are unbearably
slow and very diluted. Sometimes there will be deeper thoughts buried there,
but 98% of the times it's not, which is depressing.

Even nowadays, there is a cute TLDR bot on reddit, and from times to times
reading the original article really doesn't bring anything more than what the
bot put in a more succinct way.

~~~
emodendroket
I don't think the world needs to consist solely of page-turning books that
"hook the reader."

~~~
gmueckl
I'd say that in order to stay with a book, it needs a hook that the reader can
grab on to. But readers have different tastes, so while you might enjoy slow
moving brooding works (just guessing), someone else enjoys some fast paced,
packed, dense writing. But in either case, if the book fails to meet
expectations, chances are that you'll put it aside before you finish.

~~~
emodendroket
I want something different from an Abe Kobo novel than I do from an Agatha
Christie one.

------
beat
I've recently regained the ability to do in-depth reading. I attribute the
final loss of my old since-childhood book habit to the Kindle app on my
iPad... it seemed "better" to buy electronic books instead. But that meant the
Internet was there waiting for me, after every chapter or pause, I could just
go check Facebook or email, or... yeah.

So I started reading paper books again. The context switch into paper is
relatively expensive, so I'd stay there, not cutting over to the internet. I
started reading serious material again. From there, my spouse gave me her
unused Kindle Paperwhite (she reads a ton on her iPad, so she doesn't use the
Paperwhite), and I found the Paperwhite gave me most of the Kindle advantages
without the multipurpose device disadvantages.

Next, I cut back seriously on my social media. I went cold turkey on Facebook
for a bit (and on Twitter shortly after), and I consciously avoid bad FB
habits. Nonetheless, it's an addiction machine, and when I do use it again, I
realize that cold turkey is probably better.

Without social media apps on my phone, I find myself with a Kindle app
instead. Much better!

When I was 20 or so and reading very heavily (I had a job that gave me four
hours of sitting time in half hour chunks, so I read a lot), I started a self-
control process of reading one fiction and one non-fiction book simultaneously
- at that time, to make sure I read plenty of non-fiction. Now, I have to make
myself read fiction instead. I seem to have settled that divide by reading
fiction on my phone, and non-fiction on my Kindle.

Audiobooks and podcasts have been a change for me, too. I started with a
serious audiobook on a road trip ( _The Order of Time_ , by Carlo Rovelli).
From there, I blew through all 120 episodes of the _Philosophize This!_
podcast. A new job has me on an ugly commute for the first time in years, so
I'm filling that time in the car with _Hardcore History_ (the monstrous six
hour Celtic Holocaust episode about the Roman invasion of Gaul), and foreign
language vocabulary study (Spanish).

Having a proper reading habit of an hour or two a day on average has me back
to reading heavy things. I've read a lot of history this year, and I'm
currently back to reading philosophy (Simone de Beauvoir and Herbert Marcuse).
Plus, I'm managing to dig through a backlog of software industry books, mostly
DevOps things I'd missed out on before.

It's so much better than social media.

~~~
padraigf
> From there, I blew through all 120 episodes of the Philosophize This!
> podcast.

Good recommendation (based on the first episode anyway).

------
amelius
Can someone please provide a TL;DR?

:)

------
CraneWorm
just don't post anything from slate, there is no way to opt-out from their
tracking shit

~~~
js2
[https://outline.com/5jLN3T](https://outline.com/5jLN3T)

~~~
peterlk
Thank you! This site is beautiful. How is it sustainable?

------
rayiner
“Readers” are so judgey. There is nothing wrong with reading the wikipedia
summary of books instead of the whole thing. I read “Fellowship of the Ring”
in middle school. Took forever! Put me off the whole enterprise.

~~~
byproxy
If all you care about are plot details, maybe.

But you're missing out on a person's voice. Prose can be as beautiful as any
piece of visual art in a gallery. Not only are you depriving yourself of an
aesthetic experience, but also a learning experience. Reading will boost your
vocabulary and help your writing and give you more cultural references to pull
from (and recognize, when they come up in another's work).

But...if you can't be assed, you can't be assed, I suppose.

~~~
wilsonnb3
> Prose can be as beautiful as any piece of visual art in a gallery

For many people, "prose" is just what you have to get through to find out what
happens in the plot or to the characters. A lot of people have a minimal
appreciation for most forms of art and literature is far more subtle and
unappreciated than visual and auditory forms of art.

> Not only are you depriving yourself of an aesthetic experience, but also a
> learning experience. Reading will boost your vocabulary and help your
> writing and give you more cultural references to pull from (and recognize,
> when they come up in another's work).

I'm not sure what the inherent merit you see in boosting one's vocabulary is.
I know a lot of words that I never use and no one I know ever uses. If I
didn't know them, my life wouldn't be any different.

Reading is important for writers but most of us aren't writers. The vast
majority of us that are writers write things like emails, internet comments,
and work related documents. Not the kind of thing that reading fiction is
going to help with.

As for cultural references, culture has been trending away from literature and
towards movies and television for a very long time. I'd go so far as to say
that in modern American culture, you're not going to be missing anything by
not reading books.

Anyways, it's not that people "can't be assed", it's that books don't hold the
same value for them that they hold for you. There's nothing wrong with that.

~~~
byproxy
That last statement was me resigning myself to that fact. Slightly vulgar
phrasing to contrast previous phrasing, which I find slightly humorous.

can't be assed -> can't be bothered -> doesn't hold literature in high-regard
-> I suppose - > okay.

Anyway, spice-of-life, and all that. To each, their own. Etc.

