They kind of miss some of the charm of this word in translation. Yes “tsumu” is pile up and “doku” is reading but “(v)de-oku” is to do that verb in preparation or “for later”. So tsunde-oku which you can contract to tsundoku also literally just means to pile up something for later. It’s a wonderful pun.
I must admit this is something I certainly can relate to. I buy probably more than average programming books and can only read some of them when I buy them. But a situation will come up, where it’s really handy to just reach into the book shelf / library and have one or two good books at hand to read and solve the current issue I run into or give them to a cooperator to level up the skills.
And I must admit I did something similar for electronics projects.
Paraphrasing Umberto Eco, there are two kinds of libraries: one kind are collections of trophies and mementos, but the other kind can be formidable resource in right hands. The latter one is knowledge management tool, and contains also unread books because it is useful to also manage ones future knowledge.
If you want to go the deep end, in 1970s or so Eco wrote guidebook to academic thesis writing that comes with a tutorial how to bootstrap a bibliography and an index card system for your research or other professional purposes, of course most conveniently (though maybe not most cheaply) used with your personal research library that contains whole of your bibliography.
That said, there is also a failure modes of sorts. One that used to be famous was people who collected a respectable looking library (or had someone collect it) but never read or used it themselves, only show off their supposedly good taste in books to visitors. Other, related one, but more in the spirit of plans "I will do all the cool things I wanted ro do when I have time after retirement" involves similar mismanaging ones time and thus spending too much time collecting the library compared to using it.
Warren Zevon said "We love to buy books because we believe we're buying the time to read them" and I mostly agree. Most book acquisitions are an aspiration to experience and a desire to flower in some particular direction, to pass a little afternoon in enjoyment, or even to master a concept.
I look at my unread, unwatched, and unheard media and I think it's a window into who I would like to be, even if only something so shallow as the years free to enjoy them.
For me, the ability to consume infinite information electronically is both a blessing and a curse. I tend to have decision paralysis when searching for information online -- is this method for learning X the best one? what else do I need to know about X? Am I ready to learn about X? Before starting X, what should I know? In the end, I'll end up reading all about the history of Y on Wikipedia, and never even begin with X.
So, recently when I get interested in a random topic, I'll read some book reviews online and pull the trigger on a used book for under $20. I know that one day, I'll get that spark of curiosity again; when it happens, I know I have a solid book there, waiting for me.
I stopped collecting, prior to Goodreads being "a thing."
My guess would be immediacy of access and, often, cost. I have some books I have picked up for rather cheap which go for no less than a hundred dollars now. However, the immediacy is what I would like to concentrate on for the rest of this comment.
From the daydream of an extra day off this month to the wish-fulfillment of superpowers, we think about who we might evolve into if we only had a little more time. This extends to woodworking tools and soon-to-be-dusty exercise equipment. And so the presence of an unread book, a DVD still in the sleeve, or a CD still in cellophane wrap becomes a subtle nag as you walk past it day after day. It says ...
For me, they stay at the forefront of my conscious, so it's difficult to just turn the other way around or pretend they don't exist somewhere. It's easy to get rid of goodreads, I will just never visit the page, I can't do that with physical books.
Audiobooks is the only approach that worked for me. Listen when I commute, when I shop for groceries, when I do household chores. It's a pretty fragmented way to get through a book, but with a busy lifestyle, it's better than nothing! Been doing that for years.
Edit: I should add that another optimization I got into this year has been to slowly ramp up the audio speed, which allows me to cover more content, albeit with some hit to comprehension, depending on book type. Currently listening to a non-fiction book at 1.6x.
That's kind of like saying, "people who are parents, how do you find time to have fun?"
It is overwhelming, particularly at first, but after a while you figure out is a marathon, not a sprint, and that an important part of being a good parent is self-care. Then it's just a matter of what constitutes self-care for you. Getting good sleep, eating healthy, getting exercise, socializing with friends, watching movies, having date night, and yes, reading books are just some of the activities that might be considered self-care. You figure put how much time you need to allocate to self-care to be a functional parent, and then you figure out how to carve it the time. All of that is hard a heck, but you figure it out eventually or you fail miserably at patenting.
In that context, reading books isn't much of a miracle or particularly impressive; it's just a choice of what works best for you.
> an important part of being a good parent is self-care
Kids (also) learn by example, by imitating their parents doing their own things. So, not only self care, but also your things. Obviously, common sense, a toddler requires more attention than a teenager, won’t read nor play piano right away. Some things, like playing music, cooking (and for whatever reason, vacuuming) seems to have early impact :)
The other way I have heard the same idea, but phrased with slightly different motivation:
Your children are important part of your life, and you are important part of their life (especially in the early years). This has also an implication: Who actually is this person they get to know?
I don't have kids, but coincidentally discussed these kind of childhood memories with my spouse quite recently after someone made similar complaint. I probably hsve no idea of time commitments required of very small children. However, about at the age we were old enough not to be disruptive (if supplied with reading material when necessary), both our parents took us to their adult things: bird watcher society meetings, social events, art museums, bookshops, and seminars. It is probable our parents did their peronal own things less than they would have if we had not existed, but we agreed we did not suffer from it, and learned quite a deal.
There is anyway the peculiar something about way kids' experience thing and what of them remain when we grow anyway. Undoubtledly I have learned things much useful I don't remember much about, like how to walk. For me, the images I can call up are the odd, random, small ones. To a child many things are novel in this world, and one knows there is lots of things in adults' world to uncover. Yet because of that lack of perspective, various things may be treated as the normal. As an added complication, one's perspective on childhood memories changes and gains different color when one grows up.
Once, while visiting relatives on a road-trip, tthere was half a day long detour to see an exhibition of non-figurative sculptures whose details I don't recall. I do remember the calm, cool, air-conditioned atmosphere, the white bright walls, the smell of the museum, and the impression of uncanny puzzlement and imcomprehension left by the lone melancholy video installation in a small, separate darkened room in one of the exhibition halls. I was about 12 years old and quite bored. I surmise I was brought along mostly because father wanted to go, maybe because he wanted to give me educational experience about modern art, but most certainly there was any no other option suitable for preteen's inclinations given the circumstances of road trip, and as I said, he wanted to go. Nevertheless, despite the boredom, today the memory certainly is far more interesting than what I recall of the most of the kid-oriented activities I liked then better and also took lot of my parents' time.
It is difficult for me to judge the value of that museum experience -- is it because of the exhibition was remarkable or does it feel remarkable because I remember it? It might even be a partially constructed memory from several similar museum trips. And after all, the thing I remember especially well, much better and concretely than anything else, one of my earliest childhood memories (that I have photographied evidence of), is something utterly mundane, namely the large, black, late 80s mat we had on the living room. In retrospect, it was horrendously ugly on its own right as soon as the TRON aesthetic went out of style, but the reason I remember it was that it had this repeating, neon-colored rectangle pattern, rows and columns, one symmetrically after other. To my eternal dislike, the pattern repeated regularly until it did not: the final row of rectangles at one end were shorter than they should have been given the rest of the pattern. No matter how I counted or measured or tried to mentally rotate the damned thing in my head, there was no solution, no escape, the thing was always asymmetrical. (I amuse myself thinking this may have something to do with me deciding to study math and CS in university later.) Thus one of possibly life-defining experiences was the rug my parents bought years before I was born, and presumably thrown away while I was in primary school (it disappeared and I never inquired about it).
Of childrens' fiction authors, I think ones such as Roald Dahl, Dickens, Lemony Snicket, maybe Rowling (the very first chapters of Philosopher's Stone) capture something of this aspect to watching the world unfold.
I’ve tried many times. Just can’t focus on the audio. I’ll start thinking about something and the next thing I know 20 minutes will have passed without hearing a word.
Try starting with something suspense based that does not have convoluted writing and really grabs your attention, like a Dan Brown book or Harry Potter (read by Stephen Fry). Also, go for the professional readings (i.e. not most of Librivox) and pay careful attention to what reviews say about the reader, as their performance is essential for comprehension. Play around with listening speed a bit (both too slow and too fast won’t work, depending on the material). I could easily increase material complexity after getting through suspense-based books.
I could not get into audiobooks (even after years of listening to scientific talk podcasts) until I got hold of Origin by Dan Brown in an Audible trial, and ended up being gripped by the 20 hour book for two weeks straight. It has been 15+ audiobooks from various sources per year for me since then, which has really enriched my life. Retention is better since I finish the books that can be integrated with various activities not requiring verbal thinking way faster.
Another trick is to start with podcasts. I still remember stumbling upon hardcore history podcast. It was so good that I just walked hours randomly listening to the series on Mongols.
Generally podcasts are lighter than books. And generally fiction books are lighter than non fiction.
I have the exact same issue. If it’s video, my eyes (and brain) are occupied and not easily distracted. But audio alone, unless it’s like radio where you don’t care if you miss something, has been difficult to keep attention on.
Unlike eBooks, where you can easily go back by scanning with your eyes, audiobooks can only provide you a way to quickly go back in time, not context (unless the context is directly related to time, like rewinding for 10 or 20 seconds, for example).
I’ve been thinking of listening to audiobooks while doing chores and not bothering about missing some words or sentences. But I’d have to choose a casual work so that I don’t regret missing anything.
Listening to audiobooks while riding a bicycle worked well for me. Driving, walking and any other physical activity that can be done in "zombie mode" works well with audiobooks, radio.
Now I'm prone to tuning out the stream of text the same way I (and presumably brightball) tune out the stream of speech from an audiobook. If I want to be sure not to miss something, I need to read aloud. :(
I am shocked to find out that no one in in this thread mentioned Scribd.
Scribd is the go to place for audiobooks, it is the only major subscription service I regularly pay.
Audible is horrible, their business model sucks, and what sucks even more is their scummy marketing.
Scribd is basically the Netflix for books, and I honestly love it and cannot recommend it enough.
I do think it has way more potential to become something if it integrated with other services even better, but I guess working with publishers is not easy...
That’s exactly what I do. And, I realized that it makes a huge difference if you buy both audio and the eBook. I love Amazon’s whispersync functionality, because it allows me to switch back and forth between audio and text. So whenever I hear something I don’t understand I read it instead.
After a spine surgery, Audio books became the de-facto medium for books for me and I really appreciate the accessibility it provides.
Btw, Audio books for accessibility reasons are not new, 'Talking Books' have been in existence since 1930s through specialized record players, cassettes and mail-order libraries. Here is a nice video about[1] from TechMoan and article[2] at RNIB.
I don't even have kids yet and I'm also only able to complete books via sped-up audiobooks. It's a really great way to get through them.
For fiction, go for something with a professional narrator. Jim Dale's Harry Potter series is a good example. They can make it into a modern-day radio drama. But for non-fiction, I prefer if the author reads it. Authors imbibe an excitement to the reading of non-fiction; professionals often come across as monotone and I can't focus on them.
Aside, Audible is pretty scummy. Consider a less scummy alternative like Libro.fm.
- Audible's "Cancel membership" flow is multiple pages long and makes you think you've canceled it when you actually have to keep progressing through additional "I want to cancel" clicks. I thought I canceled the free trial when I hadn't. When complaining to some friends of mine, they also made the same mistake.
- When you finally cancel your membership, you've only put in a request to cancel it. The actual cancellation will happen in 30 days. This means you're always billed one more time after cancellation (I couldn't believe this when I saw it).
- When your membership is finally canceled, you lose all of your tokens (you get one per month). So if you have 5 tokens saved up and you want to pause your membership for a couple months because your bank balance is low, too bad. (Note: I've since realized that Audible lets you pause your membership once per year for 1-3 months, but this is an unsatisfying solution and I only discovered it in their support forum. I didn't even see the option while canceling twice.)
- Because canceling your membership has a 30-day delay that charges you once more, you're basically buying one last token that's going to get immediately deleted. This means that if you're billed on the 1st of the month but you cancel (ahem, submit a cancel request) on the 2nd of the month, 29 days later you're going to be charged one last time and receive a token that is deleted within 24 hours.
I haven't used Libro.fm yet (have a sour taste in my mouth from Audible), but their tokens never expire and canceling ("pausing", in their language) membership doesn't delete tokens.
I want to write a blog post that makes these points more eloquently, with evidence, but I haven't had the energy.
"Wait, what if we charge people once more when they try to cancel our service?" is one of the most ridiculous experiences I've ever had. Even worse than that one time I had to cancel a cam-site subscription by uncommenting-out the <button>Cancel</button> in the html.
The world is only as good as the things we choose to tolerate.
Even if you are happy with Audible it is worth trying to cancel every few months because it is highly likely they will offer you a substantial discount every time.
Thank you. I find audible difficult to navigate. I have been meaning to cancel but I gave up. I am waiting for a book I really need that’s a good deal. Collecting credits till then. I do like their free meditation snippets tho’
Audible's business decision to revoke credits on membership cancellation is one of those decisions that makes me wonder if they're actually leaving money on the table. Like, wouldn't having unspent credits in your account contribute to membership reactivations down the road? And enable marketing emails like "Don't you want to spend your 3 credits?"
When you finally cancel your membership, you've only put in a request to cancel it. The actual cancellation will happen in 30 days. This means you're always billed one more time after cancellation
- Oct 25th: Copy and pasted from their email, "We’re just confirming that you’ve cancelled your Audible membership. You’ll continue to have access to your credits until November 25, 2020."
- Nov 4th: I'm charged once more and receive a token.
- Nov 25th: I finally lose tokens and my membership transitions to the canceled state. I'm never charged again.
I've run this experiment a second time when my girlfriend canceled last month (I also wanted screenshots of the cancelation wizard for the blog post I want to write). She was charged once more between the "cancel request", the rebill date, and the actual cancel 30 days later.
What do you think is a more accurate, charitable description of these events? I think "cancelation has a 30-day delay" summarizes the post-cancel rebill much more charitably than it deserves.
I have one. It's well worth it. I've listened to more than 200 books in the last two years in my spare time. It's a skill that takes time but I absorb books just as well now via listening.
tts programs have also gotten much better over the last 5 years or so, entirely adequate for most technical reading/articles/non fiction. it's an imperfect solution but it does reopen the doors to a vast swathe of writings that will likely never be worthwhile for a human to narrate.
I have a big family including several young children and still manage to read about 25 books a year.
My method: we got rid of our TV a few years ago. I know that is a well worn statement on HN, and probably comes across to some as a virtue signal. That's not my goal, just relating an anecdote. But no TV is strangely freeing. To those thinking about doing it, I'd say unplug it and put it in the closet for a few weeks and see what you think.
Similar to this. Have three young kids. Don’t watch any tv, Netflix, etc. Every chance I get (e.g. before going to sleep, on the tube), I read books on the kindle app on my phone. It’s surprising how much you can get through as long as you’re consistent. Phone particularly helps when trying to read when lying next to a kid at bedtime to get them to sleep, can still read under the covers in the dark with the backlight.
Same thing here, though we don't have a kid just yet. In my case the TV cable decoder just stopped working for whatever reason a year and a half ago and I never really managed to call the TV cable company to tell them to come and fix it.
I can still watch football (soccer) matches by casting from my computer to the TV and we do have a Netflix account (which we don't even use that heavily) shared with a close friend but that's about it. I can confirm that the change for the best has been considerable.
If no TV is “too far” then limit it to 1 hour and only watch things you love, you will surprised how little that is. Dig in to the screen time metrics too, you can probably Twitter and Facebook less than you do, you can still see pictures of your mom’s dog but not lose hours to it.
This feels powerful in a world where TV consumption is already on sharp decline, yet you managed to move a few floors deeper in the historical entertainment stack.
No TV for us just meant playing games elsewhere (not complaining either, just a matter of preferences)
I have a toddler at home. I purchased a kindle a few months ago and it has drastically increased my reading time. I try to carry the kindle around the house instead of my phone. And read whenever I can - 15 to 30 mins chunks. I also read in bed before going to sleep and the backlit kindle is great for that.
Also I have been renting kindle books from my library. Very easy to try books and continue reading only if I find it interesting!
My son is still an infant, and sometimes things (teething, stomach aches, who knows) keeps him from sleeping. The Kindle makes it much more tolerable to walk around and rock him at night.
Of course, it also helps that my employer will reimburse any book purchases I make.
Our local library makes it pretty easy. Ours works through an app called Libby that connects with my library card and I then download books to the kindle.
I also recommend Libby. It used to be Cloud Library with our public library but they phased out of it and it’s Libby now. I like it much better. They also have audiobooks.
I have two daughters (4, 12). Here is how I do, copied verbatim from a previous discussion on HN[1]
I don't have strict rules, methods, or patterns. However, I follow common themes such as skimming (or speed-reading) boring/mundane sections, change books and come back later, read multiple books at a time.
Personally, I feel something missing if I totally skip something, so I tend to or try to finish what I read. I was known to be that kid who read Newspapers top to bottom of all pages, so that is that.
My tricks;
- Don't drive, get an Uber and read. I have finished so many books inside an Uber car. I'm in India and is cheap to get a private driver, the monthly cost pays off with the amount of things you can do in the back of your car, reading books is one.
- If I'm flying, I finish about 2 typical books per leg of the flight.
- Always have your Kindle or a Book with you. Read instead of looking at your phone. ;-)
- If you have kids, read (physical books) to show them that you read, they will follow.
The counterpoint is that it’s unlikely you’ll switch to replying to poorly thought out comments on hackernews, for an example, when you’re on a dedicated reading device than when you’re on just another app on your internet connected attention thief of a device.
That is a reasonable concern, but it varies based on the person. I'm not worried that I'll suddenly start browsing the internet while reading on the subway. It's not at all unlikely that I'll suddenly interrupt my reading if I'm messaged while I'm on the subway, but that's something I consider desirable, not something to be avoided.
Cool. I do have it on my iPad (tablet) to read when I forgot my kindle. It hasn't happen in 3+ years. However, I forgotten my iPad a lot of times and not my Kindle. :-)
My phone (iPhone 11 Pro that will likely last for 2+ more years) is just a really good camera, that has some phone function with the usual calendar, maps, etc. I avoid phone calls as much as I can.
Sounds like you may be a much more talented reader than myself, but a question: how does speed reading not conflict with "text assimilation"?
By this I mean: if you read a book very rapidly (which I assume you have to do if you tend to finish two books per leg of flight), how can you mentally "chew" the substance enough to build full comprehension of the topic?
May just be I'm a slow reader & tend to read books in English (which is not my mother tongue), but this has always tripped me with trying speed reading.
Well, this does not work with fiction where it is more fun following minute details of the stories. However, for non-fiction, when you are in a vicinity of the genre one typically read, you can practically pick up and glide along with the text. For instance, I read a lot about Entrepreneurship, Startups, Philosophy, etc. Quite a bit of the context overlap more than one can imagine. There are times when it goes in my head, "yeah! now it will be that, this, but does this have anything different."
During my normal reading speed, if things don't "click", I go back and play back what I read. I don't speed read all the time.
For flights, I like picking up much smaller physical books (200-ish page). You start reading while waiting to board, in the flight, and all the other commute before your destination. I usually give the books to random people, or leave it at places so people can pick it up. For the really good ones, I bring them home for my library. This means, I have also read quite a lot of cheesy, lousy books.
English is also not my mother tongue but is now a primary language. I come from a region in India where for every few square kilometer, one can find a different language and/or dialect. So, we ended up being taught in English, speak in English for more complex words, etc.
I also realized, I used to sit for an hour two days a week just waiting for my daughter with her private tuition. That finishes off quite a lot of books. :-)
I read rather slowly. I've been setting meager book goals for myself the past couple years, hoping to up my goals over time. But I feel my reading speed hasn't improved much.
Do you, or did you at some point, make a conscious effort to read faster? Or did speed just come with practice over time?
I won't do this for books I want to enjoy such as fantasy and sci fi (although sometimes through the more monotonous parts). I will use a few of these for articles/papers until I get to a part which is more technical. Good luck!
Speed does help. I read up and practice speed-reading for quite a while. I'm no longer interested in the number of books read per year but I'm more picky these days, digesting the best I can of the lesser number of quality books that I read.
I still do speed-reading when I stumble on part of the book that are not interesting to me or I have read very similar concepts before (most non-fiction books in the same genre).
For context, I used to hit 60-70 books per year when I was counting. This year, due to the Pandemic (last time I checked) I have read over 70+ books as picked up by Goodread from Kindle. So, I will likely be hitting about 100 in total this year.
But yes, I will slow down and try to be more picky ahead.
I read a lot in my teens, but was never good at it. Computers have always held my attention better. I've gotten much more into reading _after_ having a kid because I wanted them to love books and be better at reading then I am.
Started by reading to my kid before bed. Even at a really young age when the book didn't mean anything, it still seemed to calm them. It allowed me the opportunity to A) read anything I wanted, B) build a foundational hobby over time, and C) spend time with my child. They now bring me books (usually whatever story we're reading at the time, but occasionally a short kids book) and I make a point to take a break and read to them. Because of that and other events this year, I've been able to complete dozens of books.
I read novels aloud to my children at bed and nap times. This started after reading Alice in Wonderland to my one year old and realizing that a kid who couldn't talk yet obviously didn't care what I was reading. At this point my kids are two and five, and my older son is approaching the point where he'll be able to follow longer books and I'll shift to things he understands, but I've read about 15 novels in their entirety to the kids thus far.
I have read thousands of kids books in the past 3 years. Does that count?
Edit: more seriously, by age 3.5 or 4 kids can understand a huge variety of material, and there are tons of books that are fun for the whole family to read aloud together.
Disclaimer: My kids are 10 and 12, and so don't need constant attention, and they've always slept quite well.
Set aside 30 minutes to lie in bed and read before going to sleep. This also feels as if it has the effect of helping me to get to sleep faster.
This is my target, which I only reach occasionally. The hardest part is consciously de-prioritising whatever it is I'm doing at 30-minutes to sleep time.
I read/listen at anywhere between 2x to 3.5x speed, depending on the book and the narrator. If it's nonfiction, it's usually on the higher end, and if it's fiction, usually on the lower end, but again, it depends on the narrator themself.
In addition, I read when doing everything. Exercise? Reading a book. Washing dishes? Reading a book. Commuting to work? Reading a book.
A regular-sized book is between 10-20 hours of listening time. If you listen at 2.5x speed, that's around 7.5-12.5 hours-ish. If you commute 30 minutes a day each way, and only listen in your commute, that's already a book almost every week. Add in doing chores, exercise, etc, and you're getting a lot of reading time.
(For the record: 2 kids ages 2 and 4, and I read about 90-100 books a year, ranging from short books to long epic fantasies. But I also listen to podcasts quite a bit so that cuts down "reading" time as well.)
I understand a lot of people are exhausted, especially when there are multiple children involved. But reading books has never suffered from parenting for me.
I wake up at 6AM and spend a while reading on the sofa, before our child wakes up. On an average day, pre-covid19, I'd spend time doing the morning routine (eating breakfast, getting dressed, taking the child to daycare), then I'd sit on a tram/bus for 30 minutes to head to the office. That time would be spent reading.
Lunchtime I'd usually read a book while eating a sandwich, then again reading on the bus/tram back to the house.
Before sleeping I'd read for 30-60 minutes too, unless I was watching a film with my wife, going to the pub, or doing something else.
But even on very busy days I'd always have around and hour of commute time, on public-transport, to read a book.
15 minutes at bedtime every night, plus any time I'm commuting. I think having an e-reader with back light helps, because you can read without disturbing anyone else in the bed and they are thin enough to carry anywhere.
This is my solution. 15-30 minutes before bed and maybe another 15-30 minutes in the morning on the weekends before the kids rush our bed around 7:45am. I'm using a Kindle Paperwhite.
When the children are babies or much later? If they're above 4-5 years old, it's simple: don't devote all your free time to your children, and suffocate them in the process...
It did plummet from about 100 books to 40 per year. For me the key was a) getting an ebook reader so I always have books on me and b) commuting instead of driving to work, that's an easy 90-120 minutes of reading per day.
The Goodreads reading goal used to help too, especially planning to write a small review with notes to myself forced me to read more actively. The pandemic lockdown has broken that though, I've lost all will to sit down and write.
I read mostly in the evenings after the kids are put to bed, but I note that I watch relatively little television, which would likely otherwise consume that time.
I have four kids, who are now teenagers. On average I think I've finished maybe ten or twenty books a year, by reading them on my work commute. I'm lucky to live somewhere this is possible and comfortable. Some books I've finished on vacation trips, but basically almost none at home, except in the two or three last years.
In 2019 I've read 100 books. Im not married nor have children, but I might have advice to share
If your goal is to just finish a book, you can listen to an audiobook at 3.5x speed.
Some books are easy, some books are hard. If you pick easy books you can go through them much faster
You have to pick your goals and priorities about what you want from the book.
I mostly read non-fiction books that are not heavy in academics. So most of them are not written to be lean if you know what I mean
Being able to tell people I've read 100 books was pretty cool but it was just a vanity metric to boost ego. It's pretty dumb to be honest. Theres better ways to consume a huge amount of information.
This doesnt apply to domains that require deep knowledge/learning ie: programming, engineering, sciences, math, algorithms, hobbies, etc.
Also things you learn from books are not a rule of law, which Ive noticed that is something people tend to forget.
Thanks for pointing out the fallacy of trying to read 100s of books, seems to come next to trying to read infinite jest just to check a mark or brag about it.
The reality is that the majority of non fiction books are written by authors with perverse incentives - as a writer you can mostly make money by writing a complete book, whether or not you have a books worth of things to say about the topic. My approach has been to try and read 1 or two books a year but make sure they matter. The few books I do read, I remember most of their good parts and find them valuable and rewarding. Almost all of my friends and colleagues who are self proclaimed voracious readers never seem the wiser from it, not like they can recount any specific instance of a book affecting their life or decisions in any way at least.
All of this is about non fiction of course, fiction books are a whole another animal!
I agree completely with most of what you said. The whole system of making books having a minimum number of words doesnt help at all.
And I agree with the fiction part, I know and have witnessed people who have been reading fiction throughout their whole life. As an adult, they enjoy and can easily finish a fiction book in one day. But most of them cannot do the same with non-fiction books. I am at the opposite. I can go through a non-fiction really fast, but would take forever and rarely enjoy reading fiction.
I do notice that too, that some books have really valuable insights and can kinda stand the test of time. Some are just like iterations of multiple books out there thats just retold in a different way
I leave a book in the bathroom and never bring my phone with me into the bathroom. It's not a very fast way of reading but I do finish a book every few weeks. I prefer paper books because I underline important points which I then summarize into notes.
25 pages in the morning and 25 pages at night. Done it for years. I have 2 kids. Its not always exactly these numbers, but its not far off and I try to keep to it.
I have twins, they're toddlers. I read at night before bed. My reading hasn't slowed from before kids to after kids. I average 2-3 books per month and I am usually reading two books at a time. I am reading exclusively on my Kindle right now, though I plan to get back to physical books as the twins age (I don't want them to confuse reading on a Kindle with tablet media consumption). We'll see what happens when they're older...
We put the toddler to bed at 8PM, which leaves us with 3 to 4 hours of time at home, during which we have to avoid making much noise.
At the same time, I'm too exhausted to do anything productive (actively learning new stuff or coding for-fun projects), and I'm finding media and games much less satisfying than before.
As a result, I often spend my evenings reading (fiction, mostly). I'm probably now reading more than ever before.
Past Me always thinks he knows exactly what Present Me should be doing with my time. Past Me is a lazy asshole who doesn't want to make the effort at the moment, so he does something like buying a book and leaves it for Present Me to finish. Everything from the dishes to articles to books.
Sometimes that jerk doesn't even bother to make a long term memory, so I open my Kindle reader and there's books in there I barely recognize. The Complete History of Czarist Russia?? Who the hell does Past Me think I am? It's like he thinks between then and now, I've suddenly become a completely different person.
Of course, I try not to do this to Future Me. I might bookmark a few sites, added a few movies to my watch list and signed up for an class or whatever. But I'm sure he'll have the time and focus that I don't have now. I'm sure of it. He'll thank me, really, I'm sure.
I have a few "masters degrees" worth of books... physics, math, origami, Japanese, art/design, photography. I've had to force myself to slow drastically buying in favor of reading the ones I already have. Also, I'm running out of space.
Same here. Every time someone checks out my bookshelf I tell them that I only read a few select pages from most of those books during my studies and that's it. No regrets, too!
I actually buy more books now that I have a Kindle. It happened like this: I know that the Kindle is a doorway into reading all the novels and non-fiction books I ever wanted, because they can be freely downloaded from LibGen. At the same time, the Kindle is an absolutely terrible format for reading poetry: often poetry relies on elaborate typesetting that EPUB/MOBI doesn’t support, some editions of poetry tightly connect the poems and the paper and binding used, etc. As I reflected on this, I was inspired to set about building a huge home library of modern poets’ collected works; basically any name connected with the 20th-century canon, I have bought it or am planning to buy it. I probably would have never thought to do this if it weren’t for the Kindle!
It's actually gotten worse for me with the kindle books... we often get e-credits from Amazon for asking for a day or two latter shipping arrival, and these pile up, and they expire, so... Hey, got $8 off on an ebook, I have one I want to read eventually, so let's get it, and... another on the pile!
I now collect "sample chapters" on my Kindle, rather than buying new books. Highly recommend that approach - in my case most of the time I don't want to continue after reading the sample, so I move on to another one.
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
Ha! My wife's Professor gave her the job of reading a hundred papers and creating a spreadsheet of pertinent data (dating methods, accuracy, age, comparables and so on). So that's one way of handling it.
I have a trick I've adopted recently for nonfiction that has helped me immensely to read more and keep reading.¹ If a portion of a book is unappealing for any reason -- I feel like I already know it, it's irrelevant, it's impenetrable, whatever -- just skip ahead.
It's still there if I need to come back to it. And this preserves the reading as an enjoyable and motivated experience rather than a slog that's easy to procrastinate over. In particular, if a later section turns out to not make sense without the bit that I skipped, I'm now highly motivated to go back and understand it.
If you find yourself hampered by a kind of "completionism" like I do, you might find this very freeing and satisfying.
I used this tactic on a book recently that had a lot of new-to-me gems of information at the beginning and end, but fluff in the middle. Previously I would have lost out on the stuff at the end, because I would have set the book aside at some point and dreaded coming back to it.
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¹ I absolutely didn't invent this, but I'm also not sure where I picked it up.
I read quite a lot of books, probably about 2 per week. However I also have a bad case of tsundoku: there are 5 or 6 unfinished books on my nightstand (I probably should give up on some of those). There are about 100 books waiting to be read in my bedroom alone. Some have waited for more than 5 years :)
I felt like audiobooks was cheating, but I got into it, and I have no regrets. Being able to sit down and read a book in peace is a luxury of the rich.
Bullocks. I read more books living in $300/mo apartment in college than I do now living in a far more expensive place as an adult. And I’m not THAT busy
Drifting off onto topics when listening/reading is what I enjoy the most! When I'm reading fantasy, I'll have to pause after a cool fight scene while my imagination reverts to a 6 year old thinking of all the scenarios where the protagonist is winning or saying a line and being smooth. When I'm reading/listening to non-fiction and trying to understand the writers intent or what the words means to me.
Not saying that your way is wrong or any less of an experience since the way you enjoy it the most is what matters. For me, reading was painfully slow and I thought listening to audiobooks would be a more efficient way of going through books. I listened to audiobooks at higher than 1x speed, thinking I would get the same experience and remove the wasteful rabbit holes that I would go down when narrators spoke too slowly, but audiobooks
weren't doing it for me like reading was. When I went back to books, I realized the mental rabbit holes were what made books enjoyable.
I'm back at using audiobooks as my primary method, but now I'm aggressive with the pause button as soon as I feel myself drifting.
Again, not saying that my way is superior. I just think it's funny how people can see the same situation play out, and have very different takes on it.
The problem I was facing is when I get distracted by unrelated rabbit holes of thought. An audiobook is like a train, it's going to continue no matter what I'm thinking about. I also tend to listen to a lot of podcasts which can be better for that, even fiction podcasts.
I find personally that works when I can be free of outside interruptions. If I have to multi-task or respond to others, I can lose the follow track. Also no other deep thought when listening to the books, it has to be really active listening.
I find active reading much faster than active listening if it’s the only thing I do, to the point that I read ahead on podcast transcripts instead of listening to them.
It depends on the type of the book though. Harder books are better on paper. If we don't understand a sentence or a paragraph, it can be quite annoying to constantly rewind. But on paper, we can read the paragraph ten times if we want to. And make notes on the margin.
Audio books are awesome for fiction, biography etc
Oh yeah, I can't do nonfiction books like that. There are few history podcasts I listen to and am fine with as history is just a series of stories anyway. But for anything more conceptual it needs to be read and not listened to.
I almost didn't understand this, but then remembered that growing up I didn't have a room and all my family members had televisions on in every room. The only way I could read was to put on headphones, turn them off and face away from the tv. Even then it was hard to concentrate.
Oh boy. I have been listening to audiobooks since 2010.... hardly spent 5-20 days since when I didnt have an audiobook playing while going to sleep.
I spend a year finishing wallander series. Then another year for Lee child, then another or John grisham.
Other than those, read almost 40-80 books yearly. *wink 2x playback.
I have to say, books are now a part of my personality. There are times when I dig up a copy of any wallander series or Lee child because I want to hear dick hill.
Same for narrators like orlagh cassidy, Steve barthurst, Simon vance, and hundreds of others.
My most recent love has been Louise penny series. I thoroughly enjoyed that series.
Not to start with either department Q or Lars Kepler. Those two were brutal and enjoyed the rawness of it.
I once worked for an extremely wealthy guy for a bit. He built a brand new office building and during setup I was in his very expensive looking back office... and I realized the nice and old looking books weren't even books... they were finely done hollow blocks of book looking replicas with real curved leather spines and everything...
I will never forget how that summed up the man to me. I quit not long after.
My grandma bought the last apartment of a new block, and to her surprise it came fully furnished -- with all the crap the interior designer had chosen. It had been the one on show.
The second bedroom was themed blue and black. I got about 30 new sci fi books, which had been chosen only for the colour of the spine.
Soviet book collecting was often form of conspicuous consumption - it demonstrated owner's ability to acquire goods - so book value was objective, established by society; while tsundoku seems to be driven by subjective value, placed by owner - making it closer to mild hoarding.
Not sure what the USSR has to do with anything here. People do this in America all the time, especially in the business world. It's fashionable to look like one reads books, yet people don't want to spend the time to properly do just that.
You should have a look at The Best of Myles by Flann O'Brien, and the stretch of items about his "readers", who will make one's newly purchased books look properly read.
Eh. I started buying books when I was busted broke. I just ended up keeping them, and never ceasing. I read them to death and bought more as I discovered more. I had wine boxes packed full that I had to haul everywhere. It was worth it.
I've just had to pack up my collection again as we're moving out of the city. Happy to do it and I won't be downsizing for the sake of downsizing—ever, if I can help it.
I love wandering through and re-reading things I'd put aside for some time. Poetry, in particular, is good for that.
There is a book called "Lost in Translation" with one of these words on every page with the country of origin, pronunciation, definition, and some beautiful artwork I believe.
The finns have a unit of measurement dealing with the gap between how far a reindeer can travel before needing to relieve itself. Tsundoku is also included.
This is the problem that lead us to e-books in our house. Books wound up taking too much space, and with most of them going unread we needed to change tactics. Unread e-books is a lot more manageable.
E-books would largely solve this problem for me but they are normally way more expensive than the used physical book to not be worth the additional cost...
Hey, I've finally found an art I'm good at! Of course my wife and I used to just call it being irresponsible about how much we spend on books. We don't have time to read them all. We finally had to get rid of about 1500 of them when we moved into a small place. Now we can just tell people we are masters of the ancient art of Tsundoku!
If you’ve a dedicated room lined with rich, mahogany shelves that reach high into your 30 foot ceilings, so high that they require their own dedicated ladders to traverse.
The image I generally conjure up when someone says they’ve a lot of books is closer to that of the classic hoarder though.
Or if they inherit it. My grandfather left me his collection of over 7000 books. It was thrown up the attic because I was deemed to young to read some of them. By the time I got my hands on them, they were crumbling due to bad storage and some of them were so old that if you try to fold the edge, it broke..like a biscuit. And then we had a devastating flood and lost it..I tried to dry them and saved about half the collection. A second flood ten years later took away the remaining books.
Since then..I can’t bear to throw away even a magazine subscription. I guess that makes me a hoarder.
Anyone knows how to break the book hoarding habit? It’s about time I let go of the trauma of the flood damage and water logged books.
if i have 1-2 books unread, i might read them; if i have 100-200 on the shelf unread, i am less apt to read even one. so i have pulled a few books off the shelf and put them on my table and i have started reading them.
> One of the most popular interpretations concerned video games, with various people referencing their "vast, untouched software libraries" on game distribution platforms like Steam. And some people even joked the service should rename their annual week of discounting the "Steam Tsundoku Sale". But credit to Ronnie Filyaw of Whomp! comic, who came up with this concise definition [0]
>So when put together, "tsundoku" has the meaning of buying reading material and piling it up.
Where does the art thing come from in the article title?
I think that slapping "art of" by anglophones (no idea what other language speakers get up to here) on anything remotely connected with Japan or Japanese might be considered a strange form of racism but nonetheless I think it is a form of racism. I doubt it is considered offensive by many but to me it sounds like a re-enforcement of a stereotype.
Not every form of cultural misunderstanding is racism. Why dilute the word? What does it even mean in this context?
I think, that this "art of" while exaggerated as you point out, is thrown around not entirely without reason. It's the first association that comes to writers' mind when you see how Japanese can elevate the most mundane (in Western understanding) stuff to the next level - think polishing mud balls, senko hanabi, kintsugi and so on.
> Where does the art thing come from in the article title?
A somewhat flowery but common English idiom used in preference to a bare noun or bare gerund phrase when referring to a generalized practice, particular in titles.
Not a Japanese speaker, but I'm a native Chinese speaker. I know that Bingfa (The Art of War) could also be translated as The Practice of War or Methods of War. Translations are always interpretations because phrases aren't exact.
The Art of JavaScript sure does sound more exotic than The Practice of JavaScript, so I can see why a translator would make that choice.
"Art" used ironically, or perhaps whimsically, is fairly common in English. "The art of being well deceived" appears in both Swift and Pope. Whistler wrote The Gentle Art of Making Enemies.
I think this comment is right and it's too bad it's being voted down. "Tsundoku" just refers to accumulating unread books and it does seem weird that it's presented as an "art" in English just because it relates to Japan.
