[HN Gopher] Is this a good book for me, now?
___________________________________________________________________
Is this a good book for me, now?
Author : ingve
Score : 204 points
Date : 2023-08-16 09:23 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (maryrosecook.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (maryrosecook.com)
| csours wrote:
| "Pet Sounds" by the Beach Boys had a very similar effect for me.
| Some of those songs hit different after different life
| experiences.
|
| I feel like a lot of people have album(s) like this, I'd love it
| if you shared.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| The album _Days of Future Past_ by The Moody Blues is that way
| for me.
|
| As far as individual tracks:
|
| _I Just Wasn 't Made For These Times_ (From _Pet Sounds_ )
| certainly hits differently depending on when you hear it.
|
| _Landslide_ by Fleetwood Mac has a similar effect for me.
| OmarShehata wrote:
| I relate to a lot of this! I have had a similar transformation. I
| think it's really important and changes practically how you read
| books. It frees you from this "I need to read these books that X
| said transformed their life".
|
| But also, the small things like, you can just skip a section, or
| drop a book. If it's not working for you, then powering through
| it isn't necessarily going to make it better. But also this
| mindset has allowed me to re-read books, knowing that the "me" is
| different and I might get something new out of it.
|
| I once read an HN comment a long time ago saying "why would you
| ever re-read books? You already have this knowledge. Seems like a
| complete waste of time" and I couldn't disagree more, but had
| trouble articulating why. Next time I will link to this post!
| slothtrop wrote:
| I've dropped books in the past I just wasn't ready for (too
| young/inexperienced a reader), and enjoyed them later. On the
| other hand, these days I feel I can gauge well enough whether
| it's worth my time to finish what I'm reading. Usually I do,
| but not always.
|
| I get more into a book if I can allow myself a large enough
| block of time to read it. I had a phase where it was basically
| the last thing I did in my day, and I'd only chip away at 10-15
| min, having to re-read pages, not getting immersed. I still
| like to read a bit at night but I give myself other blocks.
| hammock wrote:
| 7 Habits for Highly Effective People transformed my life. But
| not before I read it 3 times. I skipped around each time. I
| still have never read it cover to cover.
|
| Most crucially, the valuable parts that transformed me were not
| the actual seven habits or what the online cliff notes cover,
| but the other, non-headline concepts taught deep in some of the
| chapters (specifically: universal spiritual morality,
| Personality Ethic and Character Ethic, Circles of Concern and
| Influence, and some others)
| sBqQu3U0wH wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| balaji1 wrote:
| the hardest part of consuming info from books or online,
| especially online info, is to figure out how to calibrate that
| info for you.
|
| Lets say you are techie in your late 20s earning decently, living
| in a bubble of a unique society. What is good advise that you can
| apply as action immediately?
|
| That said, there are timeless advice. But those sometimes require
| a huge will power and straying from norm of today to incorporate.
| thomasfromcdnjs wrote:
| I usually prefer reading over audio books, but if I don't feel
| like finishing a book, I just play the rest of it as an audio
| book while I am working.
| taopai wrote:
| "Every time someone reads a book a new book is being created."
|
| But not only reading. Try going for a walk while thinking about
| some book your read some time ago. Look for the underlying ideas
| or story and reflect about it.
|
| This also applies to memories. Changing, growing up, can make you
| change how you feel and reflect about past experiences.
|
| I am know reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance while
| having a part time job delivering pizzas in motorcycle. It's a
| pretty awesome experience.
| blairbeckwith wrote:
| "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the
| same river and he's not the same man."
| HenryBemis wrote:
| I have read Siddhartha quite a few times in my life (every
| 4-5 years). Every time I align with a different character, or
| with Siddhartha in the various phases.
|
| Timing is (almost) everything in life. I read 3-4 years ago
| "Though shall prosper" and "Half-time" and I could not have
| picked a better timing for both. I couldn't imagine
| appreciating either 20 years ago, and it would be "too late"
| reading them at my 70s.
|
| So yes, timing matters.
|
| But there is also 1984, which everytime I read it just hits
| the (same almost) spot!
| labster wrote:
| Orwell tends to be a clue-by-four precisely because he
| knows how people can misinterpret political theory to their
| own liking.
| mjklin wrote:
| Watch out for those gumption traps!
| epiccoleman wrote:
| This is something I have been trying to work on lately - just
| cramming my head full of stuff that can be processed in the ol'
| background thread.
|
| What I have found is that sometimes, some seemingly innocuous
| thing I read years ago will pop out at just the right moment,
| some neural connection forms and all of a sudden I have the
| basis of a whole rabbit hole of interesting thoughts.
|
| I think it's important to fill your mind with _good_ stuff,
| things that have the necessary depth and maybe enough
| subjectivity that they 're ripe for that kind of background
| processing. You are probably not going to have deep interesting
| thoughts about Twilight (although maybe you will, no judgment.)
| But philosophy, poetry, great fiction, even religious texts -
| they're all crammed with symbolism and really reward re-reads
| and deep thoughts.
|
| A recent example of this for me is Kazuo Ishiguro's book The
| Remains of the Day. It was mentioned on a podcast I like and so
| I picked it up on something of a whim during a library visit.
|
| The book is about a butler who served a "great English house"
| and when I started it I was _deeply_ skeptical that I would
| enjoy it. But it 's a great example of the kind of work that
| really bears out for thinking on, and since I finished it I've
| really enjoyed turning things over in my mind. I'm usually a
| genre fiction guy (sci-fi, horror) and a lot of those books
| just don't have the same depth.
|
| I don't mean to disparage "light reading" because I'm truly not
| that kind of. snide intellectual douche. But it's really
| fascinating sort of watching your brain pick something apart
| that warrants deep thought, and it's a really cool feeling to
| be in some discussion with my wife and think "oh my god, that
| bit from the introduction of book XYZ is so perfect right now,
| I need to share it and talk about it."
|
| One other book that I've really enjoyed the "post-processing"
| phase on is The Essential Rumi - the Coleman Barks translation.
| Those little poems are so rich and full of meaning, and it's
| seriously rewarding to let your brain go to town on them.
| barrysteve wrote:
| Uhh, yes. This article has a very neutral perspective.
|
| The supposed 'reservations' against the article's thesis is just
| a restating of the article's thesis.
|
| Reading books you won't immediately apply is good, and reading
| books that you will never apply is good.
|
| You build an internal map of the problem space. Oversee in a
| short period of time where people have gone before you. It helps
| when you know nothing.
|
| Yes the book is good for you now, because there was a reason you
| picked it up in the first place.
|
| You don't have to 'experience' or undergo emotional turmoil to
| understand. Books can be both an emotional journey and packed
| full of useful knowledge. It's up to you how emotionally invested
| you become while reading.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| I think you are deciding good on an absolute scale, and you are
| right in that any time you spend actively engaging your mind
| and growing is not going to be a complete waste of time. In a
| world where it is often almost impossible to know what effect a
| book has on you until much later, if at all, it's very hard to
| know whether a book you just read was 'huge' or just another
| book.
|
| So while I did enjoy the article and applying the little
| framework to my own reading history, there's no way to know
| before you read it, and probably even after you read it in a
| lot of cases, whether a book was the 'right book for you' at a
| given time. I guess that is the point of the article in the
| end, you can't reasonably build a book recommendation system
| based on past reading history and reviews of books. That 5 star
| you gave Huckleberry Finn, remembering how much you enjoyed it
| when you were 13, might be a 1 star if you read it for the
| first time today. Or maybe it would be 5 stars still. There's
| almost no way to know.
| zen_of_prog wrote:
| I think the message is useful for people who receive or want to
| give recommendations. The reason I often pick up something is
| that it was rated highly on some online review, or that
| somebody told me I should read it under the assumption that it
| will be as eye-opening to me as it was to them.
|
| > Yes the book is good for you now, because there was a reason
| you picked it up in the first place.
|
| I disagree. That can be the case, but the assumptions under
| which it was picked up are often wrong, misleading, or become
| wrong over time. This article sheds light on those assumptions.
|
| > You don't have to 'experience' or undergo emotional turmoil
| to understand.
|
| But if I expect an experience and I think the characters are
| all flat, I'm disappointed. If the book speaks to me, I become
| more invested. Using recommendations and understanding their
| subjectivity can prevent you from picking up junk, assuming
| that's what you want.
| falcor84 wrote:
| >Yes the book is good for you now, because there was a reason
| you picked it up in the first place.
|
| I agree in general, but not with that specific statement. Even
| if there was a good reason you picked it up, it might not be a
| sufficiently good reason to spend 10 more hours on it, or to
| block the queue of other books that would be more valuable to
| you at that point in time.
| mangamadaiyan wrote:
| How do you know the book is (or will be) valuable to you
| until (a) you finish reading the book, and (b) experience a
| set of circumstances that make you appreciate the "value" of
| the book?
|
| Is a period of 10 hours (or however many) spent reading a
| book _so_ important to one that one must judge a book before
| picking it up?
| jebarker wrote:
| I think it depends on the type of book. I agree that you
| can't really appreciate what value you'll get from
| literature before reading, digesting and living with it.
| But lots of non-fiction should actually just be a blog post
| or some bullet points. There's certainly an opportunity
| cost to reading those books.
| corethree wrote:
| Such a surface level view.
|
| Books can lie and deceive and they can be wrong and evil.
|
| There's this strange idea that books are good for you and
| television is garbage. Nothing is further from the truth. Both
| books and television are just different forms of human output
| both of which can be bad or good because humans themselves can be
| bad or good. One isn't particularly better than the other.
|
| One thing about books though is the amount of effort it takes to
| read it. The effort is so great that completion of a book often
| leads to more bias. Not always but often. The more effort you
| spend on something the higher positive bias you build towards it.
| Hence books tend to be more convincing then television which
| requires zero effort to consume.
| raincole wrote:
| The article has nothing do to with "books are inherently good
| for you".
|
| Ironically, your comment shows that you didn't read the
| article. Maybe TV (and internet) has destroyed your attention
| span and reading books is inherently good for you.
| tizzy wrote:
| I don't think you read the article, or if you did you didn't
| understand it.
|
| The idea isn't books themselves are good or bad, it's that the
| same book can be good or bad depending on who you are. Maybe
| that's a surface level view, but it doesn't relate to the
| second half of your comment?
| mym1990 wrote:
| 'There's this strange idea that books are good for you and
| television is garbage. Nothing is further from the truth.'
|
| This seems very hyperbolic. I might agree with you if we are
| talking about short form content...a magazine column vs
| something similar in video format. And of course, selection
| matters as well...watching one hour of a well vetted
| documentary vs watching an hour of Love Island are going to
| engage the brain differently.
|
| Consuming books is a very active way of thinking, and consuming
| video media is generally very passive. The research that needs
| to go into getting a whole book across the finish line is
| pretty staggering(again, if you're not choose complete trash).
| Even when I read fiction, my brain has to create the imagery
| from the text, in rough form...and that is kind of beautiful.
| Watching an epic like Lord of the Rings...the scene is already
| there...there is little room for your brain to interpret it any
| other way.
|
| Your comment about becoming more biased as one engages in one
| direction of thinking definitely holds true...each "fact"
| reinforces the held world view. Which is why it is great to try
| to read things across a spectrum on one topic...its difficult,
| but it gives way more perspective on the issues.
| samsquire wrote:
| I want and prefer things that are in this category of words:
|
| good, light, love, faith, kindness, beauty, glory, majesty,
| magnificence, sophistication, elegance, awe, fruit, colour,
| right, righteousness, wholesome, truth, noble.
|
| I think television, films and books focus on the opposite of
| utopia. But if you know any that I would like, please
| recommend.
| webnrrd2k wrote:
| fruit?
|
| It seems out of place in your list. Is it an autocorrect
| typo?
| jhbadger wrote:
| It's a bit silly to think that, for example, novels are
| inherently better than television (and in fact in the 19th
| century people complained about people wasting their time
| reading novels much as modern people complain about television
| and social media as time wasters), but in terms of nonfiction,
| books simply provide more depth than any other source, except
| perhaps academic papers.
| 2143 wrote:
| > Not getting very much out of Anna Karenina, supposedly one of
| the aesthetic and emotional heights of human expression and
| experience, doesn't feel great.
|
| Incidentally, I have very recently stalled a second time on _Anna
| Karenina_ , generally considered to be a masterpiece.
|
| I'll probably revisit it later, but it's just not for me at the
| moment.
|
| Also, _The Idea Factory_ by Pepper White doesn 't seem to be very
| popular (or maybe it is?). I first read it when I was in college
| and loved it. Re-read it in grad-school and I loved it even more.
| I think it was because I was in grad-school and could empathize
| with the main character.
| jekude wrote:
| Amazing interview clip by Patrick Collison on his reading
| strategy (as well as John's) -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkh3BHP6KJ0
|
| Very much echoes some of the sentiment from this article.
| iamben wrote:
| Fiction aside, I started reading the book summary in Blinkist
| before I read the book. I've found it helpful to a) know whether
| I want to actually read the book (ie, the fundamental ideas work
| for/with me _right now_ , as per this article) and b) set me up
| for "what's coming," which seems to help me digest it a bit
| better. Obviously YMMV!
| jebarker wrote:
| I think this a great strategy for many of the many self-
| help/life management type books that come out now too. They
| usually contain a few useful nuggets surrounded by a couple of
| hundred pages of cherry picked anecdotes posing as evidence
| and/or self-aggrandizing .
| thanatropism wrote:
| A better idea yet is to spend the time with Ralph Waldo
| Emerson.
| me_smith wrote:
| What would be a good starting point with Emerson?
| dunk010 wrote:
| Presumably... Waldo?
| groby_b wrote:
| Not without some solid companions that bludgeon
| transcendetalism. For contemporaries, probably Poe. (On New
| England Transcendentalism, specifically). Melville and
| Hawthorne make good reads as well.
|
| Emerson, like so many self-help books, offers what looks on
| the surface trivial and immediately obvious, providing a
| seemingly simple "if-only" path. Meanwhile, his ideas on
| individualism have done untold damage to society as a
| whole.
|
| This isn't to imply something simple as "Emerson is wrong".
| He has valid insights. But reading them in a vacuum,
| assuming Emerson alone is sufficient reading, is not the
| best approach.
|
| Ultimately, it is no accident Emerson suggests to "set at
| naught books and traditions", because that is the only way
| his ideas can survive unscathed.
|
| (fwiw, the advice of "read widely" holds for any given
| book. Never believe one person has the answers)
| sbysb wrote:
| I have always said that you can gain more value from self-
| help/life management type books by reading the table of
| contents and then spending the time you would have read the
| book just thinking about those topics and coming to your own
| conclusions.
|
| This is obviously a bit hyperbole but seriously most self
| help books could be an article instead and I wouldn't miss
| anything that was cut
| jacurtis wrote:
| Yeah most self-help books start off as viral articles,
| popular newspaper editorals, or conference talks, and
| publishers will then approach the creators of these ideas
| and ask them to write a book about it.
|
| The formula is simple, the idea you presented has already
| demonstrated itself as extremely popular. But only a
| thousand people can attend that conference, let's print it
| as a book and sell it in airports, websites, and stores
| around the world as a nice packaged book that everyone can
| buy and it will surely be just as popular but we can sell
| it to more people.
|
| But then the problem. Writing down the original idea only
| takes a few pages, maybe 10-20. So we let the author
| expound a little, which brings it up to 80 pages. But still
| no one is going to pay $20 for an 80 page book, so the
| publishers ask them to break small sub-concepts into entire
| chapters to get to the magical 275-325 page mark that 95%
| of books sell at. These fit into shipping boxes well, every
| store bookshelf is designed around this size, even US
| Postal Service's "Media Mail" is optimized around this
| sizing.
|
| So in the end, you are left with most self-help books being
| extremely padded to get to the the standard mass-market-
| paperback size. So books that should be long blog posts or
| a 15 min presentation get dragged out into 275 page epics
| where it becomes clear by the end that the author has ran
| out of stuff to say and is just filling the page count.
|
| One great example right now is the top-selling book: "The
| Subtle Art of Not Giving a F$&#". I highly recommend
| everyone go to the nearest bookstore and read the first
| introduction and first chapter. They are absolute gold. The
| author summarizes the whole book in about 20 pages and does
| an excellent job. It is well written, entertaining, and
| enlightening. Everything you want in a good book. But then
| you can put the book down and walk away. Because the next
| 225 pages are just rehashing the same thing from the first
| chapter. Repeating itself. The author is clearly trying to
| reach the minimum 250 page count that the publisher will
| allow. He is grasping at straws and just re-iterating the
| same basic concept for 80% of the book. Sadly most self-
| help books are the same thing. Great concepts that need to
| be 20-50 pages.
| carlossouza wrote:
| > Third, book recommendation systems based on your reading
| history can be helpful, but only so much.
|
| Book recommendation systems should be a hybrid system with
| content-based filtering and collaborative filtering systems.
|
| Reading history (lagging indicator) + browsing history (leading
| indicator) would form the basis of a content-based filtering.
|
| The collaborative filtering part would ensure the system compares
| users with same reading patterns.
|
| A system like this should address all author's concerns.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| There's lots of thornier issues that doesn't solve, like the
| famous _Napoleon Dynamite_ problem from the Netflix challenge.
| nottorp wrote:
| I think that at least once in a while one should read/watch
| something that is not recommended based on stuff they've
| read/watched before. Helps keeping the brain fresh.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > First, skipping sections that aren't good. > Second, dropping
| books that aren't good.
|
| I agree. This alone will make pretty much anyone read more, learn
| more, and enjoy it more. Too many people feel this weird sense of
| responsibility: having opened the book, I must read every word,
| in order, until the last page, or I have failed at my job. A
| healthier perspective is that books are there for you to use and
| throw away as needed, not a sacred burden.
| [deleted]
| nottorp wrote:
| Yes yes yes. Drop them if they don't click with you. Life's too
| short.
|
| I've even dropped a book by one of my favorite authors once. I
| just couldn't stand it [Makes note to check what Neal
| Stephenson wrote after Seveneves].
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-08-16 23:01 UTC)