There’s an old story about a guy taking a smoke break with his non-smoking colleague.
“How long have you been smoking for?” the colleague asks.
“Thirty years,” says the smoker.
“Thirty years!” marvels the co-worker. “That costs so much money. At a pack a day, you’re spending $1,900 a year. Had you instead invested that money at an 8% return for the last 30 years, you’d have $250,000 in the bank today. That’s enough to buy a Ferrari.”
Impossible to actually achieve that return. Those indexes can add and remove companies at any time. Index funds never perform to the same level as an index, and that's without accounting for fees.
According to [1] VFINX (Vanguard S&P 500 fund) with re-invested dividends from Jan 1989 - Sep 2019 grew 10.25% per year on average. 7.58% / year when they account for inflation.
I don't spend much time on social media, and I read maybe 30 to 50 books a year. My wife, a huge reader, will read around 90 this year. Maybe if we gave up our creative, athletic, or social pursuits we could get those numbers up to 200, but what's the point?
> Typical non-fiction books have ~50,000 words
I recently finished writing a book, and it was around 125,000 words. In the end, it felt short when I held it in my hands. I doubt highly the 50,000 number.
> The main reason this happens is a failure to execute.
The main reason people don't read 200 books a year, really, is because there's not much value in reading that many. If you're reading for enjoyment, slow down and enjoy it. If you're reading to learn something, slow down and internalize it. If you're reading to show off, just read the Wikipedia summaries because no one really cares that you've read a ton of books.
This may sound like a dumb question, but how much do you think you retain and take with you from each book through out a year?
I know it will depend on the book, if it's a book to entertain or a technical book... but sometimes I get the feeling that so little is retained it's almost unproductive in the long term simply because you will forget a lot of it.
I have books that stuck with me, that changed my perception, but those are a really small fraction, and probably had to re-read them to get some details if I wanted to talk about that book to someone for example.
Do you take notes? If so, do you revisit those notes?
I probably read 75/25% fiction, non-fiction, so for me it's mostly about entertainment.
A few years ago i started takin serious notes, using memory palaces and other stuff to try help to remember more but it made reading a lot less enjoyable, so i stopped.
These days I tell my better half or a friend or a work colleague about the interesting things i read and that is a good balance between remembering and enjoying reading.
The 'traditional' length of a fiction novel is 60k words. Although I believe 90k is a more common expected length today (looking at publisher submission requirements). Obviously non-fiction is much more variable, both in length and time required to read. E.g.: it's going to be significantly more time consuming to read a physics text that walks you through (even rudimentary equations) than a step by step illustrated guide to photography.
I don’t see how one could process 200 books a year. That means thinking about new ideas every other day. I have 90 minutes commuting time every day to listen to books and podcasts. In the beginning it was fun but now I am slowly realizing that this is more information than I can or want to handle on an ongoing basis.
I have adapted my podcasts accordingly. I listen to lighthearted banter between cohosts which I also have some online (text chat) communications with from time to time. It's like eves-dropping on nice acquaintances or distant relatives having a good laugh while getting some light industry news at the same time.
I do that too. Mix some light stuff in with the heavier stuff. For example I have learned that Stephen king is a damn good writer. It won’t change your life but it makes a commute quite entertaining.
So quit social media, do some stuff, and once you have a passive income measured in the billions your professional and creative pursuits don't get in the way.
Not saying this applies here, but I have the impression that many people consider listening to audio books at 1.5x-2x speed also "reading".
I think it depends what the goal is, comprehension vs simply going through the motions. When I read technical books, I tend to read quite slow. When I read some fantasy novel just before bed, I read fast and will have probably forgotten by the morning what I read about. With audio books, it's easier to go through the motions of reading lots, but imo reading comprehension suffers greatly due to other distractions at the same time.
Reading tech books requires that you frequently stop and think, and work problems or write code. This slows the read speed significantly.
At slowest, reading math can take 30 minutes or more per page. Likewise, if you intend to ace an exam in molecular biology or physics or medicine, you'll be taking notes and re-reading often.
In fact, few substantial nonfiction books can be read quickly. I suspect that only popular nonfiction fare can (like political screeds or one-concept wonders).
50,000 is one of the (several) generally accepted minimum lengths for a novel. That must be where the number came from, but agreed—even in my most voracious stack-of-books-a-week years, I wouldn’t hit 200 books a year. This was before social media existed.
That argument is inconsistent. You say that that humans don't have capacity for 200 books, yet have capacity for the equivalent of social media?
I read on average a little short of 200 books a year. I don't feel rushed. It works out a bit more than a book every other day. And you can fit more than that over the weekend.
I don't understand the hostility here. I read books because I enjoy it. Nothing beats a book for information density. Do you watch TV series? You can read Song of Ice and Fire faster than you can watch a season of Game of thrones.
I read 200 books a year (some years) due to reading lightning fast and not driving, but reading books using my algorithm of picking the most appealing at the library is not really more edifying than social media. Like I sometimes pick up graphic novels, weird poetry, handbooks with pictures of mushrooms or whatever.
At this point I'm wondering if this idea that reading books is always more valuable than any other entertainment activity is a kind of cultural brainwashing we're going through to make sure our kids stay literate.
Reading comprehension and speed can both improve with practice. This is a fundamental building block of the "learning how to learn" that school is generally teaches.
Really it depends on your definition of books. Anyone can read though 100 pages in a day, and there are plenty of ~100 page books. So really, 365 books might be reasonable.
My question is this- Would reading 200 books per year make you better off than whatever social media you read? I probably only read a handful of books every year, but I read hundreds if not thousands of HN linked articles. I think there is some sort mystique around books like they magically are all sound, enlightened content and other forms of reading are junk food for the brain.
OK, skimmed the article- The central theme appears to be that you are rotting your brain for wasting time on social media. What if instead of social media you read 200 erotic romance novels, are you better off?
Descartes wrote that reading great books is like having a conversation with the greatest minds who have ever lived - and even at that, hearing only the absolute best of their thinking.
I think it's a matter of filters. On Twitter where there is almost no filter, you will be reading almost exclusively garbage. You may just be better off reading erotic romance novels than reading unfiltered Twitter. HN is a little more tightly filtered, the quality of stuff posted is generally higher, and it's probably more worth your time.
But it's hard to beat hundreds or thousands of years of filtering through the best thoughts of the best minds. When you pick up the plays of Sophocles or the writings of Cicero you know that people from radically different societies and ages of history have found wisdom and insight in their thoughts. So I think there is some "magic" in books in that they have had time to age, and that thousands of very smart people have found value there.
Descartes lived in a time when most people couldn't even read and therefore the people who actually wrote books might well have been some of "the greatest minds who ever lived". Today almost everyone can read and almost everyone has the potential to write a book. So if we are talking about baseline quality, the magic of books has decreased a lot since the enlightenment. Today a book is just an indication of quantity of writing and not necessarily an indication of quality. And it isn't like the "great minds" aren't also on Twitter or writing shorter form articles. The quality is there too, it just might take a little extra effort to find it.
I've got to say this: reading fiction that survived the test of time was like having thousands of substitute parents who were better at raising me than my own.
I’ve found that the classic fiction books have revealed more fundamental truths than modern non fiction books.
Even scientific books that are out of date have deep insights into nature for example the origin of species, what is life?, and origin and history of conscientious.
Also my sentiment. Good fictional storytelling describes the corners and in-betweens of human experience; non-fiction typically describes a mix of technical tools(basically trade skills and weaponizable knowledge) and self-promotion(the book was in some fashion written for a career purpose).
The exceptions abound, of course, but categorically speaking, you only need some technical knowledge. It's the "how to lead your life" knowledge that is harder to glean, and one most resistant to taking a head-on approach like studying all the philosophers and then ranking their greatness in a spreadsheet.
I read some Plato earlier this year, and I confess I was unimpressed. I had always been taught that he was a great philosopher, but apparently his philosophy was: if you don't know something, just make it up, in exquisite detail. I'm not sure what I was supposed to get out of it, except how much the ancient Greeks loved mathematical purity, and didn't have the scientific method.
What we know in modern terms from modern books is the best thoughts of the best minds filtered down through the ages. I don't need to read the rough drafts.
Fair enough, I'm just glad you put forth the effort and then came to your own conclusions about what you read instead of thinking what everyone told you to think.
Your observation that the Greeks didn't have "the" scientific method is, to me, what makes them so very interesting and what made their thought so original. Plato was one of the very first people writing down his answers to the question "How do we know things?", which is the same question that the scientific method tries to answer. You can trace his ideas throughout history and it's really astonishing to think about. Plato's thought heavily influenced early Christian theology, then you move on to people like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, who influenced the monastic orders where some of the first properly "modern" scientific experimentation began taking place in the middle ages and we move on to the Enlightenment from there. I think the value of reading the guy who started all that speaks for itself.
If you don't believe me, there is always Alfred North Whitehead's famous quote to the effect that all of Western philosophy is essentially a series of footnotes on Plato.
Some "footnotes"! Yes, I agree that "original" would be an apt description.
Plato: Fire is obviously made of tiny tetrahedrons, because it feels sharp and stabby when you touch it, and tetrahedrons also have sharp points, QED.†
† Everyone else, after Chemistry: OK so that didn't turn out to be true at all.
Yes, Original, exactly! Original denotes something very powerful, a beginning which sets things off, which branches off into a bunch of other things that are only iterations of that first thing. You can draw a line through history from the ancient Greek philosophers, who in your view were so ignorant as not to deserve any consideration, directly to the first chemist who discovered what fire is actually made of.
Maybe Plato's hypothesis about fire was incorrect, but you don't think it prompted the next guy to try and find a better answer? And then the next guy, and so on? You don't see any value in knowing where we have all come from intellectually?
Plato was a "great philosopher", in the sense of the how philosophers tend to approach things: propose an abstract concept and then contemplate its consequences. The initial abstraction doesn't necessarily have to be tethered to reality and in some cases doesn't need to be internally consistent (at least at the outset, sometimes philosophers will then try to refine).
If you tend to gravitate towards either a mathematical thinking style or a scientific thinking style, Plato and Aristotle will probably underwhelm.
(And actually you'll probably find that a great deal of modern philosophers, Kant, Nietsche, Foucault, etc. are not that much more up your alley.)
You're right and it's something that's related to the Lindy effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect). "The Lindy effect is a theory that the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things like a technology or an idea is proportional to their current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy."
I laughed out loud at "200 erotic romance novels" :)
Of course you're right about that. But the conclusion should not be "continue rotting away on social networks", the conclusion should be "read 200 good books".
Or even just 2 good books would be an improvement for many people.
You are absolutely right. Even 2 good books are a huge improvement, and reading quality should be the takeaway.
I will even admit that my romance novels is a bit of a straw man, but I think what bothers me about articles like this is the amount of assumptions that go into it. Is social media the only reason they arent reading? If it went away magically would the world be better because we all read and gained knowledge? I will even backtrack a bit and say maybe this article is good in that it does the math of what is theoretically possible if you do reject social media. At the end of the day though someone has to want to do better to make this change.
> Of course you're right about that. But the conclusion should not be "continue rotting away on social networks", the conclusion should be "read 200 good books".
"Good book" is extremely subjective category. But I imagine that with such consumption, they would become boring and repetitive quickly.
Never understood the "you should read X hundred books per year" trend. Especially when the reason is "Warren buffet said so". It's like thinking only wearing grey t-shirts will make you the next Zuckerberg, and there is no way you'll be internalising even 5% of 500 books per year.
Do something you find truly meaningful/fulfilling with your time is a better alternative imho.
The whole practice of counting how many books you read is ridiculous. I recently read Don DeLillo's Underworld. It's 850 pages long and some sections can be kind of a slog. But it was one of the most satisfying books I've ever read. It took me 4 months to get through it. Am I really worse off because I'm reading at a pace of 3 books per year vs. someone who reads 100 trashy self-help or empty business-speak "thought leader" books per year? Probably not.
I've read one Don DeLiio book, White Noise. There are other works on myself of his that I intend to read as thoroughly enjoyed White Noise.
Though more to your point I recently finished Mathias Enard's Zone - three months to read. It is 517 pages long, one sentence, a stream of thought. A difficult book to say the least, as the topic, dealing with not only the melancholy of the narrator's life but how his theme has remained the same for thousands of years. Zone will have a lasting impact on my ideological outlook for the remainder of my life.
As a break from hard topics, I am now reading How to Listen to Jazz, as an avid jazz listener.
Its called Cargo cult and it really seems many people tend to gravitate to this behavior if they don't know any better.
For me its seems ridiculous, even numbers some people mention here, like 50-100 books per year. If one has 100% employment, this doesn't leave much space for this thing called real life, in whatever unique manifestation. But hey, at least they don't shoot heroin, right?
Tbh, it reeks of self-help guru. It's almost a meme now, along with "delete facebook, hit the gym, lawyer up" circlejerk you see in relationship forums.
I stopped using social media fairly early on but it wasn’t until recently that I started to replace that time with books. The first year I thought I’d set an easy goal of 6 books. I read 32. Once I started reading I wanted to continue reading. I’m close to 50 books so far this year and my life has been considerably more hectic than last year.
Side Note: Check out your local library and download Libby/Overdrive/Hoopla. You’ll have access to tons of books/magazines/audiobooks/movies for free. They even buy books I request on occasion!
Logistical part of reading 200 books a year seems like a bigger challenge than actually reading the books. I'm not sure I could find 200 good books to read. Basically I would have to find new books at the same rate I read them. Also, I would probably have to pre-order a month worth of books and find a place to store them after I have finished reading. Then, of course, I could go to library, but that takes a lot of time, given that I'm reading most of my free time. Seems like a headache and I need to hire a personal secretary who would provide me with a steady stream of good books.
EDIT:
Just realized that there already might be some kind of service, that does just that. If not, it might be a good business idea.
Tyler Cowen's "What I've been reading" blog posts[1] have been a great source of book recommendations for me. He reads an unbelievable number of books across a lot of fields and topics, so it's likely that you'll see something that interests you at least once every couple posts.
Once you've identified interesting books, you also have to do some "triage" to identify what to actually read now. My strategy: Every time I find a book that looks interesting, I use Amazon's "Send a free sample" feature to send a sample chapter to my Kindle. Whenever I finish a book (or get bored with the one I'm reading), I'll flip through the samples I downloaded until I find one that holds my attention, and then I'll buy the book (or get it from the digital library if available) when I get to the end of the sample chapter.
Goodreads also purports to provide book recommendations based on the reading list you've uploaded, but I haven't had good experiences with that so far.
In some cities, you can use the library as this service. They will store the books before and after you read them, and often they will provide suggestions.
How many edx courses from top universities could you do in the same amount of time?
Perhaps a balance between the two.
Binge watch?
How about binge development.
It is definitely worth focusing on quality rather than quantity.
Personally I have found hacker news to be a highly valuable resource over the past few years. Many books I have read, and interesting topics I have looked into have come from all of your posts, comments and recommendations.
The signal to noise ratio is among the best on the web that I have encountered thus far.
As a parent, I rarely have time in chunks larger than a few minutes before being interrupted by children needing a drink, drawing on the wall with permanent marker, or escaping the house and running toward the road. It's not just about how much time we have, but how it is discretized. Not doing social media for some people equates to having several 5 minute chunks of time throughout the day doing nothing instead of doing something. Maybe they would be better off just meditating, but reading books this way doesn't really work for me at least.
This is one of the reasons I love audible. Driving to and from work is probably the single biggest uninterrupted chunk of time I get to myself, unless I stay up late at night. For whatever reason, I can multitask driving and listening, so I can listen to a couple of books a month that way.
I used to listen to sports radio to fill that time, but the local station has fired all their decent on-air talent, so I guess, thanks Entercom?
Exactly. Maybe I can take this approach with a Stephen King novel, but trying to read non-fiction which I want to remember and absorb requires longer periods of focus, for me at least.
Article is just blogspam for their dubious "habit coach" service, contains multiple affiliate links to the same.
Rest of the article seems to be fluff, as another commentor pointed out the author estimates 2 hours per book. That's laughable.
Regardless of the fact if it's even possible to read that quickly, what about retaining and revising what you learnt? Especially important if you're reading non-fiction. I'm trying to experiment with the Zettelkasten method (posted on HN a few days ago) to see if that works.
>Regardless of the fact if it's even possible to read that quickly, what about retaining and revising what you learnt? Especially important if you're reading non-fiction.
Exactly this. # of books as a goal seems like a poor choice of metric. But perhaps readers new to books have to start somewhere that's easy to measure, even if it's not a great metric.
The author's math works out to a bit over 2 hours a book. I assume this was elided because thats wild to expect.
I would have been more convinced if the author posted their list of books, with page and/or word count, and math'd from that.
For what its worth, my speed is between 1 to 3 minutes a page, depending on size and subject matter. At best, 2 hours would get me through a novella, a moderate sized book of poems, or maybe one of Plato's dialogues. That actually sounds right. But most books are longer than that.
> To read 200 books, simply spend 417 hours a year reading.
I mean, if you're blazing through books without really paying attention to them or thinking about them, sure. But I'm not sure the point of reading is to flip through pages as quickly as possible.
Also, there's nothing intellectually holy about books. They can be just as much of a waste of time as social media or TV. Whatever media you're consuming, the point should be to be mindful about it. Not to optimize for some pointless metric.
> It was Dec. 2014. I’d found my dream job. Some days, I would be there, sitting at my dream job, and I would think, “My god what if I’m still here in 40 years? I don’t want to die like this…”
Far be it for me to tell anyone how to analyze their own life, but if this is your reaction to your "dream job", isn't it possible it's not actually your dream job?
When someone says their partner is the man/woman of their dreams, they never follow it up with "My god, what if we're still together in 40 years? I don't want to die with them..."
The author lays it out as simple math, but I take issue with several of the assertions. First, that we all read content of all types at the same speed - namely our maximum words-per-minute. I've recently been handed a book far outside my area of training (I'm a scientist, the book is philosophy and cultural critique), and often I find myself re-reading a sentence or stopping to dig up context on terminology. I'm sure if I was simply taking in the sequence of words at maximum speed, I'd finish the book much more quickly, but I wouldn't be getting anything out of it. Secondly, the author is incredibly dismissive of non-book media (they mention television, but it may be my habits that bias me toward grouping blog posts and essays in with "social media" since they both happen in my phone-to-face space). It's true, engaging with a single author on a focused topic over many pages has unique advantages, but not everything worth being exposed to requires that level of involvement. Some of the best reading I've encountered this year has been short fiction and essays, almost always online. Also, others have noted it, "books" is an overly general target, there are lots of books that aren't worth the time it takes to read them. Setting a target of reading so-many books, without any other qualification, can lead to some strange optimizations (e.g. reading through dozens of pulpy airport romance novels to pad your total in late December). I'm not immune to book elitism, I do find I enjoy reading paper more than a screen for most topics, but the all-caps "TRASH" definitely set off my alarms.
What sort of books are they reading that only has 50,000 words? Lord of the Rings has over 480,000 words for all 3 books. Harry Potter has over a million for 7 books. Enders Game has 100,000.
Plus this isn't taking into account that I like to read more technical about my profession which take me longer.
> The average American reads 200–400 words per minute (Since you’re on Medium, I’m going to assume you read 400 wpm like me)
and that assumption is probably a bad assumption. I do tend to read rather slowly.
For some reason I never read books and somehow I even got ma bachelor in computer science without reading any of the books but just skimming over some of them.
I find it very tiresome to read books, when I sit down with one and start reading I have a 60% chance of falling asleep before I'm done with the second page and a 40% chance that I need to re read the page because I stopped paying attention and didn't remember what was written there.
The result: 103 words per minute, it would take me 17 days to read 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' when I would read 60 minutes a day consistently without re-reading or falling asleep.
Edit: Ok, English is not my first language but I doubt that I'd do better in any of the other languages I know.
Warren Buffet stories are like Chuck Norris jokes. Buffet does this, Buffet does that. Oh well.
I just see a pattern in that story: Save your precious time. Use your resources in a better way. Be more efficent. Amass more resources (that could be personal fitness or wealth as well). Here the resource is knowledge. And they finally turned the quiet nerd realm of reading books in solitude into competition and sports.
Wondering what you do after year two when having read 400 books. Will you be able to recite what was in book number 42? And then what? You start a discussion with your coworkers about Plato or some obscure sociological theories? You could do that but this might not go anywhere (speaking of personal experience here).
I guess the idea is to speed read your way through as fast as possible to get the numbers right. So you can simply throw in some quotes like the article did with Orhan Pamuk. Why not ambling a bit and enjoying books instead?
I can't find any source for the 200-400 wpm statistic (which the author assumes everyone is on the high end of). And 50,000 words per book seems low, especially for an average.
>608 hours on social media
>1642 hours on TV
>Wow. That’s 2250 hours a year spent on TRASH. If those hours were spent reading instead, you could be reading over 1,000 books a year!
Clearly the author doesn't indulge in this TRASH, so why has he only read 200 books per year? It sounds like he's wasting a whole lot of time, or some of these numbers are off.
Does a class of app exist that can chunk set of selected books, texts or subjects into small, self-contained units and feed them to the user in a daily twitter-like feed?
Skimming social feeds is a very different kind of reading than book reading. If you spent all that time sprinting could you could also run 300 miles per week?
This N-books-a-year thing sounds shallow to me. The one year I tracked with Goodreads I clocked at 14, but nowadays I don't target numbers. There are books I've had open for two years now.
I'm sure I could read 200 graphic novels in a quarter, but I mostly focus on difficult stuff that tires me at 5-15 pages in. I also read a lot of interesting and worthwhile stuff online.
Yes, yes, read a book a day, Lamborghini in the Hollywood hills, I'm pretty sure we've been over this already. Jokes aside, this article assumes that you can read a book in a little over 2 hours, and that you can find 200 books per year that you'd want to read (and that this takes no time by itself). Both of those are quite wrong in my experience.
Why are people so enamored with books? The only kind of books I read are technical books, and that's only when the content is not available elsewhere (or the quality of the content is much higher in a book).
What free education content on youtube for whatever your interest is (other than programming, most of that sucks on youtube).
I don’t buy it. I scroll on hacker news or send my friends nonsense when I’m too tired/unfocused to read a book. The time isn’t interchangeable. I generally read 50-80min per day depending on how busy I am. If work is easy at that period add another 30min of studying technical material on my own time.
I'm currently reading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson and it's quite lengthy at 1300+ pages. Not only that, but there are some interesting digressions along the way, some which have gotten me interested in very basic cryptography (or at least the history). For instance: https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/about/cryptologic-h...
So I don't see how in a case like this, I could finish this book (and any related materials of interest) in the allotted time, to reach the goal of 200 books a year. That's just unrealistic.
The main reason I don't read 200 books a year is because I read good books frequently, instead of wasting my attention on low quality books and challenging myself on the number of books I read.
One or two books a month is my target, too. I enjoy reading and, if I don’t reign in the habit, it will consume all of my free time and begin eating into time I’ve reserved for other things.
I used to tell myself that reading is a better way to spend my time than watching movies or TV. But my counterpoint is that it’s still not what I’ve made plans to do. I’ve found that limiting long-form reading to several hours a week is still enough time to get through one or two books a month.
And when I read excessively, I’ll browse my library’s currently available books until I find something. That’s in contrast with now, when I decide to read a particular book and then wait for it to become available. Though I do carry a “to-read” list and there’s usually one of those available at any given time.
I don't think 200 books, or 400 for that matter, would replace the joy I receive sharing funny cat pictures with my kids and chatting with my grandma about recipes and paint colors for my house remodeling project on social media.
Sounds like you use social media in positive ways, instead of, say, scrolling endlessly, checking how many likes you have, and having unproductive political arguments with casual acquaintances.
I was thinking about this last night and how I'm glad I don't read so many books. It seems like it would be hard to internalize a lot of the story. I used to read a lot more, and can think fondly on many of the books I read but cannot recall most plot details etc. Taking time to read a book, a few weeks, gives you time to digest it and ponder some of what it's saying, and create some long term memories as well! Gorging yourself on hundreds of books a year is probably only marginally better than doing the same with TV shows.
Of all the reasons to avoid so called social media this is probably the worst. How about the fact that the average person creates unoriginal and bad content or the fact that 99.9% of it is chad and staceys highschool dating simulator for adults? How about the fact that you've read 1984 and you wouldn't let someone limit you to grunting in 280 characters. Oh, and the real kicker -- its become a cringy subculture centered around mob mentality, bad behavior, and shouting down all the other voices as much as possible. Christ! Literally all of it is tightly controlled by corporations/government that invest billions in brain research. Give me a break.
Wow! Incels have made their way to Hacker News! But please, tell me more "Dr Detroit". You have your audience, now tell us where the mean girls touched you.
No matter how bad a comment is, please don't respond by breaking the site guidelines yourself. Posting in the flamewar style this aggressively is something we ban accounts for, because it degrades discussion badly. You may not owe the other commenter better, but you owe this community better if you're participating here.
---
There’s an old story about a guy taking a smoke break with his non-smoking colleague.
“How long have you been smoking for?” the colleague asks.
“Thirty years,” says the smoker.
“Thirty years!” marvels the co-worker. “That costs so much money. At a pack a day, you’re spending $1,900 a year. Had you instead invested that money at an 8% return for the last 30 years, you’d have $250,000 in the bank today. That’s enough to buy a Ferrari.”
The smoker looked puzzled.
“Do you smoke?” he asked his co-worker.
“No.”
“So where is your Ferrari?”
https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual-funds/profile/performan...
[1] https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&t...
> Reading 200 books a year isn’t hard at all.
I don't spend much time on social media, and I read maybe 30 to 50 books a year. My wife, a huge reader, will read around 90 this year. Maybe if we gave up our creative, athletic, or social pursuits we could get those numbers up to 200, but what's the point?
> Typical non-fiction books have ~50,000 words
I recently finished writing a book, and it was around 125,000 words. In the end, it felt short when I held it in my hands. I doubt highly the 50,000 number.
> The main reason this happens is a failure to execute.
The main reason people don't read 200 books a year, really, is because there's not much value in reading that many. If you're reading for enjoyment, slow down and enjoy it. If you're reading to learn something, slow down and internalize it. If you're reading to show off, just read the Wikipedia summaries because no one really cares that you've read a ton of books.
I probably read/listen for 1 hour each weekday and about 2 hours each day on the weekend.
200 would require around 30-40 hours of reading time per week, so it's possible I suppose, but unlikely.
I know it will depend on the book, if it's a book to entertain or a technical book... but sometimes I get the feeling that so little is retained it's almost unproductive in the long term simply because you will forget a lot of it.
I have books that stuck with me, that changed my perception, but those are a really small fraction, and probably had to re-read them to get some details if I wanted to talk about that book to someone for example.
Do you take notes? If so, do you revisit those notes?
A few years ago i started takin serious notes, using memory palaces and other stuff to try help to remember more but it made reading a lot less enjoyable, so i stopped.
These days I tell my better half or a friend or a work colleague about the interesting things i read and that is a good balance between remembering and enjoying reading.
So quit social media, do some stuff, and once you have a passive income measured in the billions your professional and creative pursuits don't get in the way.
I think it depends what the goal is, comprehension vs simply going through the motions. When I read technical books, I tend to read quite slow. When I read some fantasy novel just before bed, I read fast and will have probably forgotten by the morning what I read about. With audio books, it's easier to go through the motions of reading lots, but imo reading comprehension suffers greatly due to other distractions at the same time.
At slowest, reading math can take 30 minutes or more per page. Likewise, if you intend to ace an exam in molecular biology or physics or medicine, you'll be taking notes and re-reading often.
In fact, few substantial nonfiction books can be read quickly. I suspect that only popular nonfiction fare can (like political screeds or one-concept wonders).
I read on average a little short of 200 books a year. I don't feel rushed. It works out a bit more than a book every other day. And you can fit more than that over the weekend.
I don't understand the hostility here. I read books because I enjoy it. Nothing beats a book for information density. Do you watch TV series? You can read Song of Ice and Fire faster than you can watch a season of Game of thrones.
At this point I'm wondering if this idea that reading books is always more valuable than any other entertainment activity is a kind of cultural brainwashing we're going through to make sure our kids stay literate.
OK, skimmed the article- The central theme appears to be that you are rotting your brain for wasting time on social media. What if instead of social media you read 200 erotic romance novels, are you better off?
I think it's a matter of filters. On Twitter where there is almost no filter, you will be reading almost exclusively garbage. You may just be better off reading erotic romance novels than reading unfiltered Twitter. HN is a little more tightly filtered, the quality of stuff posted is generally higher, and it's probably more worth your time.
But it's hard to beat hundreds or thousands of years of filtering through the best thoughts of the best minds. When you pick up the plays of Sophocles or the writings of Cicero you know that people from radically different societies and ages of history have found wisdom and insight in their thoughts. So I think there is some "magic" in books in that they have had time to age, and that thousands of very smart people have found value there.
Even scientific books that are out of date have deep insights into nature for example the origin of species, what is life?, and origin and history of conscientious.
The exceptions abound, of course, but categorically speaking, you only need some technical knowledge. It's the "how to lead your life" knowledge that is harder to glean, and one most resistant to taking a head-on approach like studying all the philosophers and then ranking their greatness in a spreadsheet.
I read some Plato earlier this year, and I confess I was unimpressed. I had always been taught that he was a great philosopher, but apparently his philosophy was: if you don't know something, just make it up, in exquisite detail. I'm not sure what I was supposed to get out of it, except how much the ancient Greeks loved mathematical purity, and didn't have the scientific method.
What we know in modern terms from modern books is the best thoughts of the best minds filtered down through the ages. I don't need to read the rough drafts.
Your observation that the Greeks didn't have "the" scientific method is, to me, what makes them so very interesting and what made their thought so original. Plato was one of the very first people writing down his answers to the question "How do we know things?", which is the same question that the scientific method tries to answer. You can trace his ideas throughout history and it's really astonishing to think about. Plato's thought heavily influenced early Christian theology, then you move on to people like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, who influenced the monastic orders where some of the first properly "modern" scientific experimentation began taking place in the middle ages and we move on to the Enlightenment from there. I think the value of reading the guy who started all that speaks for itself.
If you don't believe me, there is always Alfred North Whitehead's famous quote to the effect that all of Western philosophy is essentially a series of footnotes on Plato.
Plato: Fire is obviously made of tiny tetrahedrons, because it feels sharp and stabby when you touch it, and tetrahedrons also have sharp points, QED.†
† Everyone else, after Chemistry: OK so that didn't turn out to be true at all.
Maybe Plato's hypothesis about fire was incorrect, but you don't think it prompted the next guy to try and find a better answer? And then the next guy, and so on? You don't see any value in knowing where we have all come from intellectually?
If you tend to gravitate towards either a mathematical thinking style or a scientific thinking style, Plato and Aristotle will probably underwhelm.
(And actually you'll probably find that a great deal of modern philosophers, Kant, Nietsche, Foucault, etc. are not that much more up your alley.)
Of course you're right about that. But the conclusion should not be "continue rotting away on social networks", the conclusion should be "read 200 good books".
Or even just 2 good books would be an improvement for many people.
"Good book" is extremely subjective category. But I imagine that with such consumption, they would become boring and repetitive quickly.
200 books of any type sounds like too much time in one activity for me.
Though more to your point I recently finished Mathias Enard's Zone - three months to read. It is 517 pages long, one sentence, a stream of thought. A difficult book to say the least, as the topic, dealing with not only the melancholy of the narrator's life but how his theme has remained the same for thousands of years. Zone will have a lasting impact on my ideological outlook for the remainder of my life.
As a break from hard topics, I am now reading How to Listen to Jazz, as an avid jazz listener.
For me its seems ridiculous, even numbers some people mention here, like 50-100 books per year. If one has 100% employment, this doesn't leave much space for this thing called real life, in whatever unique manifestation. But hey, at least they don't shoot heroin, right?
Side Note: Check out your local library and download Libby/Overdrive/Hoopla. You’ll have access to tons of books/magazines/audiobooks/movies for free. They even buy books I request on occasion!
Once you've identified interesting books, you also have to do some "triage" to identify what to actually read now. My strategy: Every time I find a book that looks interesting, I use Amazon's "Send a free sample" feature to send a sample chapter to my Kindle. Whenever I finish a book (or get bored with the one I'm reading), I'll flip through the samples I downloaded until I find one that holds my attention, and then I'll buy the book (or get it from the digital library if available) when I get to the end of the sample chapter.
Goodreads also purports to provide book recommendations based on the reading list you've uploaded, but I haven't had good experiences with that so far.
[1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/category/b...
I probably read 200 books in my entire life, trying to be quite selective. Looking back on it, maybe 30-40% of them were worth my time.
And the ones that changed my outlook on things and actually enlightened me? Maybe 10 books out of 200. I'm excluding pure textbooks here though.
Reading books, for the most part, for most people is just another form of entertainment. Sure, it's probably better than social media.
If you have Amazon Prime they even give you a selection for free and then theres Kindle Unlimited, a subscription that lets you rent a ton more books.
Perhaps a balance between the two.
Binge watch?
How about binge development.
It is definitely worth focusing on quality rather than quantity.
Personally I have found hacker news to be a highly valuable resource over the past few years. Many books I have read, and interesting topics I have looked into have come from all of your posts, comments and recommendations.
The signal to noise ratio is among the best on the web that I have encountered thus far.
I used to listen to sports radio to fill that time, but the local station has fired all their decent on-air talent, so I guess, thanks Entercom?
Rest of the article seems to be fluff, as another commentor pointed out the author estimates 2 hours per book. That's laughable.
Regardless of the fact if it's even possible to read that quickly, what about retaining and revising what you learnt? Especially important if you're reading non-fiction. I'm trying to experiment with the Zettelkasten method (posted on HN a few days ago) to see if that works.
Exactly this. # of books as a goal seems like a poor choice of metric. But perhaps readers new to books have to start somewhere that's easy to measure, even if it's not a great metric.
I would have been more convinced if the author posted their list of books, with page and/or word count, and math'd from that.
For what its worth, my speed is between 1 to 3 minutes a page, depending on size and subject matter. At best, 2 hours would get me through a novella, a moderate sized book of poems, or maybe one of Plato's dialogues. That actually sounds right. But most books are longer than that.
I mean, if you're blazing through books without really paying attention to them or thinking about them, sure. But I'm not sure the point of reading is to flip through pages as quickly as possible.
Also, there's nothing intellectually holy about books. They can be just as much of a waste of time as social media or TV. Whatever media you're consuming, the point should be to be mindful about it. Not to optimize for some pointless metric.
Far be it for me to tell anyone how to analyze their own life, but if this is your reaction to your "dream job", isn't it possible it's not actually your dream job?
When someone says their partner is the man/woman of their dreams, they never follow it up with "My god, what if we're still together in 40 years? I don't want to die with them..."
Plus this isn't taking into account that I like to read more technical about my profession which take me longer.
> The average American reads 200–400 words per minute (Since you’re on Medium, I’m going to assume you read 400 wpm like me)
and that assumption is probably a bad assumption. I do tend to read rather slowly.
I find it very tiresome to read books, when I sit down with one and start reading I have a 60% chance of falling asleep before I'm done with the second page and a 40% chance that I need to re read the page because I stopped paying attention and didn't remember what was written there.
When I read the line with 200-400 words per minute I wondered how fast I am and tested it here: https://www.myreadspeed.com/calculate/
The result: 103 words per minute, it would take me 17 days to read 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' when I would read 60 minutes a day consistently without re-reading or falling asleep.
Edit: Ok, English is not my first language but I doubt that I'd do better in any of the other languages I know.
So, I deleted my social media, and at this point I am at around 52 books, plus a bunch of abandoned books.
Was a great decision. There is no wisdom to be found in social media.
0: ( https://cresten.pizza/blog/2018-12-16-books-i-read-in-2018/ )
I just see a pattern in that story: Save your precious time. Use your resources in a better way. Be more efficent. Amass more resources (that could be personal fitness or wealth as well). Here the resource is knowledge. And they finally turned the quiet nerd realm of reading books in solitude into competition and sports.
Wondering what you do after year two when having read 400 books. Will you be able to recite what was in book number 42? And then what? You start a discussion with your coworkers about Plato or some obscure sociological theories? You could do that but this might not go anywhere (speaking of personal experience here).
I guess the idea is to speed read your way through as fast as possible to get the numbers right. So you can simply throw in some quotes like the article did with Orhan Pamuk. Why not ambling a bit and enjoying books instead?
>608 hours on social media
>1642 hours on TV
>Wow. That’s 2250 hours a year spent on TRASH. If those hours were spent reading instead, you could be reading over 1,000 books a year!
Clearly the author doesn't indulge in this TRASH, so why has he only read 200 books per year? It sounds like he's wasting a whole lot of time, or some of these numbers are off.
I'm sure I could read 200 graphic novels in a quarter, but I mostly focus on difficult stuff that tires me at 5-15 pages in. I also read a lot of interesting and worthwhile stuff online.
Now, I bet I could do 200 push-ups a year.
What free education content on youtube for whatever your interest is (other than programming, most of that sucks on youtube).
So I don't see how in a case like this, I could finish this book (and any related materials of interest) in the allotted time, to reach the goal of 200 books a year. That's just unrealistic.
I used to tell myself that reading is a better way to spend my time than watching movies or TV. But my counterpoint is that it’s still not what I’ve made plans to do. I’ve found that limiting long-form reading to several hours a week is still enough time to get through one or two books a month.
And when I read excessively, I’ll browse my library’s currently available books until I find something. That’s in contrast with now, when I decide to read a particular book and then wait for it to become available. Though I do carry a “to-read” list and there’s usually one of those available at any given time.
This is ridiculous even by our standards
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html