I have an English Lit degree, and the following advice from a professor almost made it worthwhile: "if you're reading for pleasure, and it's not pleasurable, put the book down. Give the author 50 pages, and if they haven't made it worth your time, move on to the next book."
I share this advice with everybody, but almost nobody takes it as far as I know. There's way too much guilt and shame surrounding reading: "if I pick it up, by GOD I will finish it, even if it takes a year and I hate every second of it". It shouldn't be that way.
Two of my favorite books - God Emperor of Dune and Anathem - did not hook me until 2-300 pages. I don’t like this advice as it would make me miss these amazing books.
The challenge with the advice is that is I want ok experiences, it works. But if I’m looking for amazing experiences it cuts them off. Lots of art is difficult until the switch that makes it worthwhile. If I followed the advice to only meet my immediate, hedonistic needs to be happy then I wouldn’t have as much overall happiness.
Especially since one great book may be as enjoyable as 100 marginal books.
Of course, it’s also important to try to figure out how to avoid all the other terrible books that just never get better.
> I don’t like this advice as it would make me miss these amazing books.
Abandoning a book does not mean you can never pick it up again. I have abandoned media that I didn’t like only to return to it years later and enjoy it.
> The challenge with the advice is that is I want ok experiences, it works. But if I’m looking for amazing experiences it cuts them off.
That would only be true if all amazing experiences sucked at the start, which is absolutely not true.
> Lots of art is difficult until the switch that makes it worthwhile.
And lots of it is worth it all the way through, or has something that makes you believe it will deliver if you stick with it.
> Especially since one great book may be as enjoyable as 100 marginal books.
And because our time is finite, if we abandon those 100 we may have the opportunity to find 5 great books instead of 1.
I think my response comes down to having an absolute rule like this is not a good idea.
My practice is to have a set rule about when to continue and when to put away. And I think that’s ok.
I’m all for people having their own heuristics that work for them, but don’t like sharing an easy to follow rule that may be harmful but is followed just because it’s simple and easy.
It seem especially funny that a literature professor would have such a rule as there are so many great books in literature that are difficult and unpleasant while I’m reading them but I’m glad I did.
I’m reminded of a colleague who said something like “every morning a 5am I don’t want to go to the gym and I want to quit the whole time because it’s not fun, but after I finish I never regret having done it.”
Don't you think you're being a little uncharitable to the advice?
The experience between struggling with a complex work that you feel has something to tell you vs. being disappointed by low-quality schlock isn't hard to differentiate. Telling people to 'just power through it no matter what' results in a lot of wasted time, and potentially worse, a diminished joy in reading itself.
I certainly don’t think people should continue on with terrible books or power through everything. If I have schlock I don’t want to give it 50 pages and it may be worth quitting at 5 pages, or 15, or even on the cover.
I’m not sure I’d have very useful advice other than to think about what they read and why and to constantly adjust their to read and am reading list of books.
I feel this way about Dune Messiah, except I didn't appreciate it until after Children of Dune. Dune is one of my favorite books, if not my favorite. Dune Messiah is a *frustrating* read right after Dune. It's not until you see the whole story of the first three books as one narrative arc that it becomes enjoyable.
Perhaps, but how does it expose me to more books. What is this method compared to?
I don’t think there are only two options- quit after 50 pages or always finish. You certainly shouldn’t always finish, but I don’t think you should always read 50 pages either.
Im more in the camp of “having to rule is better than following this rule.”
This is good advice. Similarly, if you're reading a book for the information, and you find it's way too wordy, there's no shame in just skimming it.
I used to feel like it was my duty to read every word written by an author if I was serious about reading, even for self-help or pop-psych books. Over time, I realized that there's really a lot of bad writing out there, but there's still good nuggets of info if you look. The trick is to just recognize when a book is just padding itself out and just skim through the boring bits. No shame in that. And honestly, so many self-help or productivity books are just padded out to justify selling a book.
Agree with this. Once a self-help author publishes the second or third book, it’s time to consider what more can they offer. Didn’t their first book solve everything? Or are they just doing it for the money.
Many people wouldn't get far into the great works of literature with this approach. Many worthwhile books are "difficult pleasures" but the pleasure might not come until after experiencing a lot of pain. Things that are worth doing aren't always fun but you get through the displeasure to become a different person -- one who has access to pleasures you may not have realized you could experience. I didn't like beer when I first tried it. I kept trying it and now I know why beer is beloved by so many.
Many worthwhile books are difficult, true, but many are not. You'll never read all of either group. This advice is saying: don't waste time on books you're not getting anything out of, if it means missing out on books you would get something out of.
Honestly, you could read all the greatest books several times in a life with a habit of reading and a good prioritization. Many great books are pleasurable but many pleasures are acquired. The pleasures of middle age are not the pleasures of youth. The things you might toss aside one year are the things you cherish a decade later. If a reader doesn't get something out of a great book then that's a problem with the reader more than the book.
In general this is good advice, but needs a heuristic of when to apply it. It's a bit like albums: some are hard to get into but worth the effort in the end.
So while there are plenty of books I won't finish, I tend to stick with things if:
a) I've worked my way through a previous book by the author and it was worthwhile
b) People whose opinions I trust say it's hard but worthwhile
My spouse and I have a “10 minute” rule for movies or streaming video series. If either of us makes a thumbs down motion in the first 10 minutes we just stop and find something else to watch.
Sunk cost fallacy is playing its part as well I think. I can’t bring myself to read anything I don’t like anymore. I’m a slow reader so working through a book takes its time and I want to get the best possible experience out of it. Won’t happen if I don’t like the book. It’s not only valid for books but everything else: series, movies, video games. If it doesn’t work, why push it?
Some of it also comes from prior impressions that a book is "worth reading". Take Wealth of Nations as an example. It inspired, arguably, the whole field of economics - and yet after a hundred or so pages of reading about the worth of the labour of a man in Glasgow as compared to the labour of a man in London, I just wanted someone to end my misery.
Alas, I'm afflicted by the "must finish" disease, so I paused reading and keep telling myself I'll get back to it.
Do you know how many attempts it took me to finally read Catch 22?
I must've read the first chapter a dozen times. I kept putting it down because it just wasn't holding my interest. Then one day it did and I read it straight through.
One of my favorite books till this day.
BTW, I have no compunction about reading the last few pages of a book first. If it seems like a terrible ending I don't bother. Otherwise, by the time I read it I'll likely have forgotten how it ends. I'd never do this with a movie, but it has yet to spoil a book for me.
This is generally my approach, not just with books but with TV shows and movies as well. Unless there's a compelling reason for me to forge on, I give something a chance and then abort early if it doesn't show a promising yield.
I also take a version of this with informational books. I read until I feel I got what I needed out of the book, and then don't feel pressure to read on if what's left isn't of interest or need.
I've been saying I'm "in the middle of 7 books right now" for almost a year now because I can't let myself admit I'm done reading them :(
I think the biggest difficulty of letting go is that I know if I _wasn't_ so busy I really would like to finish all of them. It's harder to let go when it's external pressures keeping you from finding the time rather than your own motivation/interest
I’m not a literature expert and I know people generally like the book. But I got maybe half way through the book and was wondering, “okay so when is the plot going to advance? Is there even a plot? Just feels like stuff is happening but I’m not sure why I should care.”
I spent too long thinking that it must be a good book so maybe I just have to give it a few more chapters.
Snow Crash is way uneven. I believe the first chapter was actually storyboarded, to be a comic book. So it makes an amazing hook, but the rest of the book Needs An Editor.
It reads as almost a picaresque satire, like Candide. It's full of good jokes like "I'm sure he'll listen to Reason" and "the most important technology man has created is the three ring binder", and uses the adventure structure to make commentary about his particular dystopia.
Buuuuut, its also laced with random boring history lessons on ancient mesopotamia. There are just too many locations, characters and digressions to move the plot up coherently and keep in your head, and the flipping between protagonists is hard to follow and remember. Wikipedia's plot summary doesn't even mention several key points, like a nuclear fission powered guard dog nearly going critical. Some the jokes are dated references to the 1980's (Godfather's pizza, Moonies).
There is a good book in there, but wait for the miniseries in 2050.
I imagine every award Stephenson wins allows him more freedom from editors, and now if you don't enjoy his work, society insists its somehow your fault. You must not be smart enough to enjoy fictional histories of cryptography.
And don't get me wrong, the works of his I've read are set in imaginative worlds, amazing yet somehow just a hyperbolic version of today. It's just that the rejected Wikipedia articles that come along don't much serve the world building or narrative.
Snow Crash is my second favorite Stephenson book (The Diamond Age is my favorite). I can see the validity of the literary criticisms of it -- but it still hits a sweet spot for me, and I have enjoyed it just as much every time I've read it again.
A piece of art can simply not be your thing, but still be "good". That people whose taste you respect think something is great is reason to give it a shot -- but if you're not into it, you're not into it.
That's not wrong at all. It's just differing tastes. It doesn't mean that the work isn't good, nor does it mean that your taste is flawed.
It's good advice for multiple reasons. I put books down using this rule for many years. Sometimes I pick it up again and absolutely love it but I'm at a different point in my life and intellectual interests. It's kind of like mushrooms - when I was a kid I hated them, now I want them on everything.
Absolutely. "I must finish everything on my plate" mentality is unnecessary masochism. I recall plowing through ~2/3 of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and then losing interest. I picked up "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts" today to be my new bathroom reader.
The first time i picked up Infinite Jest it was a drag for 200 pages and I dropped it.
Tried it second time. Went through those terrible 200 first pages... and suddenly I was on the 900th wishing hard it wasn't about to end. One of favourite books to this day.
I'm general, this is an online problem: how long do you want to persevere on any given book if it's not immediately gratifying? I often take into consideration whether I enjoyed other author's works and friends suggestions.
I think it's not so good advice. I have read many books which took me many, many attempts to get to the point of no return to love them and finish them, most of those books are now my favorites. The consumerist approach of giving 50 pages would be better suited for red flags, for example, if it's a theme you don't like, or maybe, just maybe, something against your personal beliefs and values. Life is too short to not give a chance to literature masterpieces.
I think good advice is something along the lines of: "Find a good book discussion group" (for me this is /r/Fantasy). "Then, if you aren't liking a book somewhat significantly into it, explain to people there why you don't like it and should you keep reading it."
This method is pretty effective in a good discussion group because if you have explained your reasons well, people will understand your reasons for dislike and know whether things change; the payoff is worth it; the author improves; etc.
One example is The Licanius Trilogy. A lot of people say, "I read book 1, I hate it, should I finish it" and depending on how much they hated book 1 and their reading speed people will give differing advice. For example if you can finish the trilogy in 5 days (this is about how fast I read it) I would say yes, the ending is fantastic but the books are pretty dreadful in terms of prose quality and character depth. However if this will take you 6 months, no, bail out now and spend your time better. Read a plot summary on Wikipedia.
Reading is very much a social activity and much better when treated as such imo.
Whatever heuristic you want to use is fine, the key thing is that if it fails your test, you have to be willing to put it down and move on to the next book. Don't get caught up on 50 pages, it's an arbitrary number.
For me, it's somewhat about thinking "I am not good at finishing things". I want to be someone who "gets things done", when I should actually strive to be someone who "quickly lets go of what is not worth spending time on".
Yes. Not everything is worth finishing. Trying something out and dropping it if it doesn't work is just as important to be able to do as being able to finish things.
We have a finite amount of time on this earth, and we can't do everything. If we never "test out" stuff and drop it if it's not for us, we'll be unable to discover a lot of things that are excellent uses of our limited time.
I don't agree with this. Many times, I struggled with a book but "forced" myself to finish it, to find it beneficial in the end and resulting in a substantial change in my views.
I’m the developer of an iOS and iPadOS app that I think is relevant here. My app Ephemera is a simple read-later application that places expiration dates on every link you add. If you don’t read the article in time, it disappears forever.
The app isn’t for everyone, but if you are buried under the torrent of information you “think” you should read, I have found that Ephemera helps me focus and actually read more.
I actually solved this without an app. I realized I had around 10k "read later" items in my bookmarks folder in Chrome, and I simply deleted all of them.
I solved this by forcing myself to read my list in chronological order. After a small period it became very obvious that most stuff I'd put in my list truly did not matter.
I think it's more that you always have a bunch of other things competing for your attention on the internet so there's no incentive to read things you once wanted to read.
Even an article you just opened in a tab competes with scavenging for more info on HN/Reddit/Twitter. I don't think that's evidence that the articles are just worthless.
Once, when the internet was out for a few days, I realized that iOS saves your reading list items for offline reading and I was glad to have it. All sorts of interesting articles that I curated. I now work through the reading queue on flights.
Awesome! I do this with my YouTube Watch Later playlist and it really works. I'll get a couple hundred videos I "definitely want to watch, but not now" and my script will clear them out after X time. Never once have I missed something it's deleted. I don't even know _what_ it's deleted, because if it stood out enough to remember the name and search it up again I'll probably just watch it. Very few things do.
* Somehow, App Store SEO can't find it with "ephemera". "ephemera deadpan" found it though
* For me, personally, bookmarking is usually done on the computer and read elsewhere. Phone-only is restrictive
* Not a fan of paid unlock for basic features (setting expiration dates, accessing my own history (?!?)). I almost understand notifications if server costs are involved, like Apollo, but. While I understand devs gotta make a buck and this is both popular and well within your rights, I am not a fan of this trend
Sure! It's utter garbage but you're welcome to it. I keep it in a notes file and paste it into the console to run it.
It sorts by `Date Added (newest)` and truncates the list to the 150 most recent videos. It also removes anything I've watched more than ~80% of. (Because the built-in button removes videos if you've watched _any_ percent, incl long ones you haven't finished yet)
Nice idea. I use Readwise in the river/shortlist mode and have a similar filter (not in shortlist, saved > x days ago), but I have to manually clear it out.
As you probably guessed, Snapchat doesn't really get deleted. I sat as a juror on a case where some of the most damning evidence was a Snapchat the police obtained from the company following an armed robbery and car theft. Some people are really poor at planning and covering their tracks.
Is there a way to have unread items go in an archive instead of disappearing? Sometimes I find insightful to re-look at the titles of things I've saved, even if I don't read them. It brings me back the why I saved it and it always unlocks some thought.
I'd love something similar with more general aspect, just TODO list with different priorities, expiration etc. Whether the content is URL, name of the book or grocery list are just implementation details.
Love the idea. I use Signal's Note to Self feature with a 4 week timer. Anything that warrants an extension gets readded to the queue. A dedicated app with a custom expiration / reminders / notifications / cross-device syncing would be phenomenal!
I had this problem but with videogames. What I ended up doing was making a giant spreadsheet in Airtable with every game I've ever played and ever want to play. I have a nice little "What To Play Next" grid of images that I'm constantly tinkering with the order of as my fancy gravitates towards one genre or another. E.g. If I finish a long JRPG I'll probably filter on games of a shorter length or a Shooter for a palette cleanse and move that higher up in the list.
The important parts for me were:
* Don't assume you'll play everything or stress about "missing" games
* Easy visibility into what I'm currently playing, what I liked in the past, and what I've been thinking about playing next
* Try not to play more than 2 games concurrently. Then I end up never finishing anything, I appreciate the games I play less, and then I have less fun playing games overall.
Bonus points with this approach: Since I always have something I'm excited to play next, I'm never in a rush to buy games new. I actually save a fair amount of money because I'm almost always playing games a couple years old and on sale for 50%+ off.
This approach has been so successful and enjoyable for me I even thought about spinning this off into a product online but figured my weird OCD approach maybe isn't that generally applicable to other. Plus you can just create your own Airtable tailored to your own needs.
Most of the columns are self-explanatory. IGDB = is a games database run by Twitch (https://www.igdb.com/). I use the ID as basically a foreign key to their table and then I have scripts that query stuff in there like their critic's rating and release date programmatically.
Also if anyone knows of any other public data sets of video games and video game metadata please let me know!
I made a drastic improvement in my mindset with regards to media backlogs when I realized that they they exist to entertain me and that my whims are the only thing that matters. I don’t owe that pile of books anything. Now they’re not allowed to generate stress, only entertainment!
I think people feel forced to get the value they put in back out of every single one of them asap as to not feel like they wasted their money which is what is causing that stress to begin with, even though there really isn't any reason for that urge if you look at it. The backlog is going to be there practically forever, just waiting - granted it's not tied to a service which might shut down at any moment.
That's why libraries (or, shall we say, digital libraries) are great, I don't have to worry about running out of media or feel like I need to get value from them.
I also try not to play more than a handful of games at a time. The paradox of choice is real.
I tend to play older games, and games I can pick up and play for five minutes at a time. Think Game Boy. A level here and a level there can feel like you've achieved way more than some longer, more grindy games.
I keep a couple of lists of games.
A massive "sounds interesting" list of games that I hear about along the way. I may never play some of them, but it sounded good at the time. Title and system is about all I put here. If I come back and don't remember what it was, it probably wasn't as interesting as I thought.
The other is list with WIP, started, and finished games.
If something slides into the started pile and I forget where I was, I just remove it. Life is too short to worry about things that are supposed to be fun.
> I also try not to play more than a handful of games at a time. The paradox of choice is real.
In general I'm like this, but I also have games that are exclusions to the rule that I pop back around to from time to time, like the save I have in Factorio that I come back to and tinker with now and then (I keep a text file around with my general to-do list so I don't spend an hour running around the base trying to remember what the hell I was doing, while marveling at various bits of kludged together spaghetti)
As for books, I'm generally working through at least 3 at a time: One on audible, for commutes, one on my kindle, and one in print. I try to keep the kindle/print books varied so I switch between whichever strikes my fancy at the moment.
Yeah I compartmentalize exceptions like these as well. Like I don't count "ongoing coop games with friends" or "long term games" (like your Factorio save, or something like League of Legends) towards my broader "What I'm currently playing" count.
I've got the same issue, particularly with PlayStation Plus, where there are countless games available at minimal cost.
My previous strategy was to begin a game, that would be my main game, while sampling others on the side. If one of the side games caught my interest more, it would take the main game's place, and I might return to the original game later.
This approach was low-pressure, but it often took me years to complete many games.
I used to handle my side projects similarly, starting numerous projects but rarely bringing them to completion. Lately, I've been making an effort to stick with a side project long enough to at least show it to friends.
Now, I'm pushing myself to stay committed to two games at a time. One game is from top of my list that I really want to play. The other is a shorter one. This way I can enjoy that satisfying feeling of accomplishment more frequently.
I'd never considered making a spreadsheet for this, but now I'm intrigued by the idea!
> I used to handle my side projects similarly, starting numerous projects but rarely bringing them to completion. Lately, I've been making an effort to stick with a side project long enough to at least show it to friends.
I've been following the same approach, but also noticed that it's less effective at utilizing my excitement. Every project hits the point where sooner tedious work must be done and I've found myself sometimes stay away from it for a few weeks and not pick up something I'm excited about because I should really work on the tedious thing, so I work on neither.
Ha, are you me? I've got an extremely similar setup.
I used Airtable to solve 3 problems:
1. With so many free games (Epic, GoG, PS+, Gamepass, etc), it's hard to know if/where I own a game
2. With so many owned games, it's hard to pick a thing to play.
3. Keeping track of what games I've played and how I felt about them. I do a big writeup of "my best media of the year" and it's hard to keep track of what I play.
Data wise, I also center everything on the IGDB ID, which gives me a lot of basic metadata. I also store Steam ID if available, because that's a more common foreign key. I've got a custom React extension that handles adding and fetching data. I've got tables for Games, Purchases, and Playthroughs, plus support for replay reasons and genre selection.
I recently did a big migration to add HLTB data, which I sure __thought__ was going to be simple and ended up being a big pain. I'm going to do a writeup for it once I find the time, because it did end up being interesting.
In terms of existing data, I found https://github.com/leinstay/steamdb very useful for collating information (though I had to shrink it a bit with `jq`- those are some pretty hefty JSON documents.
I totally agree this is overkill for most people, but I've also found it super successful for increasing my enjoyment of videogames in an odd way. A bit part of that recently was recategorizing games from a 1-4 scale of interest level to a more human scale of "Play Next", "Play Soon", "Want to Play", "Play Eventually", "Would Like to Play", and "Won't Play". This lets me functionally hide games that I really don't intend to play (especially ones I just added to accounts for free). Narrowing my "Play Next" list down to about 15 games and restricting "Now Playing" to ~ 1 / platform __greatly__ reduces the cognitive overhead of a "backlog" and turns them into "a fun buffet of things I can do".
It hasn't been updated in a while but I have used this games list before. (https://github.com/Elbriga14/EveryVideoGameEver)
IGDB sounds incredible though, thanks for sharing.
I'm curious if you use How Long to Beat to get the completion time. I've used completion time to produce some helpful metrics.
Yes I use How Long To Beat! I was amazed to see it’s so popular it’s even integrated into IGN’s page for games.
And wow storing them all as JSON that’s cool. I wish there was something with as much data as IGDB but you could download and access as easily as JSON files. Their API is really good but obviously has rate limits, etc.
A strength of a product, particularly where emotion and motivation are concerned, is guidance and encouragement - making it easy to do. Even if you "could" do it without help.
Most people aren't autodidacts... even elite atheletes have coaches.
That was an awful lot of words to say “read what you can”.
I used to worry about adding items to my “want to read” list faster than I could read them. I realized that this is preferable to the opposite - having nothing to read. As long as I’m alive and want to read, I’ll be reading something. Having read all the books I want to is not my objective; enjoying reading books is. So, no need to worry about not having enough time to read all I want to.
I now treat my list as a pre-filtered pool of books that span various topics. There is no prioritization associated with them. I find it best to read next whichever book seems most relevant to my interests at the time, which I can’t anticipate in advance.
The other day my girlfriend sent me an article about microscopic gears in the legs of an insect and so I decided to read a book off my list about intelligent design. My prior read was about cardiovascular disease because I read an article about cholesterol on the internet. The one prior to that was about gender disparities, simply because I felt like it fit my frame of mind at the time.
There is no need to make the matter complicated: read what you want to read, when you want to read it.
> an awful lot of words to say “read what you can”.
But it needs to be said and repeated, right?
Because people feel time-poor when it comes to matching what they want to do against what they can do. Building up a backlog is probably the worst way to kill the fun there.
And if everyone in that scenario feels like they are somewhat alone in that feeling where the "Books I wish I had time to read" turns into a prioritization exercise where you end up reading the "most important book" while thinking of a book you aren't.
You and the OP are saying the same thing, but it is worth repeating.
The longer you've been out of a structured learning environment like a school/college the more sense that makes because that is a constrained environment where optimization actually helps & the fun reading part isn't.
As for me, my library holds list is a good way to have a "river of books" where I can dip out of it and let it pass through my bookshelf on a schedule whether I read it or not.
People are making trivial things unnecessarily complicated.
Unless and until you have a specific objective (eg. prepare/need for a job, go through a course etc.) all reading is cursory i.e. people are natural born dilettantes and flaneurs.
You the reader should only read the second last paragraph, which I copied here for your convenience:
To return to information overload: this means treating your "to read" pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it). After all, you presumably don't feel overwhelmed by all the unread books in the British Library – and not because there aren't an overwhelming number of them, but because it never occurred to you that it might be your job to get through them all.
I asked GPT4 to summarize the article's most important information into bullet points, which I find more useful than one paragraph summaries:
> 1) The initial belief that technology would help filter out irrelevant information and prevent overload has not come to fruition; instead, people are overwhelmed by content they genuinely want to read.
> 2) The problem lies in the fact that our filters are too successful, causing us to face a daily influx of interesting content (referred to as "haystack-sized piles of needles").
> 3) Many aspects of life also involve "too many needles," where we struggle to allocate our limited time and attention to numerous important tasks or interests.
> 4) Conventional productivity advice, which emphasizes efficiency, organization, and prioritization, falls short in addressing the challenge of having too many significant priorities.
> 5) The proposed solution is to treat the to-read pile as a river, selectively choosing items to engage with while accepting the inherent impossibility of clearing the entire backlog, thus leading to a more liberating and realistic approach to information overload.
The downside of doing the above is it's more generic and loses the punch of the prose. Always the main issue with skipping the reading to get to the meat. Obviously easier for non-fiction than fiction.
Eliminate the waste in your 'to read' pile by populating it the same way he suggests selecting from it - pluck a few choice items here and there from the river that is the British Library.
I understand what you’re trying to do with this comment, but arguably the river in this case is HN.
The paragraph you mention is the tangible advice, but articulating the problem is in my mind even more important than the advice itself.
Advice is just advice. Maybe it applies to you, maybe it doesn’t. The problem is what remains. The problem if well articulated either validates the advice, or gives the reader information to process for themselves and from which personal insight can be reached.
The advice without the problem is just some guy on the Internet telling you what to do, and that, to me, is rather uninteresting.
I think many people are struggling with the same issues independently, all across society. This is equally true right now as it is in other times.
Perhaps there are many who have identified the problem without settling on a satisfying solution. In these cases the context is already (painfully) familiar and the main insight will be the path forward out of their malaise.
What you say is true for those who have never even grappled with the question, but I assume HN harbors folks who like to analyze inefficiencies in their lives, so I'd expect most of those here who already have reading lists to have contended with this problem and at least attempted to search for solutions in the past.
Never heard of this person before but was pleasantly surprised by the content.
In my own life, I have spent decades plagued by the feeling that I wasn’t doing enough, and I had many varied areas of focus and felt like I didn’t really progress on anything. That in itself (the feeling of lack of progress) was I think kind of misleading, as I did progress on some things (though I clearly regressed on some things as well).
I don’t really know how it happened but I have made some significant shifts in my life. I started to become physically active again, I stopped smoking cigarettes and some other unhealthy habits, I started really developing and digging into some of my active and creative passions like writing, playing a musical instrument, and renewing my focus on coding to an end and with purpose and quality in mind.
Somehow I started finding that I had much more energy and time available for everything. And as opportunities arose I began to seize them. It was a very exciting period for me. Eventually, my plate really became too full, and things began to suffer (mostly me) and I started to say no to things, and continue to keep my focus on what I really think is important. I feel that it has taught me about the interconnected nature of my life, and about how to value my time, how to slow down and appreciate something, how to deal with my emotions head on instead of taking years or decades to process events in my life (I am sure there have and will be many exceptions to what I have said), how to actively take stock of my current situation and change my plans as needed, how to deal with the fact that my expectations for things very rarely match up with reality, how to stop being an intellectual purist and idealist while still deeply valuing a good idea and pursuing my ideals. I look back at how much I have accomplished the last year and I can’t help thinking everything came from stopping trying to do everything and accomplishing nothing (or so it felt), and by embracing what really mattered to me when it was in front of me. I learned to float down the river, I guess. Lazily most of the time. But when I feel it is necessary, I can exert more power in changing my trajectory than ever I could before.
His books are enjoyable, I'd recommend his most recent one "Four thousand weeks" and the previous one "The Antidote" as well. Especially if you're overwhelmed or gets hit with anxiety often.
I think most people end up doing what he's suggesting anyway, out of necessity. I suppose his key insight is to just stop feeling guilty about not being able to get through it all.
How many of them has already rot? I've found that 70% of ten-year-ago bookmarks of mine do not exist anymore, especially if it was a weblog or a youtube video.
My local library has a limit of having 100 books on hold (which I hit during 2020 lockdowns when there were closed for a while). My current hold list is ~60, and the system allows you to put 'pause' a hold until a certain day so that they don't all arrive at once: so I have holds going out to July.
By the system also has a "saved" books feature where it allows you to simply bookmark stuff of interest (and categorize/tag them) but not ask the library to deliver them. My saved list is ~1200. I don't expect to actually get to them, but I have options for my next item.
(I long ago gave up buying books (except in very rare cases) just because I don't have space.)
In my younger years I subscribed to the New Yorker and the Economist. Both full of interesting stuff, but a torrent. I had to unsubscribe as I kept on thinking, I'll finish that one later, but never did before the next one arrived. Great magazines for a flight, where time seems boundless, and you were connection-less, before the internet found its way onto airplanes.
You have to filter. Music, youtube, book content is created faster than you can consume in your limited time on this planet. I read mainly for information, and try spend more time with friends/ hobbies. Still catch some TV, but I try to limit.
The New Yorker is great when you have the time. It seems like the Economist has really trimmed the article length over the years though, probably in response to web analytics.
That could never work for me personally. A book isn't something that's uniform in quality or engagement throughout, in fact they're often predictably lopsided where the the first few pages are getting you familiar with the characters and setting. I also have to know the ending to even begin to think about the book as a whole. Never not finished a book myself and I read a lot - can't say I loved every book I've ever read, but I don't regret the time spent finishing them, even the least enjoyable ones.
>Never not finished a book myself and I read a lot - can't say I loved every book I've ever read, but I don't regret the time spent finishing them, even the least enjoyable ones.
I agree. I read a lot of books too, and I've only given up on a few. Mostly I don't remember what they were (after all, I disliked them enough not to finish them), but BattleField Earth[0] comes to mind. Gosh, what an awful read. Never did finish that one. Ugh.
Other than those few, I'm not sad I finished any of the books I wasn't that into.[1]
Authors pay a lot of attention to the first few pages of their books, and try to expose the best aspects of their writing style there in order to hook you in. I try to remain conscious of this as I read in order to better anticipate the style and content curation that follows.
> I don't regret the time spent finishing them
I think this is a different take than many others would have on the topic of reading. I know I regret spending time reading things that do not "spark joy", to put it pithily.
For fiction, I flip a book open to about 1/3 of the way through and read a paragraph or two, which generally tells me everything I need to know. That avoids the unrepresentative intro portion—I appreciate a punchy and/or gripping opening scene, but it's not very well correlated to how much I'll enjoy the rest of the text.
It's weird, there aren't that many ways of choosing a set of words to convey something, and yet an author's voice and style comes through roughly the same no matter where I sample from (except for the overworked parts, which usually includes the beginning.) And it usually comes through strong, which is great: sometimes I think my reading diet is mostly about sampling a variety of good-tasting styles of mental processing. (Sadly, that does mean that co-written books hardly ever work for me. The voice is muddled. It's rare that authors are able to meld their work truly synergistically.)
>Sadly, that does mean that co-written books hardly ever work for me. The voice is muddled. It's rare that authors are able to meld their work truly synergistically.
I thought the authors of the Expanse[0] series did a pretty good job with that. AFAICT (but I have no way to confirm this), they split the storytelling so that each plot arc is consistent and speaks with a single voice.
I can certainly see how multiple authors could muddle the "voice", but I think the quality (or otherwise) is more a function of storyboarding/universe creation and how well that's done collectively by the authors.
Please note I'm not really disagreeing with you and, as a rule, your observation jibes with mine. Although (as I mentioned) there are some exceptions.
There's a wide range of emotions and impact I expect from good writing - joy is nice, but hardly required for me. A couple of my favorites I've read several times like East of Eden or Brothers Karamazov end up being more like fundamental changes to who I am rather just experiences of emotion, neither being very joyous.
Very much agree, no shame in dropping a work you started if it isn't as good as it seemed. Also skipping ahead in books and skimming articles can help.
To give him credit I have to cite Dave Weiner who for me created the concept of of online information being a "river" which means you can watch it go by and not feel guilty about it. You pick out what you find interesting or important and let the rest go. I've never thought of "zero inbox" as something worth striving for. Just let it go...
For me, it's much more rewarding to find those "needles" and add them to my reading list -- than to actually read them. I.e. the dopamine hit of finding something new/interesting -- that's the thrill.
I guess I'm ok with that -- it's hard to force myself to process items from the river. Any tips on that?
> To return to information overload: this means treating your "to read" pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it). After all, you presumably don't feel overwhelmed by all the unread books in the British Library – and not because there aren't an overwhelming number of them, but because it never occurred to you that it might be your job to get through them all.
I find the analogy with the British library spot on, and very liberating.
Something that helped me was to develop my "discernment" of "quality" so I could quickly reject material that appeared interesting but actually was of little use to me. This is going to be different for each person, but I think it's worth putting some thought into because I had previously assumed I had developed a natural talent for it when actually I was consuming content out of habit.
One way I've been managing this is by reading summaries of certain books. While it can be difficult to decide which books deserve a full read, this approach has significantly reduced the stress I feel about my ever-growing "to-read" pile. By focusing on the most important ideas and insights, I can still learn and grow without feeling the pressure to read every single book on my list.
Careful with this. You have to trust that the summary is correct. Which, as it turns out, isn't as foolproof as one might hope for.
It turns out that a sizeable percentage of human reviewers and condensers of information just make stuff up. And if you're just consuming the summary of a work, how would you know?
I developed a simple read-later app called Readstack to tackle this problem. The idea is that it forces you to go through pages one-by-one, without postponing. So, if you want to read something, you will have one item on the top of the list, and you need to read it or remove it before you can go to the following items. It helped me reduce my read-later pule to zero.
I ended up treating my bookcase full of all my unread books I originally planned to work through like this. In this case my bookcase is the bucket, and I carve a stream or a river out of it. It's like a two step filtering process.
It just probably would have been cheaper for me to just bought the ones I actually would read. But sometimes you can't escape the fantasy of you being some higher intellectual who will one day work through all of these books. I realize now that I probably will never make it through that Modern Algebra text, Operating Systems, or the complete collection of William Shakespear by the Royal Shakespear company -- so I humor myself while being realistic about the progress I can make.
I organize my Obsidian around this concept, separating out different streams for different domains of content I'm interested in. Social, AI, Antilibrary, Wisdom, generic Inbox, and my own Passing Thoughts and Story Prompts.
I treat each of these streams as an input to growing my understanding & thinking in these domains, much like a stream of water nourishes plants around it. It's a big unlock to do things this way, because it treats inputs as opportunities not tasks. Different streams flow at different rates based on where my initial interests lie and based on interesting things happening in the world.
Sort of biomimicry in action in the intellectual realm
If all you need is a short term cache of ephemeral things that won't matter in a year, Google Keep is probably fine.
If you want something that you invest in that stores thoughts and ideas that you want to go back to later, I'd use something far more reliable. I'd look at:
* Whether the product is a revenue driver for the company
* Whether the company has a history of good behavior
* Whether the company seems like they care about their users & making a good product
* Whether you have control over the data, including an open file format
Personally I wouldn't touch Keep because none of the above apply.
I switched from Keep to Obsidian as well. It depends on your goals. For me, I was saving things in Keep that I wanted to have forever and I don't trust Google to operate the service forever. The exported data is also not super portable. And there are things I want to save that I don't want on a cloud service. So I switched to Obsidian which gives me a simple and portable file format, privacy, and I trust myself to keep those files safe more than I trust Google.
I think the new AI tools are going to help me a great deal. There are books that I know I’m not going to read but I’d still like the Cliffs Notes distillation. I think an AI that understands my areas of interest could create personalized summaries of those books.
I’m also looking forward to seeing if the new AIs work as better recommendation engines. Again, once the AI gets to know me, I’d love to be able to ask “I want to learn how to sew a messenger-type bag. Where do I start?” Hopefully I’d get back a list of books, videos, and local craftspeople. (And I actually do want to learn that…)
I did and haven't found it that useful after all. Turns out that after you subscribe, it's hard to find the motivation to get through many of those condensed versions.
I tried blinkist, I liked it in theory but I realized that I only listened to the summaries while busy with other things so I wasn’t really absorbing the information.
I can’t help but think their time is running out. AIs are going to be able to produce the book summary and maybe even generate the audio version of that too.
I have not, because I actually prefer to read the full book, even if my Tsundoku keeps growing. Another way that I look at it is that even if I compressed my unread books into summaries, I would then just get more and more summaries, ending up with the same problem.
I recommended it to you because it sounds like you really want to read the books you have or are accumulating, so you might find it valuable, even if I don't.
I prefer to read the full book as well, I just know that there are certain books for which that will never happen. For example, I would love to have already read one of those 4” thick biographies of Winston Churchill but I have almost no desire to start reading one of them.
I had read some books on kindle here and there over the years,but recently switched over to full time on the kindle. And I must say, there is a distinct pleasure in carrying multiple books with me, and switching between them at will. I have been trying to replace bouncing around apps on my phone with bouncing around books on my kindle and it's been very enjoyable. Reduces pressure to finish any single book, and a lot more freedom to bounce around!
I think LLMs could definitely help us stop treating large piles as "lists" (to be completed). You can just "dialogue" with it through Chat. And if the AI has access to your recent activities or notes, it can even give you relevant choices. Or you can "navigate" through it in an interactive 2D/3D map that clusters the article/books by (semantic) similarity.
So dialogue and navigation take the place of checking a list.
Yes, more opaque and unpredictable for sure, but I don’t think it deepens the problems of curation. I believe it is solution. : you trade predictability/transparency for smarter /non-linear curation. You can always choose.
My todo list is the same way. I expect to finish everything currently one it somewhere around my 3000th birthday. I just prioritize what needs to be done now, and then what I can do know that feels interesting at the moment. The rest I'll do latter
Note that there is nothing on the list about expanding human lifespan. There are some things that get priority around exercise and eating good food, but that is as close as it gets.
Yup. Discovered this in hard data after I built by first ToDo/Task Managemtn application, then populated with current projects. I soon discovered that I had 768 hours of Critical and High importance items that needed to be completed in the next two weeks. For reference, there are only 168hrs*2=336 hours in a fortnight.
Not. Going. To. Happen.
So, that list gets post-filtered in real time ...
Seems to be the plague of the ambitious and/or conscientious — We should be happy that our reach exceeds our grasp
An interesting read! I sorta solved this with my little SaaS[0]. I send interesting articles and RSS feeds to my Kindle, and I read some of them every evening before bed time.
Articles never stayed in a “bucket” but they flow every day.
Not worth reading, ignore it. And I can always find them later if needed (hint: it will never be)
If you read a lot of online content, give it a try
Yes to conversion quality. For example, the official extension has a huge problem with detecting the cover. I fixed it with KTool.
I also implemented custom parsers for many sites that use a “modern” frontend framework (read: SPA)
And here is the main difference: ability to send RSS feeds and newsletters to Kindle, combine them into only 1 ebook and read at a specific time you set.
I think it’s better to compare KTool to other alternatives like p2k or instapaper. The official extension did an OK job if you don’t need any features above.
I enjoyed reading this, but was left with the same feeling that i had at the end of the 1983 film WarGames, namely: "...the only winning move is not to play..." I acknowledge this post is not exactly saying that...but it still feels a little flattening to arrive at that point. (With all apologies and respect to the author, i'm referring to my feelings on the suggestions, that's all.)
I agree with your summary but to me it seems like a useful point of insight. Analogous to the saying "when you find yourself in a hole that's getting deeper the first thing to do is stop digging". Something that seems like common sense but is hard to grasp when you're in the hole, unless someone explicitly points it out.
One might also decide that this article is wrong, but it could still be worth considering the point to reject it.
Things like this might work for a small fraction of people for whom structure is in and of itself part of the pleasure. For unorganized quacks like me doing all of these “techniques” just ends up being a chore and takes the fun out already mundane things.
I think in this analogy, I am the river and books to read are rocks along the bed. I flow over all the rocks and glean some information worn off the rocks.
So I can work on selecting what kind of rocks go into my path that I flow over.
I agree with the concept, but I tend to view my to-read pile more like a sushi conveyor than a river. Assuming I'm still interested later in what I have to read, then it can come round again.
The article discusses the issue of having too many things to read, listen to, or watch, and how it can be overwhelming. The author argues that the problem is not a lack of filtering technology, but rather too much information that we actually care about. They suggest that instead of trying to reduce the size of the to-read/listen/watch pile, we should treat it like a river, and pick a few choice items from it, rather than trying to empty the whole pile. The article also emphasizes the need to make tough choices about what matters most in life, and accept that we cannot do everything.
As someone wanting to read lots of books and articles, this really resonates with me. Not having to read everything but picking and choosing a few here and there
First: there's a hell of a lot of wisdom about reading and how to approach it in Mortimer Adler's How To Read a Book. That's a perennial favourite of both HN and myself. In particular it addresses the question of how to read different types of books and for different purposes. In detail. In particular, Adler repeatedly stresses the notion of reading as an inquiry, in the sense that you are asking questions of the book and the author. If those questions are rewarded, all the better. If they're not ... you might be better of spending time elsewhere.
Disclaimer: I'm only about halfway through it myself, though the book is on my e-reader ;-)
On filters, I disagree with Burkeman, it is filter failure, and Burkeman is himself failing to define what sorts of filters are needed.
In the context of the "haystack-sized piles of needles", it's useful to consider the question how many needles do I need?, and to simply select a sufficient (and not excessive) number. This does presume that the stacks are of equivalent quality, which can pose a slight challenge, though factors such as reputation and some occasional broad sampling usually address this.
In the physical world, our senses and mental capabilities provide us with this: we're tuned to a limited set of stimuli (sight, sound, smell, taste, various touch, proprioception, and inner-state senses such as hunger, thirst, and need to void bowels or bladder). There's a heck of a lot of other signals the Universe provides, we are utterly blind to them for the most part, and our lack of capacity to sense these largely doesn't bother us. Even within our extant sense channels, we can only detect so much: visible light, but not radio or x-rays, the audible spectrum but not infra- or ultra-sonic frequencies, some smells with great sensitivity (petrichor, mercaptin) others not at all (water, carbon monoxide), etc.
In the world of data one of the most effective and unbiased rejection methods is random sampling. We usually think of this in terms of data selected, but it could as readily be expressed as data rejected. The reason statisticians sample randomly is because measurement is expensive, and quite often a highly accurate impression of a phenomenon can be gathered from only a few tens or hundreds of individual examples if those themselves are selected without bias or are otherwise representative.
For texts and readings, much depends on why you're reading something. If it's simply for entertainment, then the requisite question is "am I being entertained". If it's for information, then the question broadens, but I'd suggest:
- Is this actually informative? Is it telling me something I don't already know (rather than reinforcing biases or existing beliefs)? Is it accurate? Is the information durable?
- Is this useful? Can I use the information, and will it change a future action or decision of mine? Does it put the past in a more comprehensible light?
- If a skill, is the skill taught useful and durable? I and many others have often noted that the base set of Unix / Linux shell tools and editors provides a highly useful and durable skillset, one I first began acquiring 30 to 40 years ago, and still use daily. I've seen many other technical skillsets, including expensive training or books (some at an employers' cost, some at my own), come and go over that same time.
- How does this fit with an existing worldview or structure? I've begun specifically cultivating a few of my own ontologies and sense-making structures, and find that these provide useful lenses for assimilating and testing new information. Occasionally I'll find other authors have anticipated my own notions, and the force with which that realisation hits is profound. It's also a strong validation that I'm likely on a useful path, or at least one that others had previously found worth pursuing.
All of these boil down to "Is this worth my time?"
Note that most news, episodic broadcast media, and online content fares abysmally on the "durability" criterion. I don't ignore these entirely (and struggle immensely with online content), but am highly cognisant that these tend to be the equivalents of fast food. As an occasional treat or spice ... not necessarily bad. But if these are your primary fare ... reconsider your priorities, environment, and patterns.
A practice I'm finding useful is to at least periodically consider what has be "BOTI" --- best of the interval. On some basis (weekly, monthly, quarterly), I'll try to cast back over what I've read, heard, or viewed, and consider what's been the most insightful or useful. For the past decade, that title's gone to an Aeon piece by Michael Schulson, "If You Can't Choose Wisely, Choose Randomly", on the value of sortition: <https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...>. And yes, that relates to my comments above on random sampling / exclusion rather neatly.
As for the first time I realised that there was in fact far more information than I could reasonably access, it was at a library. On entering uni, I remember my first visit to the main campus library, literally a tower of books, holding several million volumes (and part of an even larger collection across other libraries both on campus and at other campuses). What I did instead was to treat the collection as a resource, something to ask questions of, with a few (small) sections explored in detail, many others skipped entirely, and some sampled from selectively. A particular memory was of seeing the film The Last Emperor, a biography of Puyi, the last emperor of China, and largely a Japanese puppet. One scene of the film featured a Time Magazine photographer, and the thought occurred that there was probably a story from that time. I tracked this down and read the story, published in the 1930s, from a copy dating to that time. The experience of "oh, I can track that down" has stuck with me. And yes, losing on-campus access to academic stacks was an absolutely wrenching experience for me, moderated now through the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, Library Genesis, ZLibrary, and other resources.
And yes, if something's not worth reading, it's not worth reading, as noted in an exchange I had on HN itself over the past day or so.
tldr: "To return to information overload: this means treating your "to read" pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it). After all, you presumably don't feel overwhelmed by all the unread books in the British Library – and not because there aren't an overwhelming number of them, but because it never occurred to you that it might be your job to get through them all."
I asked ChatGPT: The article discusses the problem of having too much information and too many choices, which can be overwhelming and lead to a feeling of not being able to accomplish everything. The author suggests that the solution is not to try to filter or prioritize better, but to accept that there will always be more to do than can be done and to make choices based on what is most important at the moment. The author also suggests treating the "to-read" pile like a river, picking and choosing what to read as it flows by rather than feeling the need to read everything.
I found most books are just garbage. Take Moby-Dick for example, interesting story that could be compressed to two pages, but it is 400 pages of boring stuff, that goes on and on. And it can not be criticized as it is "fundamental corner stone of American literature"!
Watching documentary about original story, and a few pieces about 19 century whale hunting, is much better use of time!
I share this advice with everybody, but almost nobody takes it as far as I know. There's way too much guilt and shame surrounding reading: "if I pick it up, by GOD I will finish it, even if it takes a year and I hate every second of it". It shouldn't be that way.