this is such a horrible take on fiction that I've seen popup in recent times. 'Consuming' fiction as a sort of pokemon card collection and to 'acquire knowledge'.
Better read a few works of fiction deeply and genuinely for their own sake rather than trying to vacuum up books in the name of some shallow self improvement. This post reminds me of the guy with the lamborghini and the bookshelf in his garage.
Do we speed-walk through the Louvre to see the masterpieces as quickly as possible?
This cracked me up, because I actually did that. I only had a couple hours, and the size of the museum is almost overwhelming.
Besides, when I read something really good, like Hitchhiker's Guide, I usually flip it over and start it again!
Going to have to disagree with you here. I don't think you're wrong, but your stance is personal matter of taste that's somewhere between 20 pages per minute and 20 pages per hour.
I prefer fantasy and sci-fi (both YA and non-YA), because I like to explore the world building. I don't mind the simplicity of YA novels. I use reading as relaxing entertainment where I can shut off a few cylinders. Though I do enjoy heavier stuff like Sanderson's Stormlight Archives.
It reminds me of a few movies I enjoyed dearly when I was a kid. After a rewatch they seem like a bunch of good gags, that tell a miserable story. If I would judge the scenes by themselves, I would say they are nice. However if you put them in order, it seems forced to put a story together.
I had similar thoughts after reading Pratchett's The Colour of Magic. Though after I started reading The Light Fantastic it fell into place. I would say that those two books should be inseparable. Whatever happens in the first does not make sense until the second book. Now I can say that I enjoyed it more then Mort and Guards! Guards!, but at the moment it's all I read from Discworld, do maybe my opinion is yet to change. I wonder if it's the same with Hitchhiker's Guide. But I'm on 19th chapter of 4th book and although this one feels much better, whatever happens in previous three still does not make any sense.
I'll pass if you will tell me it should not make sense, that's figurative 'it' and I get it as it is. Because coherence is what makes a story for me.
I just finished Marquis de Sade's ‘Justine’—what's so difficult about that book that would require me to sit down to read it? The pornography and torture? Or the wading of the heroine from one misfortune to another? There are only a few philosophical sections in the book, and it's not hard to think about them while they're recounted.
Guess what, Plato works fine as audiobooks. Because people were telling to each other arguments such as his, for ages—exactly the reason why you can't read or listen to Socrates, and probably part of the reason for the dialog format. There's always the pause button if you need a minute to mull over what you hear.
On top, narrator performances are sometimes delights in their own right.
And on the contrary, even Fry's excellent reading can't hide how in the Harry Potter series, topographical descriptions are often clumsy, confusing and claustrophobic, especially in dungeons or forests. Plenty of authors have this problem with places, doubly so with tight ones. Except for Vonnegut, who dances around physical descriptions like they barely concern him. Perhaps someone should've read those passages out loud to Rowling?
> Frears said, “What we realized was that the novel was a machine to get to twelve crucial speeches in the book about romance and art and music and list-making and masculine distance and the masculine drive for art and the masculine difficulty with intimacy.”
> This is the case for most novels: you have to read seven hundred pages to get the handful of insights that were the reason the book was written, and the apparatus of the novel is there as a huge, elaborate, overbuilt stage set.
This is a pet peeve of mine in any type of art, especially installation art or sculpture where a clear and simple point can be quite literally expanded into a elaborate and overbuilt set that doesn't add to the impact. Or worse, obfuscates the original idea.
But then there's an explorative type of art where the method and the process is much more meaningful than the insight or punchline that the novel may have been built around. The Waves by Virginia Woolf, for example.
(edited to use my words more good)
Either way, your lifetime will never be enough to cover everything.
I wasn’t aware of this. Found it[1] and couldn’t last through the whole thing. Right next to it on the search results was a parody[2].
I learned some important lessons in life from fiction books, which quite literally changed my life.
Good fiction reflects reality - that's why authors like Branden Sanderson will always be a complete joke, they don't understand anything meaningful "irl".
I think I’ll go reread Red Dragon, which has a lot to say on the topic of consuming.
The first time I read Howl by Ginsberg, it was a copy given to me by someone who, as I look back now, was trying to guide my life away from its trajectory at the time. I was young, had, again as I look back now, an un-diagnosed mental illness, and was self-medicating through a combination of illicit drugs and terrible decisions.
This man gave me his copy of Howl that was from 1958. It was one of his most prized possessions. The gift came with a lecture, as did most meetings with this man, about my life and the life of the Beat poets back then. He expressed several lessons that have stuck with me to today. He demanded that I read the book that night and consider its themes.
There are times in your life when conscious decisions have an everlasting impact. I remember, I vividly remember sitting in my car - where I lived at the time - looking at that book after finishing a cold can of Dinty Moore beef stew. It was mid-October. The leaves were turning brown, but not fully brown yet. It was unseasonably warm, and the mosquitoes were bad enough that I had to use a t-shirt cut in half to cover the window opening, just so I could have some air movement without being eaten alive.
And there on my passenger seat was this book. Again, conscious choices. I heard Jim's words, how desperately pleading, but still forceful they were. I think he could see that I was actively trying to burn myself out.
So I picked up his, again, 1958 edition of Howl, and started reading. Jesus that poem. It's just the perfect thing that has ever existed. You can taste the sweat and shit and hate and love that Ginsberg poured into that poem. It's over 60 years old, but FUCK is it still so fresh.
I remember sitting in that car, just devouring that poem (metaphorically). I, for an instant, saw myself dying, and for what? Some weird anger I couldn't let go of about how my parents treated me when I was a kid? About how my life was seemingly unable to straighten itself out?
That book, and I cannot stress this enough, hit me so hard that I broke down. I cried. Ugly, snot faced, loud sobbing, just awful.
And I knew, at that moment, that I needed to get help. I knew that I needed to seek out someone, probably Jim (it was Jim) to help me. And I knew that my life would never be the same from that moment.
I knew that I had to remember this moment for when it got too hard to cope with 'straight' life. I knew that I needed to do something to be able to remind myself that change was now a part of me, not just something I was doing.
I ate the cover of the book.
Before and during college I read a fair amount of fiction. Most of it I enjoyed in the moment, and sometimes I even experienced those deep-truth-feeling "whoa" moments. But even then they faded from memory within a few months. Eventually, I'd recommend the book to somebody but, when pressed for a reason why, struggle to produce much beyond "oh, it's just...really good...". This bothered me. If that book was so damn good, why couldn't I articulate even some of that goodness?
Solution: now when I read a book, I keep a written list on the bookmark of page numbers for quotes I like. After I finish the book -- or decide to stop reading it -- I go back and type those quotes up in a Google doc. An OK book might have one or two, a book that "speaks to me" might have 20. Even if the book is amazing, a dozen quotes usually provides a reasonable-enough sketch to jog my memory. Finally, I write a few paragraphs of thoughts about the book.
This sounds a little tedious, but keeping the list as you go is pretty easy. Typing up the quotes and writing some thoughts might take a half hour. And it seriously improves retention of why I liked or disliked the thing and makes the reading process more participatory. Now, when I recommend a book to someone, I can usually call back some of my notes and form a coherent reason. I'm also more likely to run into a situation and realize "oh, very smart author x wrote an illuminating paragraph about this in book y that makes a point way better than I could, let me ctrl-f my Google doc and fish that out". And this doubles by deepening my appreciation of what I've read.
It's like keeping a journal: stepping back, collecting thoughts, and analyzing can be a lot of reward for comparatively small investment, especially next to the amount of time reading the book probably took.
This is quite a narrow view of fiction. Story, relationships, worldbuilding, emotion, and language are just some of the reasons I read fiction (and I imagine, just some of the reasons many authors write fiction).
Reading SRD, Ballard and so on
Which, I believe, is the point the parent comment was making. They don’t seem to be advocating a read of the abbreviated version in general, just to the author of the post seeing as they seem to put fiction’s value on the idea.
As an avid reader of nonfiction and fiction equally, the two cannot be read with the same eye to gain the most. If one were to continue with the consuming metaphor- it's very possible to eat fried rice with a shallow, metal spoon- but some authenticity is lost in the experience of eating even when it still reaches your mouth and your gullet just the same.
I was appalled. Part of the book was wondering what every obscure comment five hundred pages ago meant and whether it would come back to bite people. It was like a murder mystery without the murders. If not for the anticipation, other bits if the story arc were actually a bit weak (like many authors, they don’t want an editor but desperately need one).
I never did figure out what he was getting from the story when he was getting through them in three or four hours.
Between my day job in Fin Tech, my sideline business in my handmade leather goods and with two children at primary school, I basically have ten minutes before I fall asleep in bed at the end of the day to squeeze in a few pages.
When I started working two days a week a colleague of mine said he was jealous and wished he could do the same. While he agreed that objectively there was absolutely no reason he couldn't actually do the same.
Isn't it about setting priorities? What stops you from for example spending less time on your side business and more time reading? Please don't take it as judgemental, I am really curious.
Spoiler warning for a season 1 episode of Black Mirror: this is precisely the gut-punch realization delivered at the end of the "future" "sci-fi" episode Fifteen Million Merits. It is set in the future, and it is sci-fi, but it is not at all about the future or about sci-fi—it's entirely about now. A horrible, pointless, sterile existence—but where are the enforcers, if this is some kind of dystopia? Robot drones, cyborg lackeys of the system packing heat, sadistic future-cops? There are none. Not a single one. Perhaps the outside world was ruined so there's no escape? Oh, but no, it wasn't. It's right there. The episode's given us no reason to believe anyone who wanted to couldn't walk right out into it. But they don't. And neither do we (mostly).
My wife doesn't like to read and gets really upset when I do. I have the time, but not the environment.
I get that, I don't understand people who do that, but I at least understand they exist.
>and gets really upset when I do.
Wait. What? Define for me, really upset. How is that okay? It's a harmless nothing hobby. How can someone (who is not a giant asshole) get really upset about that?
I am not inherently anti-fiction, but there are way too many non-fiction books out there that I want to read that I cannot find them time.
When Im using it to learn something like a new spoken language, pictures and sounds are very important. When I am using it to learn a new computer language, it is important to provide context and a good example/card to remember some specific programming syntax or feature.
There should be a YMMV attached to this sentence because it's certainly not the case for me. The best that I get and retain comprehensibility of audio is 1.75x speed and that's still a lot slower than I can read the same text. Maybe the author meant that it saves time because you can do it in the car, whilst jogging/walking-dog, cleaning the house, etc. But in that case it's running on a background process (or at best time-sharing) which thwarts comprehensibility. YMMV
Thus, I would conclude that any activity, be it note taking or a similar endeavor, if proves to be disturbing the reading fluency of the agent, it could result in unintended secondary consequences, as such to foster an aversion to reading, supported by the deduction in reading pleasure and comprehension.
At the end, the agent could find itself spending less time reading, the main culprit being the very methods which it sought to maximize reading productivity, as such methods proved to be destructive for its reading fluency.
Don't get me wrong, doing the exercises is important and (perhaps) essential for learning a subject, but the key is not to burn out too quickly. Very often some of the best and most important material is in the latter part of a technical book. So I recommend reading them like technical papers: in multiple passes. If you at least superficially read through the book cover to cover at the very least you'll have a map of the territory. Additionally, it's often the case that more advanced topics in a book give you insight into why the early topics are truly so important.
And while exercises are good, you'll learn even faster if you find a practical problem you want to solve related to the material. Most people on HN will say that you must do all the exercises or you can't possibly learn. But I've found the best tactic is to read a technical book until you hit something that scratches a personal itch. For example, maybe you'll be reading a book on deep learning and then late in the book come across a section on latent factors, a problem that you're interested in and didn't know about. Even though you skimmed most of the book until this point, if you want to implement this model you have to go back and really learn all of the pieces you need to build what you want.
What if you never find anything that really clicks with you? Then you're probably better off just skimming the book for now. The key part of that is "for now". Suppose you read through a stats book and nothing piques your interest, but you come across the idea that there is some way to run a test such that you control for variance between two groups. We'll perhaps in 5 years you'll come across a problem that requires you to do just this! Because you skimmed the book you'll at least know "statistics has a solution to this problem!" Then you can go back and really learn how this solution works.
Personally I recommend against doing every exercise in a book until you need to understand that material to solve a larger, more practical problem. The best way to learn anything technical is to solve a problem with it, but you can't solve a problem with a technique if you don't even know the technique exists, so keep reading!
Get the book on your phone, and just read it every now and again and if it doesn't make sense, try to use it as a detailed study plan e.g. Many compiler textbooks emphasize the importance of instruction scheduling without necessarily teaching it very well, but now you know that you need to understand instruction scheduling from somewhere.
^ If I'm learning a new topic I'll usually grab one famous book and two more modern one's and alternate between books if something is vague/confusing
At the end of each chapter/section, write a one page summary, in as simple language as possible, to teach a hypothetical new student what you just learned.
Even better if you can then compare what you just learned to other things you know to clearly separate them in your mind.
This is just sad, especially the emphasis on consume.
What? Why would you think that the point of fiction is to coat a set of shallow ideas with a thick layer of empty-calorie entertainment?
> I like Fantasy and Young Adult stories.
Oh.
I read some of that stuff too, but I wouldn't dream of using my speed at reading them (or anything, in fact, but especially those) as a point of pride. I'm old enough not to be at all ashamed of them and I'd happily talk about reading them, but no way I'd brag about how many books I get through if that's most of what I've been reading. I mean I can go grab some Goosebumps books and read like 10 of those in a day if I want. They have chapters and everything so that counts, right? Then I can get some shirts and tote bags and pins and bumper stickers telling everyone what a reader I am.
There are lots of sorts of books.
And if you're using that as your basis for what fiction is then you've got some learning to do, to put it mildly.
[EDIT] just to highlight a part you quoted again, this is so, so frustrating to read:
> Most of the fiction books are based on the presentation of a concept or a group of concepts. The concept that presented by the book is the knowledge you’re gaining. This knowledge is small compared to non-fiction. Rest of the book is for your entertainment.
No. There are certain kinds of fiction that, when done right, have you stopping at most every couple pages to think and absorb and reflect, if you're reading it in such a way that you'll get anything out of it. If you're reading it the way you read Terry Goodkind probably you won't, and you'll have a bad time, and maybe think it's "bad" and "boring" and so on. Just like listening to 80s top-40 pop music doesn't really prepare you to give a deep listen to Miles Davis, or Beethoven, or hell even Public Enemy, despite it all being music.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book
https://www.worldcat.org/title/how-to-read-a-book/oclc/90737...
What are Young Adult stories? Anyone have any examples? I am genuinely curious.
I'd suggest:
The City Of Ember
Akata Witch
The Hate U Give
The Sun Is Also A Star
There's also the ones most people know: Silverwing (more children's literature), Harry Potter, Holes...
Good Reads have a whole section for it: https://www.goodreads.com/genres/young-adult
