The problem was that the list had no other purpose except as a kind of trophy case. I felt proud about my list, as if finishing a book is an achievement, as if reading is a sport, as if reading a lot makes you better than those who read less. I was disgusted by my own vanity, and moreover, considered it as proof that I haven't really improved my character from all that reading.
Now I stopped maintaining a list and I stopped keeping a mental account of how many pages or books I read.
The result is that, though I rarely finish any book I pick up, I probably spend more time in total reading, and I learn way more because I don't hesitate spending a lot of time appreciating or grappling with, say, a single paragraph of text.
#itsnotarace
(BTW I don't want to imply that this is true for everybody. And I mean if your list has notes that's totally different)
It seems to me that your problem was with your own feeling toward the list - “I felt proud about my list” - and not the list itself. Where does that feeling come from? It might be worth exploring.
It is true that one can be vain with oneself as the sole audience, but I wonder how common that case is. I'm going to give myself a pass on that, since the purpose of the list is mostly to remind me.
What are the purpose(s) of keeping a lifetime list of books read?
I think it’s valuable to not use it for bragging or measuring purposes. But this is the same risk and value of any diary, I think.
You may as well read it again and hope it sticks this time!
I went from 3-4 books a year to 3-4 books a week, sometimes more. I listen in the bathroom, while exercising, cooking, cleaning, cycling, gardening.
My listening speed is typically 1.75x for dense prose and hard science, all the way up to 2.5x for fiction and biographies. The secret is to score a great pair of earbuds; I recommend Jabra Elite 75t. The further the sound is from your ear, the harder it is to parse speech at high speed.
You don't start at 2.5x, obviously; start at 1.25x and increase every day or two until you start to zone out. You'll be pleasantly shocked at how quickly you'll ramp up. 1x sounds like the performer overdosed on benzos.
In the past year, I've listened to everything Haruki Murakami has written, the entire Wheel of Time series (4.4M words vs 19D5H), and several hundred others.
For free.
And yes, I still read paper books, too. Sometimes.
First, does this work very well for technical books? I would imagine not very well. Anytime you came across a code sample, a table of information or a diagram, I assume the audiobook rendition of it would be effectively useless. So perhaps the audio approach completely excludes technical reading?
Second, do you ever shake the feeling that having a book read to you is somehow qualitatively not as good as reading it from the page? I feel like seeing the written words on the page and the shapes of the sentences and the punctuation and having to interpret the tone and rhythm yourself is part of the experience of consuming literature. Does hearing it feel ... less to you? Is it the kind of thing that you just learn to get over, or does it stick with you? Or perhaps it was never an issue at all?
One is that someone else is deciding on the pacing. With paper books, I tend to take a lot more pauses to think things over or savor something particularly insightful, dramatic, funny, or what-have-you in the story. I could just pause the audio for the same effect, but there seems to be an inertia when someone else is reading that stops me from doing it as often.
Second is that it's a lot easier with audio to pay less than full attention. If I realize I haven't been fully listening for some period of time, either because of an external distraction or because my mind has gone off on some tangent, I'm less likely to go back because of the annoyance of trying scrub back to the exact location where I tuned out. This creates a tendency to shrug it off and keep going, which adds up to a lower level of absorption overall.
With a physical book, it's much easier to backtrack and re-read sections, and I'm a lot less likely to zone out in the first place since I have to actively read each sentence. Of course, sometimes I do realize that I've been visually 'reading' a paragraph or two while my mind is actually somewhere else, but I seem to snap out of it a lot quicker with a physical book than with audio, and it only takes a second to jump back up the page and re-read (much quicker than finding my exact point of departure in the audio).
Why would it be? I get where you're coming from, as I generally prefer reading over audiobooks, but it may be good to remember that story-telling began as an oral tradition. I don't see why reading a story would be superior to having someone tell you a story. I doubt The Odyssey was a lesser experience before it was written down.
We live in a time where we predominantly use and prefer the sense of sight, especially as a means of information transfer, but maybe we should let hearing have some fun too. :)
I can't answer for OP, but I did spend a year commuting a bunch and got through ~60 books or so that way.
I went from having time for 10-15 books a year to having time for ~60 books a year, so yes, you do miss a little. But not ~50 books worth of missing. It's easily worth it.
I just laughed imaging a professional voice actor reading out a block of code in a stately voice, complete with all the punctuation. "public function getName(Person $user)" xD
As for maps and charts, well, I listen to a lot of books that fall into behavioural economics and there are definitely times where the author is talking about charts and tables where I know that I could and probably should look up whatever PDF, but since I'm currently using a mattock to remove large root bundles from what used to be a hedge, it's not happening and I forgive myself for the transgression.
I want to say that, even as a voracious audiobook reader, I still struggle with what to call it. Not just because "reading" no longer feels quite right, but because of the fucking air-quotes. Remember online dating used to be this awkward, shameful thing that was seen as "not as good" even though the outcomes were the same? That same snooty stigma still surrounds audiobooks, and if you can't tell, it kind of pisses me off for similar reasons. It all comes down to "nobody is making you do it, but don't think for a second that I'm going to let you make me feel like I'm doing something weird by doing it". (I say this knowing 100% that you mean well.)
The truth is that the fears you're expressing in the third paragraph are in fact projections of your own insecurities as a reader and listener. Reading by listening is wonderful; it's mostly the same, but interesting in the ways that it's different. If you find yourself zoning out or losing focus, either drink more caffeine or listen to something that is more interesting to you. These things are your own temporary inadequacies, not an inherent property of listening to books. If you stick with it - and choose stuff well-suited to the form - you, too, will come to love it.
ps. Good earbuds make it super easy to pause, and good player software makes it easy to jump back. Would I love to see Overdrive (the company behind Libby) make it possible to sync an ebook to an audiobook so you could see the word currently being read highlit and click to jump to an arbitrary moment? Sure, that would be one cool trick. Maybe that'll come.
Someone else mentioned code samples. Fortunately I only had a couple Mesa samples in Inventing the Future and I actually gave him some audio for the way to read them. My guideline was "how would a CS professor read this in class?"
There IS a "pronouncing Mesa" epilogue to the manual, which helped. But a book with a whole lot of code in it? I don't think that would work.
In addition to (good) earbuds and practice listening at higher speeds, I suspect that not all pitch correction algos are created equal. If you are simply speeding up audio without correcting for pitch, it's going to sound like a cartoon even at 1.25x.
However, the main thing is concentration. I do not perceive that the words are sped up, because I am very actively listening to it while doing wrote, repetitive things. I have to stop the audio if I'm doing anything that requires any attention, computation or decision making whatsoever.
Cooking soup? No problem. Following a recipe? NOPE. Picking up vegetables? Sure. Reading ingredients? Not a chance. Biking on a path? Sure. Driving? Not a chance.
Assuming 10% of those books are, in some way, in your opinion, better than the other 90%, what would you say were the best couple of dozen books you've listened to? How much would you say the performer affects your perception of the book?
Great performers tend to be great, at the risk of being reductive and tongue-in-cheek. There are certainly mediocre talents out there, but most people working in that (rapidly growing) industry are really great. I do see names popping up so there's probably awards being given out for audiobook performances at this point.
However, the real question you didn't ask is how big of a deal is it for the author to read their own books. Truth be told, if you don't know the author's voice today, chances are the content would be better served by hiring an excellent voice talent.
For the authors whose voices you do know... it's hard to imagine a David Sedaris book being read by anyone except David Sedaris (except Tracy Ullman, which will be relevant when my recommendations come). It's not just biographies that need to be read by their authors to be properly enjoyed; everyone from Neil deGrasse Tyson to John Waters bring so much to their books. Whereas I'd pay good money to never listen to Neal Stephenson read anything again. Great dude, but he should stick to writing.
There are even books that are made better because they are read by their author. See: Werner Herzog's The Twilight World.
Discontinued as of this month: "FYI Our current top pick, the Jabra Elite Active 75t, has been discontinued and is no longer available."
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-workout-head...
While I'm confident that there are other earbuds, I'm tempted to hit eBay right now to pick up a spare set. They are that good.
Choose wisely what you read.
For most people, a book is probably a multi-week investment, though lighter fare can go quicker. You can also skim, or read segments only, or quit bad books quickly. I recommend each of these where appropriate.
There are roughly 300,000 "traditionally" published books printed each year in the United States (Bowker ISBN registrations), a million or three including self-published. The US Library of Congress has 40 million catalogued titles, and Google estimated about 140 million books published (through its Google Books project) as of 2015 or so. You will sample only a tiny portion of the world's literature.
The most-read books of all time are, in rough order: The Bible, the Quran, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, all reporting (with various degrees of precision and accuracy) ~0.5 -- 5 billion copies), then possibly Cervantes Don Quixote, and the Harry Potter series. Three of those, at least, are principally propaganda, in the original and/or modern senses.
A well-established historical novel may sell roughly 200 million or so copies, as with A Tale of Two Cities or The Little Prince.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books>
The Facebook (and now TikTok) homepages and/or app screens now dwarf these.
Quantity ... has its benefits, but also disadvantages. "Of the reading of books there is no end" says The Preacher in Ecclesiastes.
I recommend reading well, I've suggested Great Books as at least a good starting library, though my other suggestion is to have a good guiding question and to follow that.
Keep in mind that following recent trends, news, gossip, etc., can engross all your time and attention with very little long-term staying value. I don't remain wholly ignorant of what's happening, but I try to dip very lightly from that pitcher.
From a recent comment of mine: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32669503>
Surely the Bible is among the most un-read books in history as well, with all of the copies sitting in hotel rooms and on family shelves unopened.
I get through about 15 books a month - 2000 would be like 10-12 years, not a lifetime.
Some things are just comfortable and fun to revisit.
Some things are even both.
I don't consume a lot of media for the same reason of wasting my time, plus trial and error of finding satisfying material takes additional quantity of time I don't have. With that I justify occasional media reconsumption as I can get equally satisfying emotional response from rewatched material.
Also, why would death play any role on how many different material one needs to consume?
I use the following format:
[[title]] by [[author]] (date finished)
That way I generate a separate file for each book where I can keep notes and my rating. I also keep a separate file for each author so I can easily link all the books/short stories/essays etc by that author in one place. Obsidian is bloody awesome.
https://podviaznikov.com/readings/what-do-you-care-what-othe...
I save more by default too, I have a template that imports when I add new book to my collection and I just fill it with info/tags and my notes/quotes and other interesting stuff related to the book.
My favourite thing about Obsidian is that you can interlink all the notes together. Its super useful if you’re referring to other books in your notes or if you have literature notes on different books.
The Great Gatsby is short. Candide is shorter. The Picture of Dorian Gray is fairly short. Each of them might have been read in a day or less. War and Peace is famously long, but at a normal reading pace of 200 words per minute it will only take 40-45 hours -- say, 10 days.
I’m great at reading in cars but trains and planes are ok for me.
>Garfunkel began acting, and played Captain Nately in the Nichols film Catch-22 (1970). Simon was to play the character of Dunbar, but screenwriter Buck Henry felt the film was already crowded with characters and wrote Simon's part out.[83][84] Filming began in January 1969 and lasted about eight months, longer than expected.[85][86] The production endangered the duo's relationship;
Entirely possible since they weren't making music, touring or doing fuckall but wait for their part in the movie. Garfunkel's character doesn't have particularly crazy amounts of screen time either.
I don't know how time consuming it was to be a folk music star, but they weren't expected to workout and train choreography all day, the way pop stars are today.
Despite its reputation War and Peace is actually a pretty easy read. Perhaps except the final essay with Tolstoy philosophy of history.
Number of the 100 of his favorite books written before year X:
1500 6
1900 29
1950 24
1990 41
2022 0
→ it's all pretty recent, which is surprising for a Taleb reader
→ but 0 was written in the last 30y!
Also, 0 of the books he read in the last 30y made it to his 100 favorites list.
When I did the same exercise, 50% of my favorite books were readings from early adulthood. It scared me: am I not learning anymore? I hope I'm not the only one.
He hasn’t ranked his favorites. He has listed them in chronological order of reading. He has a second page of favorites which are more recent.
It turns out it does involve him: It's by Art Garfunkel's college roommate, who goes blind in Junior year. (I have not read it yet, it's on my list.)
https://www.amazon.com/Hello-Darkness-Old-Friend-Extraordina...
Nothing "changed my mind," but it was very useful to understand the his point of view. Turns out this politician cared very deeply about issues that I really care about, and if the side that I normally support was willing to cooperate, we could have moved more quickly on these issues.
Not really saying he isn't political, but he's not over here reading Rush Limbaugh' autobiography
This list (and the royal we!) produce a similar reaction.
Skimming this library, Garfunkel is certainly not lacking in intellectual confidence! It implies to me that he wants to understand the world, from many angles at a deep level, and yeah to do that you need confidence that might create unpleasant feelings in an observer. The discomfort is caused by envy, also regret and loss, because we all start out with boundless confidence, and only lose it over time, mainly to avoid being called out by our cool friends who discovered the social value of giving up on hard problems and difficult achievements.
This could be one of the many variables that holds humanity at an artificially low local maxima.
"The subtitle of Art Garfunkel's new memoir, " Notes From an Underground Man," echoes Dostoyevsky's "Notes From Underground" and Richard Wright's story "The Man Who Lived Underground" — both serious works of literature.
Garfunkel’s book, however, is a splattering of 30-plus years of handwritten thoughts, lists, travel notes, bad poetry, confessions, snarky digs, platitudes and prayers gussied up for publication in different fonts and sizes.
Reading it is like rummaging through a huge junk drawer of the mind."
On a less Dad joke line, a good number of those books are out of copyright. So it would be fun to link them to free versions if/when they become public domain.
1. Sorry have a tendency to rabbit on occasionally…
If you go into a used bookstore (remember those?) you find very few copies of Swann's Way but plenty of copies of the other books in In Search of Lost Time. Apparently it's common to read the first one and never go any further. I can't claim to have even done that.
It's made my day that a frivolous "list of every book Art Garfunkel read since the 60's" is rated so high!
A friend of mine borrowed a copy of 1984 I had laying around. She accidentally folder one of the pages or something, I don't recall. I don't think I've ever heard anyone apologies so much, but she REALLY loves books. It was just paperback I picked up because it was dirt cheap... I ended up giving it to her, that way it was her own book she damaged ever so slightly.
"278. Jan 1984 James Joyce Ulysses * 1921 783 pp."
"279. Jan 1984 Jim Harrison Farmer 1976 160 pp."
"280. Jan 1984 Michel de Montaigne Travel Journal 1580-81 175 pp."
Well, it seems understandable that the "On" disappeared from the title when people are referring to the book. See that the original 1859 edition de-emphasized the preposition "On" in the title with a small font: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species#/medi...
The original publisher subsequently dropped "On" from the title in the 1872 6th edition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species#:~:te....
The shorter "The Origin of Species" has gained so much popular currency that even new editions of that book omit the "On" from the title:
https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Species-150th-Anniversary/dp/0...
https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Species-Voyage-Beagle/dp/14000...
Highly recommended.
From 1968 to the end of 1978 you have approximately 3650 days...And since the page has the somewhat unusual take of also prominently listing the number of pages of each book...I was able to gather the total number of pages amounts to 43,612 pages. 12 pages per day for 10 years? Uhmmm...
Now I feel bad about constantly complaining that I don't read enough. 12 pages a day is easy, even for heavier works.
That honestly impressive how much you could read with just 12 pages a day.
Edit: Okay, a small script that grabs the first three years of books, with a bug, or two, somewhere, tells me that you actually need to read about 120 pages per day, not 12. That makes more sense. It's ten times more, but still do able.
As I said, a career I greatly admire. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Garfunkel
I'm sure I've exceeded that over a similar period. Likely anyone who enjoys reading regularly has.
I don't know exactly what I average per day. But certainly way more than a measly 12 pages.
