I Went from Reading 40 Books a Year to Reading 0

I had a very ambivalent reaction to this blog post. Most importantly, I find the author&#x27;s relationship to reading quite odd. Basically, all he talks about is reading self-help books. Not really any reading for pleasure, nor does he discuss reading to learn about other non-self-help related topics that might interest him, just for learning&#x27;s sake.<p>So he seems to approach reading primarily from a &quot;how is this going to improve my life&quot;, usually from some sort of productivity-enhancing, &quot;always be hustling&quot; mindset. So I&#x27;m not surprised at all that he&#x27;s found diminishing returns in this endeavor.<p>Don&#x27;t mean to sound too harsh, but I actually did read his entire post and throughout the whole thing I kept thinking &quot;Maybe try chilling TF out and just reading something you <i>enjoy</i>.&quot;

Please read more fiction. Why should everything be about becoming a &#x27;better&#x27; person? Why not enjoy a good story? Unconsciously you will learn something, even from fiction.

I don&#x27;t want to challenge my existing beliefs with new knowledge or points of view, unless it can be expressed in a sentence or two on the internet.

I try not to read too much more non-fiction than fiction. A few non-fiction books have had a great impact on me, but on the whole I&#x27;ve gotten a lot more from the fiction. Not only limiting yourself to non-fiction but further narrowing your scope to self-help books that can be effectively condensed into short summaries is a huge blunder, in my opinion.

I am begging you to pick up some fiction instead.

If you confine yourself to self-help and “business” books you’re going to run out of things to read.

It sounds to me like you are reading books which more or less belong all to the same niche. The gradient going from a lot to a few seems natural.

I needed to hear this: I have an ever-growing list of books I want to read, with topics ranging from the Mossad, to drug trafficking in Southeast Asia, to how to build better habits, to political theory, and some history.<p>A few days ago, I tried but failed to remember the name of a (main) character from Narcotopia.<p>When I&#x27;m reading, I&#x27;m so immersed in the story that I feel I&#x27;m living it. It brings me immense pleasure. But, to get the most out of it, I think I have to switch to studying them in detail, taking notes, etc.<p>Of course, I&#x27;ll still read for pleasure, but my reading will have to slow down so I can squeeze more out of it. I hope some other people on HN see this comment and consider it too.

&gt;As we know only too well, reading books is considered the fundamental ingredient for moving from mental inferiority to inspiring intelligence.<p>Lost me right at the first sentence. It&#x27;s inferior to believe that books are a fundamental ingredient in allaying mental inferiority. Most knowledge is tacit and comes from doing, not reading. The hero who confronts the lion gains wisdom along the way. The nerd in his library merely thinks he&#x27;s gaining wisdom.

I think reading books is important for exercising my attention span and imagination (which is why fiction is important).<p>The caveat there is that I follow Naval Ravikant&#x27;s advice and if I&#x27;m not liking a book, I either skip around to the parts I care about or I discard it and move onto another.<p>I&#x27;ve discarded a number of reputable, oft-recommended books because they did not click with me, such as Taleb&#x27;s books, Think and Grow Rich, etc etc.

In my experience self help books are of minimal value. You need to read for fun, general factual learning and historical books for perspective. I don’t read a book if I’m not interested in it and I still get through 35-50 books a year.

For those who didn’t grow up reading and spent years doom-scrolling social media, becoming a good enough reader with decent comprehension takes real effort. You have to accept rereading, losing focus, and the frustration that comes with it. But after about 200 hours of reading opinion pieces over the course of a year, it has now become enjoyable and even addictive, offering deeper insights into life. Social media is now empty calories. I get why most people don’t read. Reading is a skill and like any other you need to actively develop that skill. Scrolling social media takes no effort.

Classic confusion &quot;correlation = causation&quot;. If interesting&#x2F;knowledgeable people read more books does not mean that reading more books will make you more interesting&#x2F;knowledgeable. It&#x27;s usually the fact that for those people other intrinsic interests move them to read more books. So reading more books is a &quot;symptom&quot;.

tl;dr: &quot;I read too many books and wasn&#x27;t getting much value out of them compared to reading one or two books that I could <i>really</i> focus on.&quot;