I had a similar experience with that book.
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America has finally been liberated from the literary elite.
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a) become unemployed.
b) while your at the library doing the job search on their computers…check out books
c) read books.
d) Phone in that coding update to your current gig as 50 hours of work. When it actually only took 10 mins.
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- Get a job as an electrician
- Accept work in skyscraper fixing the fans.
- Climb the stairs to the top floor to check fans have been fixed.
- Being too lazy to walk downstairs, parachute from the top floor window.
- Congratulate yourself on doing 70 stories in less than a couple of minutes.
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…unsurprisingly for a guy with my preferred handle, I read through 100 books last year, and 176 the year before, and I’m already up to 13 for this year (average book size according to Goodreads is ~360 pages). That’s not counting my own writing, or the papers that I’ve had to review or proof.
…I’m an oddball, aren’t I?
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I really like the idea of making notes about what I’ve learned from a book. I can imagine that’d help get through a book faster, since often I have to slow down to process what I learned, or even stop completely for the day fearing I can’t retain more, and often seek out someone to tell about it to help make it stick (usually my mom - bless her patience with me explaining Spanish grammar or honeybee genetics or human color perception to her despite literally none of those things being one of her stated interests)
And giving up on a boring book makes sense too. If a book is putting me off reading, well, I’m basically already choosing not to read it, I just haven’t admitted that to myself. I can use the time I’m spending avoiding the boring book reading something else.
I differentiate that from a book being a difficult read though - if I’m having a hard time getting through it but am still motivated to read it, it’s worth it to keep going, I think, even if I’m being slowed down. Those books have always been rewarding in my experience, where the books I spend weeks pretending I’m reading, only reading one page a day or so, even if I finish them I can’t say it was terribly worth the effort.
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Came here to post that I, too, like the note strategy. I got a Paperwhite at Christmas and just got into the highlight feature. Thinking to add those excerpts into Evernote. Any way to export them - maybe using the kindle reader on the computer and copying and pasting?
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I don’t have an e-reader of any sort so I think what I’ll do is write them on post it notes and flags inside the book (I read a lot of library books, so nothing permanent) and then review my notes and write something up on my desktop (how medieval!)
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So much emphasis on quantity. Why not take some time, lots of time, on quality?
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but then I can’t read the BBS?
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I’ll admit that I started rereading David Weber’s Honorverse, and ended up taking a perspective of “this is how not to write a novel”. But, most of the time, I try to stick to better books.
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FWIW, be careful with post it notes. In my experience, after a couple of years the glue becomes a lot more gluey and can rip the page when you finally take it off, and it can leave a stain. IMHO just use pencil, even in library books. It might be heretical, but I actually really like finding someone else’s notes in a book. It feels like a personal connection across time, and you also get a sense of what other people were thinking about the book, or thought was important.
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Many years ago, it took me four attempts to finally persevere through Godel, Escher, Bach. Worth it.
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It is criminal to write in library books. Don’t listen to this monster. If you want someone’s thoughts on a book, buy a used copy that’s marked.
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Only 61? Slacker. Seriously. I read over 80 books last year and according to Goodreads, I’ve read 14 so far this year (though one was a novella so…).
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That’s multiple books per day. Are we talking about children’s books she can finish in minutes?
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Your first link leads to a page about Kym wanting to read 2000 books.
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Personally, finding underlines and notes in library books is one of those things that unreasonably enrages me. It’s like someone reaching across space and time… to jump up and down like a child beside me while I’m reading going hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey
If I want distractions while reading I have the internet.
Also I have never experienced a post it note behaving as you describe. And I was sticking post it notes in books as it was anyway, using them as bookmarks, I just wasn’t using them to take notes on the book’s contents.
I have, on the other hand, experienced someone’s smudged note causing a word to be unreadable, forcing me to erase the graphite to even read the book, and the back and forth action of a standard eraser can damage paper so if I wasn’t an artist with a kneaded eraser on hand, trying to repair the damage could have very easily caused actual damage to the book. And it still left a stain and indentations from the person’s heavy hand. So yeah I think I’ll stick to my original plan.
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I hope not; I would have expected Happy Mutants to be happily voracious in book consumption, given all the chat we do about writing, creativity etc.
I don’t do Goodreads myself but I know my Kindle has just shy of 600 books on it, I got it four years ago, and I’ve nearly read them all, for what that’s worth. Sure, lots of it is genre stuff but some of that can be big and ambitious (Stephenson and Follett among the doorstops read in 2017). Plus I still read real books.
Reading is fun! And important! I guess for me it’s far better than TV and hence I give free time to the printed page rather than the screen.
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This would be interesting indeed.
I am not planning to buy an Amazon-branded reader, or any e-book reader, because of their abyssmal handling of more-coloumned PDF. I read a lot of academic texts, nearly all of which are two- or three-columned, and nearly none of which are available in any other format than PDF.
The day I can read my bread-and-butter texts on such a device and import and export my jabref/endnote/citavi/mendeley/whatever databases I will buy one.
I think that day will never come, but anyway.
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