> I don't know if this is true, but I do struggle with finding recent interesting books.
Sturgeons law definitely applies.
Reading (or watching, or whatever) only older stuff is basically using survivor-ship as a curation filter. It's a viable approach, although will definitely miss good stuff.
If you don't do this, you need some other way to discard most of the crap.
> I agree with you about the quality of books. A fair chunk of the books on my bookshelf from that era are 80s/90s to early 00s because those books are just an order of magnitude better written, with a high signal to noise ratio.
This is a common misconception. There were plenty of shit books then, too, you just won't find people remembering and recommending them. Whereas we haven't, collectively, discarded the shit books of today, yet.
> I think one more hack is stop reading a book you know is not worth the time. It's a hard habit for me, but I've finally realized there are too many great books out there to waste time on ones that aren't. Put the book down, it's OK.
I'm in exactly the same situation and do the same thing. There's nothing that reminds me more of my mortality than looking at my (digital) library of books that I have yet to read. It's obvious now that unless I make it very big I won't ever have the time to read all of them so it's very important that I do not waste time reading books that aren't worth it (technical books are mostly exempted from this though). Like you say it's a hard habit but it's the most efficient thing you can do since time is such a scarce commodity and books are dime a dozen these days.
> If you're, like I am, tired of having to choose between books written decades ago and books written by those with at least a slightly ulterior motive
I find that most of my favorite books were written decades ago. New stuff is too boring to be worth books half the time.
That said, I buy books regularly and completely agree with the net advice. Support authors and make it a valuable career to work hard, build good knowledge, and share it.
> 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.
> Is this just basic nostalgia, people wanting to recreate the dial-up days or even BBS days?
That's certainly not why I created my search engine. Old isn't an end, its a means to cut the bullshit.
Like I read a lot of old books, not because I'm nostalgic for yellowed paper, but because they consistently have much better signal to noise ratio than most of what you'll find on a screen or printed past 1990 or so. (When people bought books in physical book stores and weren't primarily ordering books online, books weren't judged by their page count as a proxy for how much content they contained, and thus had a lot less filler and anecdotes.)
If you gave me a method of selection that was as reliable for identifying good books among contemporary books, I'd probably read more contemporary books as a result.
> Many books that were written 30 years ago are still immensely enjoyable today.
That is definitely survivorship bias. Do you have any idea how many books are created in a year, even before eCommerce? The vast majority of them are crap.
> I was an avid reader until ebook readers appeared
Same here, though possibly not for the same reasons. I go through phases of reading a couple of ebooks a week, but if I'm not careful I get reading deserts where when I look back I've spent weeks curating/buying more ebooks and never actually getting around to reading them.
I love reading, but it's a constant battle to be a reader and not just a collector of books, something I never have an issue with when it comes to my physical collection (which is large but also largely untouched due to tired, aging eyes).
> I have the right to try to avoid books I would consider 'useless'.
Yes! Of course you have the right to choose what you are reading. Don't forget about it.
> What tools/metrics are there to help find meaningful books?
Do you really want a metric on a highly subjective matter? Does a bad rating on Goodreads means what the book is bad? Does that that mean what you wouldn't enjoy it if it relevant for your interests?
> it's probably a mix of everything.
Of course.
Try this[0] (or find a text copy, it's available on archive.org too), it's short and...
> Still, I am discomforted by your book-buying habits; a book unread is a valuable resource wasted :) But each to their own way.
There are lots of fantastic books out there, and only so much time to read them. Sometimes I buy some with the intention of reading them later. But reading books properly takes time, so it's inevitable that I fall behind.
Also, lots of the techincal monographs I buy have some overlapping contents with others I own.
I can buy a book for a single chapter. That's the only way to get that chapter, so it justifies the purchase to me, even if the subjects covered overlap with other books I own.
> As someone who reads a lot, it's actually hard to find interesting things to read. I'm a picky reader.
I have 70+ plus books on hold at my local library (though the holds have been 'paused' so that they will arrive in a staggered fashion). The library has a limit of 100 books being on hold at a time, but it does have a "bookmark" feature so you can save them for later: I have over 2000 books earmarked for future putting-on-hold.
There's plenty to read.
(I read a bunch of non-fiction on academic-leaning topics (history, economics, science), and often get new things to read from the references of the book I'm currently going through. There's a bunch of fiction too: put a hold on Shogun because of the mini-series.)
> There are a lot of obscure books which is great.
This is my biggest issue: discoverability.
The site has an index which shows 12 books at a time, and it looks like 36 pages. So roughly 430 books.
This is not actually a gigantic number of books, one that is small enough that it would be great to look through all the books, and yet I'm never going to do that if I have to page through 12 results at a time.
It would be great to get a simple list view of the collection.
> I worry about reading every year or two, then I read some books, and then I remember that they aren't as interesting as they used to be
I read a lot and while I strongly disagree with your comment that books are less interesting than they used to be I will say that finding good books is very hard once you have read all the well regarded, widely recommended classics.
I often try reading new releases and New York Times best sellers and they often leave me frustrated because they are never as good as people hype them to be.
One recent example that I read was called "The Traitor Baru Cormorant" where I actually skipped closed to 60 pages of the book near the end and still managed to finish it without missing any plot related details. That book has a 4/5 on goodreads...
> And books are published on all sorts of topics so even despite this, among old books you can find weird things that disagree with each other.
This is recursive and implies a decrease in diversity over time, starting from enormously high and reaching abysmally small. But I am fairly certain that it doesn't hold.
> among old books you can find weird things that disagree with each other.
I fail to see what makes old books capable of disagreeing with each other and recent releases incapable. At some point new releases become old and therefore they suddenly attain the ability to disagree with each other?
I fail to see the difference between music and books tbh. Whatever remains popular has, as you said, some property or quality that helps preserve it in memory.
> I have loads of unread ebooks sitting on my computer.
This was true for me... 10 years ago. Now I have a kindle and all these ebooks zipped onto a device more suited for reading ebooks. And they're getting read.
> It's hard to tell which books are good.
I find this to be true for All The Books; even if I do find/read favorable reviews, I can still mislike a book even if it's not independently published.
> I realized quite some time back that my reading time is far more limited than I would like for it to be...I intend to spend the time I do have reading the best I can get my hands on...
As readers we have to come to terms with the fact that we will miss out on many good books, there just isn't enough time to read them all in a lifetime. I decided stop reading the ones that aren't that interesting to me after reading (roughly) 30%-40%[1] of the book. If after this it hasn't grabbed my interest then it just isn't my kind of book, at least in my experience. Will I miss out on the rare book that gets its act together after the 60% mark? Sure, but in my experience those are very rare and I'd rather miss out on them than spend the remaining time chasing the elusive "it gets really good after the 60% mark" books.
> I've yet to be disappointed, even when the topics are somewhat outside my everyday interests and hobbies...
My experience has been the opposite of this. I have found a lot of duds in those lists (I'm talking about fiction books specifically)...
> But there are books you don’t know you want and you won’t know you want them until they’re standing on a shelf in front of you.
This is why I love the libraries and old book shops. There's a lot of value in the serendipity of browsing, since you can discover related monographs that one's search queries somehow missed. Also it's great for inspiration: you see unconnected things which might spark new ideas or interests.
> It feels increasingly difficult to access forms of historical material which haven’t been diligently curated for your good, filtered into bland homogeneity to suit some corporation’s agenda.
It's good to escape that algorithmic curation of one's interests.
> I read very slowly and I don't remember everything I read either.
Unless you have dyslexia, this is a skill issue. You're just not very good at reading yet. The non-fiction that you're going to get through with this skill level probably isn't going to be that valuable.
> Is it more true for older books?
Not exactly. It's rather that we've had time to figure out which older books are worth keeping around. If people keep reading a work for two thousand years, there's probably something to it.
> Isn't most of the information from books freely available online?
Oh goodness, no, unless you've gotten past books into primary sources, in which case, yes, it's mostly online, but you need to have specialist knowledge to engage with it at all.
The good news is that, if you learn to read well, finding the right books, usually those meant for training specialists, can get you up to speed at a remarkable rate. I usually explain it as someone who is a crappy player in a professional league is going to be amazing in an amateur context.
> But it makes me stop and wonder why I'm spending time reading it in the first place. I feel like I need to be careful in how I read something like this, lest the time just be wasted altogether on the forgettable minutiae of history.
No human can recall every fact they read in a book (Google for studies on info retention over time — not great).
I think some desirable reading outcomes include
- enjoyment
- retention of a handful of particularly useful facts
- hopefully quite a bit of high-level context about the subject matter (including summaries or take-aways)
- AND, as Cal Newport points out [0], reading is just good for your brain — especially if you are a knowledge worker
As far as tactics go, I have been using Newport’s suggestion of highlighting interesting text (and, for physical books, highlighting the corner of the page so I can find the highlights easily). I then make sure all of the highlights make it into an app called Readwise [1] which gives me spaced repetition of these highlights over time.
Whatever you do, keep reading! Being a reader in an industry which seems to rarely read is like having a superpower.
Sturgeons law definitely applies.
Reading (or watching, or whatever) only older stuff is basically using survivor-ship as a curation filter. It's a viable approach, although will definitely miss good stuff.
If you don't do this, you need some other way to discard most of the crap.
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