Books I bought to read, but haven't yet:
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Bought or just acquired? (Score:5, Insightful)
I downloaded a lot of public domain classics and am making my way through them but I don't that count as 'bought' and not read.
Re:Bought or just acquired? (Score:4, Interesting)
Alas, I have at least 30 books which I've bought but not yet read. This is less than 1% of the books I currently have in the house.
Just like the parent poster, I don't count any of my downloads from Gutenberg [gutenberg.org], and its ilk. Only real dead-tree books are counted, and not the few thousand which I've passed on to second-hand stores or to friends.
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Similar numbers for me. Though I don't think I have as many as 30 left unread right now. At least ten, though, out of my thousands.
And before your first respondent starts in on me, yes, I've been reading for more than 15 years. Closer to 40...l.
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Re:Bought or just acquired? (Score:5, Interesting)
So you've read at least a book a day for fifteen years straight? If you absolutely must exaggerate your accomplishments, you should probably do it in a more believable manner.
First, it's not an exaggeration. Second, just how young do you think I am? If you're going to leap to such erroneous conclusions, at least pick softer targets.
Incidentally, 3500 books (the approximate number in the house at the moment) would be one per day for less than 10 years. I've been reading a lot longer than that, and tend to keep books around. BTW, I have read a book every day during several extended periods, especially when I was a teenager (my own teenage kids have read some of those very books).
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Yeah, if you're a fast reader, a lot of books can be consumed in a couple of hours, so it can be pretty easy to read several books in a single day if you're in the mood. Which makes the whole "you can't possibly have read a book a day for X years" thing even sillier.
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Many people are AVID readers - instead of say, video gamers or bicyclists. I'm 41, and I've been reading since I was five. I have read many hundreds of books, but I've lost count. I assume it would be in the thousands, all told; for instance, I have read just about every scifi book, from the excellent, good, and bad, to the downright awful, at all branches of the local public library - it's gotten to the point that I can't check out anything else because I've read them all, or at least all the ones that mig
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I read the entire 1979 World Book Encyclopedia, A to Z, during my third grade school year
I wonder how common this is among /.ers. I did the same thing, at around the same age. I did not read it to memorize, just page thru to soak up the ambiance. It did take quite awhile, months I think.
Before wikipedia existed to wander aimlessly thru, this was the equivalent activity.
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i know he said 15 years, i started to read when i was 3. i have probably read a few thousand books, thanks to libraries and friends. i've read quite a bit online too, and even with all the reading i got in the time to play some 300 or so video games. plus movies i own about 100 dvds and have watched at least another 200 movies, plus tv and anime on top of that! i am only 34.
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Also as a fan of older science fiction, books used to be about 125-150 pages long. I could destroy one of those in no time. It is not like the 500-1000 page behemoths we have today.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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"Some of us are older than the average slashdot reader"
I'd guess exactly HALF of you are older than the average. :)
Not necessarily.. but half should be lower than the median. :-D
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"Some of us are older than the average slashdot reader"
I'd guess exactly HALF of you are older than the average. :)
This just proves you don't understand math. Median and average are different beasts.
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"Some of us are older than the average slashdot reader"
I'd guess exactly HALF of you are older than the average. :)
This just proves you don't understand math. Median and average are different beasts.
If the age of Slashdot readers followed a Gaussian distribution, then the mean and median would be the same. I doubt this is the case.
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What about the "few thousand" books you claimed to not be counting? Sorry, but your claim is preposterous.
Evidently, it appears preposterous to you. From which we may surmise that you either (i) can't believe anyone reads books very much, or (ii) gravely underestimated my age. I've been reading for 50 years, and have been an avid reader for most of that time. In the last 40 years, I've probably averaged 3 books per week which gives 6000 books in total for that period. Or do you also think that simple arithmetic is preposterous?
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Evidently, it appears preposterous to you. From which we may surmise that you either (i) can't believe anyone reads books very much, or (ii) gravely underestimated my age. I've been reading for 50 years, and have been an avid reader for most of that time. In the last 40 years, I've probably averaged 3 books per week which gives 6000 books in total for that period. Or do you also think that simple arithmetic is preposterous?
Not questioning you here but just wondering, where do you get the time to read an average of 3 books a week? Are you employed? Do you shop, cook, exercise? How long does it take you to read a book with 200 to 300 pages?
I've been trying to finish one paperback for about a year now, stuff keeps interrupting me.
Re:Bought or just acquired? (Score:4, Informative)
Not questioning you here but just wondering, where do you get the time to read an average of 3 books a week? Are you employed? Do you shop, cook, exercise? How long does it take you to read a book with 200 to 300 pages?
Cook = read a book or at least page thru a magazine. Not while chopping vegetables, but plenty of time while stuff is in the oven or frying. Staring at the wall while the fish bakes in the oven and the vegetables steam in the steamer doesn't sound terribly appealing to me.
Exercise = perch on exercise bike with book in hands. I only audiobook on the treadmill and weights. This strategy doesn't work for swimmers.
Read an hour or so before bedtime each night for a couple decades, it adds up. Good excuse for non-caffeinated tea, hot apple cider, cool glass of fruit juice, whatever works, in a comfy well lit chair. Reading is a good way to wind down at night before going to bed. Supposedly the average american watches 8 hours per day of TV, which is at least 7 hours more than I watch, its hard to justify 8 hours each day as "winding down" anyway. With my un-american non-TV watching spare time, its pretty easy to get some serious reading time, in addition to hobbies, etc.
After the first hundred thousand pages or whatever, more than a page per minute on easy reading is not rushing, its just normal speed. All my adult jobs have involved considerable reading on a computer screen, which probably helps my reading speed. A 200 to 300 page book should be about 4 hours at a comfortable laid back taking it easy speed. If my "reading time" is rushed, if I'm tired or sick or distracted, I could see it taking maybe as long as an entire week to read a 250 page fiction book.
Now Gibbon's complete decline and fall of the roman empire, that was maybe 4000 pages of hard non-fiction reading, that took me something like an entire season. I cannot possibly maintain 1 ppm on Knuth or non-fiction in general. None the less, its unusual for a normal sized non-fiction book to take more than 2 weeks.
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Not questioning you here but just wondering, where do you get the time to read an average of 3 books a week?
The average(!) American watches four hours TV a day. It's not that hard to imagine that you would get through a whole lot of books if you'd replace the TV watching with book reading. That said, I am not one of those people, reading a book always feels for me more like work then a leisure activity and thus the number of books I read a year happens to be rarely make it into two digit territory.
Re:Bought or just acquired? (Score:5, Informative)
Evidently, it appears preposterous to you. From which we may surmise that you either (i) can't believe anyone reads books very much, or (ii) gravely underestimated my age. I've been reading for 50 years, and have been an avid reader for most of that time. In the last 40 years, I've probably averaged 3 books per week which gives 6000 books in total for that period. Or do you also think that simple arithmetic is preposterous?
Not questioning you here but just wondering, where do you get the time to read an average of 3 books a week? Are you employed? Do you shop, cook, exercise?
Yup, I work full time, interact with the kids, and do my share of cooking, cleaning, shopping, and odd jobs at home. We also do a fair amount of net activities (online stuff is not counted as reading books). However, although we have a TV, we don't watch it very much. The TV gets used perhaps a few hours per week with the media server, but that's usually the kids watching some SciFi or Anime. As a result, I typically have a couple of hours for casual reading each evening. The kids are also bookworms, and usually read about an hour in bed before going asleep (in addition to reading earlier in the day).
How long does it take you to read a book with 200 to 300 pages?
Depends on the book. For a typical SciFi or War or Crime novel, it would be about 4-6 hours, or a bit less if the book is really enthralling. For heavier material (e.g. "The myth of Sisyphus" by Camus), it might take me that long to properly digest 130 pages. Of course, some books (e.g. "The great Paleozoic crisis" by Erwin) are studied in small amounts over longer periods rather than being fully read in a couple of sittings.
I've been trying to finish one paperback for about a year now, stuff keeps interrupting me.
Have you tried switching off the TV for one evening per week? You could also ask yourself whether you're grasping at excuses to be interrupted, and don't enjoy reading as much as some others. If so, don't sweat it - we're all different.
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How long does it take you to read a book with 200 to 300 pages?
If we're counting normal-sized paperbacks, I read just under 100 pages per hour. So a book of this length would take me 2-3.5 hours. Reading for between half an hour to an hour before I fall asleep at night means I can get through one book every 3-4 days on average (some of the books I read are quite a bit longer, some days I read 2-3 novels in an afternoon because I'm feeling too lazy to do anything else).
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I've been a commuter since high school (30+ km in each direction by bus) and frequently prefer to read over watching TV. I've been known to read rather than sleep if it's a really good book.
I'm in my early 40's and probably average 2-3 books per week. I work full time, run a WoW guild and raid, I follow a number of TV shows most weeks and do the bulk of the cooking and cleaning in my house.
At one period in my life I have averaged over 5 books per day, though that was a fairly special circumstance where I wa
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Re:Bought or just acquired? (Score:5, Interesting)
What is so unbelievable about reading several thousand books?
I'm a slow reader - took me just over nine hours to read Exodus by Leon Uris circa 1962 - but for over fifty years I read four or five books a week, starting in grade school. Problems were, and are, time, access, and money.
Roughly one-third of my lifetime earnings have been spent on books; having a few used-book stores around was invaluable, a near-by library helps, and even while working several jobs, at least a few hours can be found to read - often while trying to fall asleep.
Now I can only afford the occasional book from Baen and other online sites, but I at least have a library across the street. While borrowed books don't count for the question, they certainly count for me. If I count only those I've bought, I figure I'm good for a bare minimum of 3500.
Readers of books are becoming fewer; sometime in the Seventies they became a minority, if memory serves. No matter how hard it may be to wrap your head around the notion, it might be useful to understand that for some people, the reading of books is a part of life.
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For me it became a choice between the passivity of books and the interactivity of the internet. I look across at a crowded bookcase, with fond memories, many read more than once but all now gathering dust. I find the choice between the two, no choice at all, fresh, alive, new, to touch the intellectual preferences of tens of thousands willing to devote the time and effort to create a web site to acknowledge and publish their intellectual pursuit. As a reader to go back to a single author when those hours c
Re:Bought or just acquired? (Score:5, Interesting)
You know I had a teacher when I was in grade school make this sort of statement to me (a book or more a day for 6 months straight, preposterous!). She decided that as I could not possibly have read all of those books, she was going to only give me credit for 1/2 of them, until I started summarizing each book randomly and giving a functional synopsis (plotline, major characters, major events, etc.) of whatever book she asked about in the list. She was really unhappy when she got to "The Complete Works of Shakespeare" (I was in 4th grade) and I started quoting obscure parts of the stories / plays. Never had any problems with her (or any other teacher for that matter) regarding what I had and had not read.
I have a library of approximately 800-1000 hardback first edition books, with a paperback reading copy for every one of those. When I buy books I look for used book stores that are trying to liquidate inventory and buy by the box-full. If I were to sit down and actually count every book I have in my collection (first ed. library, reading and in storage) I am probably at 4000 to 6000 of which I have read all of them. I am 39 for point of reference.
For some of us, paper is not dead, it's just taking a short vacation. I personally cannot read a book in PDF form, nor am I fond of audiobooks. There is just something about the feel of a good book in the hands that makes me comfortable.
Re:Bought or just acquired? (Score:4, Insightful)
nor am I fond of audiobooks
Nobody speaks as fast as I can comfortably read. I feel like a yankee visiting the south for the first time again. Can't you people talk any faster? I do listen to audiobooks when it would be inconvenient to read, such as while driving, or doing light housework and yardwork.
This also burns me away from recent TV documentaries, you know the type, mostly "live re-enactment" and commercial breaks. Sit thru an hour of "the true story of hitler's barber" on the history channel or whatever drivel, and I feel I would have gotten much more out of 2 minutes of reading wikipedia while getting 58 minutes of my life back.
Despite being supposedly "passive", books do give the reader full control of the bandwidth they'd like to accept, which is really nice.
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I use audiobooks on road-trips, but that is pretty much the only time I will listen to them.
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i felt that way until i got my kindle. e-ink display works anywhere there is light. fits 3 gb worth of ebooks calibre lets you download websites for reading on the go, it feels like reading a paperback especially with the protective cover. and the battery lasts so long that it's easy to charge it every week or so depending how much reading you do. the lowest price i've seen for one is $79, as a doorbuster on black friday. they price it assuming you will buy ebooks, but i haven't had to do that yet, i'm fina
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nor am I fond of audiobooks
I think their advantage is that they can be listened to while doing other things. My PhD supervisor bought them to listen to in the car. I listened to a few when my eye had a close encounter with a squash ball and the doctor told me that I had to avoid the rapid eye movement that comes from scanning a page of text for two weeks - for me then audiobooks helped avoid withdrawal symptoms until I was allowed real books again.
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The problem I have with audio books is that they don't tend to engage me sufficiently and my mind starts to wander and I loose track of the story. I have tried on several occasions to get into them and it just hasn't worked. Radio plays are different - with pacing and sound effects etc...
If I found audio books sufficently engaging to keep my attention then they wouldn't be very good for multitasking, especially for something like driving.
When reading I can become totally oblivious to what is going on around
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>>So you've read at least a book a day for fifteen years straight?
Looking at my Barnes and Nobles receipts, I go through about 10 books a month, on average, and have been doing for about 30 years now. Call it 3600 books... eh, it's somewhere in that ballpark.
I pitch the books I hate, keep my favorites, and donate the rest to local book clubs, but I still have an overwhelming number of books around this place.
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What's so preposterous about that claim? I make it a point to read every day, at least for an hour.
Between my wife and I, we've about 3,000 books in the house. Everything from fiction, history, philosophy science, art, politics and economics, to comics.
And in fact, we've immensely busy lifestyles. She's a full-time student at one of the top schools in the country, and I'm a traveling management consultant who works an average of 60-80 hours a week and I go to school part-time when I can. Plus we both do P90
Re:Bought or just acquired? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sometimes, I buy a handful of books that I find interesting, and read them slowly (several of them in parallel) over time. Currently, that list includes Tacitus' Annals of Imperial Rome, Solzhenitsyn's August 1914, Andy Warhol & Pat Hackett's Popism, and Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series.
Sometimes, I buy other books in a series that remain unread until such time that I get to them (such as the remaining books in the Book of the New Sun series or the remainder of Solzhenitsyn's Red Wheel series).
Of course, I also buy books that I think I'll get to eventually, but never do (I probably have some books, like Herodotus' Histories, that have been sitting on my library for a couple of years unread - yet). Hopefully, I can make enough time to glean the wisdom from those books before it's too late in life. :-)
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I downloaded a lot of public domain classics and am making my way through them but I don't that count as 'bought' and not read.
Better do it now before public domain is eradicated and Project Gutenberg is labeled as a Rouge Site under SOPA/PIPA.
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I downloaded a lot of public domain classics and am making my way through them but I don't that count as 'bought' and not read.
Better do it now before public domain is eradicated and Project Gutenberg is labeled as a Rouge Site under SOPA/PIPA.
the government will fail to stop online piracy. did they win the war on drugs? public domain is there for a reason. DMCA stopped a lot of pirates, but mostly it put government servers behind blackholes created to allow piracy to keep going. project gutenburg won't go away, but you might have to use proxies or onion routers to get to it.
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I used the criteria of 'acquired deliberately to read', rather than 'given as a gift unasked'. Even then, I have maybe 3 books at present I deliberately sought out to acquire which I haven't read, and I'm reading one of them at present. One of them I'm keeping for my book club selection next time it's my turn to pick.
Many of the books I have acquired recently have either been public domain or epubs of questionable providence. The number of books I can get through has actually gone up since I got an ereader.
Holidays (Score:2)
Less than 10% may be more than a handful... (Score:2)
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In the UK there are a lot of charity shops selling used books. I buy a big stack or paperbacks for £1 to £3 each, then read through most of them, then take them back. It's a great way to get a cheap read, it's a great way to recycle, and most of the monay goes to charity.
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Question For The Masses (Score:5, Interesting)
the poll is still very young, but there are a good number of people whose responses indicate large numbers of book purchases where the books have not been read.
My question is, what is the thought process? Why do you buy books, and presumably continue to buy books that you do not and possibly will not read?
As someone who buys one book at a time and no more until I've finished my most recent purchase, I'm trying to understand.
Re:Question For The Masses (Score:5, Interesting)
I've got about 12 books to read that I haven't started yet. That's less than 1% of the collection.
I read fairly fast - I've finished a 300 page novel in a couple of hours before. If I kept just one around, it could run out at a time when the local bookstores, library and so on are all closed. I've also given up on some books and even just thrown them across the room, so again a spare or two is useful.
Then there are series works. If I like the first volume or two of a series, I may just buy them all. If there are one or two that are hard to find, I may have the whole set put aside, waiting on getting volume 7 or whatever before I dive into the whole run.
I'm not real clear about this "possibly will not read" as you ask it? When Star Wars got rolling, people talked about a six film or nine film set, some of which would not see release for 20 years. Some kids who had become real fans with the first film died of cancer before Return of The Jedi came out. Dave Sim started Cerebus the Aardvark as a comic and told all his readers it would wrap up in issue 300, nearly 30 years from then. When various TV shows ramp up, there are often statements that the plot will be wrapped up at the end of Season 4 or 5 or 6. Quite possibly, I will die before the next Lost or X-Files or whatever gets to a conclusion, so why should I invest time or money into the incomplete series?
You seem to be describing a situation where all such gambles are illogical. You're trying to understand how someone could take the risk they might not live long enough to finish all the books they have, or various things might sidetrack them. I'm really trying to understand how someone could be that risk averse that the idea of having a few bucks locked up in a book they may not get to for a week or two looks like they are taking a long odds gamble for insane stakes. Do you not buy a full tank of gas because you might not drive long enough to run out?
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My question is, what is the thought process? Why do you buy books, and presumably continue to buy books that you do not and possibly will not read?
For me, there are a couple different cases that fit this bill; both involving e-books.
First, there are some books that, over the years, I occasionally pick up and re-read for fun - stuff like Sherlock Holmes, Lord of the Rings, etc. I've bought e-book versions of some of these but haven't read them yet - so I counted them as "purchased but unread". That made sense to me, although I'm sure others would argue the point since I've read the dead-tree version of the work itself.
Then there are new (or "new to me"
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My question is, what is the thought process? Why do you buy books, and presumably continue to buy books that you do not and possibly will not read?
I love books! And I love shopping for books...
This "not reading" thing is still quite new to me. For years I've read 50-100 books a year, plus lots of computer books that I skimmed and used for reference. But a little over a year ago I moved back to the U.S. after ten years abroad, and since returning I spend most of my free time outside instead of inside reading. Where I was living before I hated going outside, the heat, noise, pollution, chaos and fear of being hit by cars, so I read to escape. Now I
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Up through high school, I used to do way more recreational reading once the school year started than I did during the summer. It seemed odd, since I had more free time during the summer, but during the summer, I was usually out playing and having fun, while during the school year, I was usually ahead of my schoolwork, and in an environment more conducive to reading than playing, so...
Even today, I probably tend to do more recreational reading on weekdays than weekends. It's a similar phenomenon to the one
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Reference books. I start a new project, I buy half a dozen books, I grab the information I need immediately from these books, and mark the rest for personal edification at a later point.
And then there are the foreign language books, which as you might imagine, take some concentrated effort to get through.
And I desperately need a proper reading lamp. ;-)
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Well, I have a couple of thousand gaming books. Quite a few are purchases through momentum. I bought the core book(s) and modules, ran a few games and still like it but don't have a gaming group. But there are a very small percentage that I've actually read through.
I have probably maybe 400 computer related books of which most are used as a reference source.
Maybe a third of my comic books are unread by me since I traded a box of old train stuff for three long boxes of comic books.
Of the several thousand nov
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My question is, what is the thought process? Why do you buy books, and presumably continue to buy books that you do not and possibly will not read?
For me it's simply this: The books (or movies/games/whatever) that I buy and then not consume are things I want to have read, but then can't muster the motivation to actually read. I have a hard time to derive pleasure from reading and thus a lot of stuff ends up being unread or only half read as something more interesting came along.
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I answered ~10% myself, as I rarely buy books (mainly just the new book from favorite authors), but it probably is along the same lines as to why I have a gigantic backlog of video games I've yet to even touch.
See, a while back, I made a list of all games I own and have not played or fully beaten-the list came out to 99 strong, and since then I've beaten few games but accumulated many more. These are games I've actually paid for, it doesn't include games that are free (eg Maple Story) that I want to play.
Not 'yet', never (Score:2)
About 5% of books I aquire are bad enough that I don't read them through. It's very rare that I stop reading a book I actually like.
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I can't recall stopping from reading a book altogether. What happened for very bad books is that I skim through them but still reach the end.
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And yet you keep all those books you have no plans to read? Just filling up space for no reason?
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The question is "Books I bought to read, but haven't yet" there is nothing about keeping them or not. Most of the bad ones I either gift away, give to charity or throw in a recycling bin when I reorganise my shelves, which happens about every 3 years. Until then, they collect dust, yeah.
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I tend to be extremely selective when it comes to purchasing books, I only pay for books I'm fairly certain I'll end up finishing.
Right now I have one book that I'm working my way through (fairly dense sociology book) and another (hard sci-fi) that I plan on reading once I'm done with the first one.
Quotation Help (Score:3)
I recall reading a quotation on this topic once. Sadly I can't remember who said it or the precise wording, so to paraphrase:
I'm sure I've hacked that up but maybe it will ring a bell and soembody can post the correct quote with attribution. It certainly applies to my library!
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From "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" by Nassim Nicholas Taub. Here is the quote:
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encylopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.
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Sorry, but I don't quite get his logic. Anyone care to elaborate?
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There is also potentially the idea that there is a great value in unread books as there is an exciting unknown quality about what exactly is in it, whereas a book that you have read doesn't have this value (it's value will often only real
Re:Quotation Help (Score:5, Insightful)
Think of it as the Beer Principle.
Book you have already read are less valuable because at least some of their contents are now in your head. They are empty beer cans.
Unread books contain untapped beer, um, knowledge.
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From "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" by Nassim Nicholas Taub. Here is the quote:
Off topic here.
I totally don't get the title of that book :D You see I grew up in a country where Black Swans were the norm, and it wasn't until I was 30 something that I actually saw a white swan in its native habitat. So to me white swans are improbable.
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From "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" by Nassim Nicholas Taub. Here is the quote:
Off topic here.
I totally don't get the title of that book :D You see I grew up in a country where Black Swans were the norm, and it wasn't until I was 30 something that I actually saw a white swan in its native habitat. So to me white swans are improbable.
yeh me too... my northern hemisphere friends decided I was completely loopy when I started shouting "wow! look at those white swans! they are WHITE!!!" ... then I started chasing after and taking pictures of them (much like how my ex reacted when she saw squirrels in the US... again her american friends thought she had lost her mind) .
But lets face it white swans look all strange.. they are all small and delicate looking things compared to a good old robust Swan River black swan that won't just stare
Percentage meaningless (Score:5, Informative)
If it's very good, I give it to my friends / family and purchase another copy for my 'library' to read again (less than 10 books in that category).
If it's bad, I throw it away. Why would I keep it ?!?
So in the end I have only a small shelf of books at home.
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Percentage of what? Books in my house right now? Books I've ever read? Books in the library of congress? Books on my kindle?
So, I have 5 books bought waiting to be read. I have no idea what percentage that equates to. I know the numerator but not the denominator.
Born on a Blue Day (Score:5, Interesting)
Born on a Blue Day is the autobiography of an autistic man.
It is a good read, and extraordinarily lucid.
(Although I don't know how much help he may have had from his editors.)
He was interviewed on NPR, and he comes across as rational, and thoughtful, and well spoken;
and I don't doubt that he is autistic, but I'm not seeing a crushing disability.
Then the interviewer asks him what places or situations are difficult for him,
and he says the beach, the beach causes him anxiety.
And she asks why, and he says,
"ooohhhh...so many pebbles to be sorted; so many grains of sand that need to be counted..."
I was in a book store the other day, and I look at all the books, and I get pretty much the same feeling:
"ooohhh....so many books that need to be read."
But is isn't anxiety, it is more futility and despair...
Re:Born on a Blue Day (Score:4, Informative)
I was in a book store the other day, and I look at all the books, and I get pretty much the same feeling:
"ooohhh....so many books that need to be read."
But is isn't anxiety, it is more futility and despair...
Reminded me of this comic strip from Berke Breathed: http://www.northstarnerd.org/.a/6a00d8341c5fd253ef0120a5e93468970b-450wi [northstarnerd.org]
10% is only a handful for the poll maker? (Score:2)
10% is more than a handful in my case. Quite a lot more.
Reading more than once (Score:2)
This is (another thing) that ebooks excel at. (Score:5, Interesting)
With a Kindle I don't have to horde, I can just buy them when I'm ready. I used to buy books that looked interesting because.. well I was in the store and I'd probably never find that book again, so I'd get it. An impulse buy.
Then I'd have a stack, and towards the end a complete shelf of unread books. And most of them I didn't want to read, they were something that caught my eye, but when I got back to them I say "meh" and read something else.
But now I have a Kindle (it's the same for any other modern ereader). I get free samples of stuff and mark the stuff I'm interested in for later. Then, when and only when I need something to read, I click the "buy this book" button and I'm off reading something that I thoroughly enjoy. No wasted money, no wasted time, no shelf of obligation and bad decision.
100% (Score:5, Funny)
What about books that were gifts (Score:2)
I have a whole bunch of books given to me as gifts. Some self help books but a bunch of cool ones. I love owning them, but I haven't taken the time to read them. So If I include the ones that someone else bought, I think I'm still between 10 and 20 percent.
Now I"m feeling guilty. I think I need to read the cool ones.
Getting things done (Score:5, Funny)
I bought "Getting things done" back when everybody was talking about it. I still haven't gotten around to reading it.
Bookshop (Score:4, Funny)
Re-reading is what kills ... (Score:2)
But re-reading is fun - it's like sitting up with an old friend. I've read some of my favourites (Eric Frank Russell) almost a dozen times. I still catch new stuff.
There's a comment in "Twelve Monkeys" when the protagonists go to see "Vertigo" - the movie is the same, you've changed.
Odd numbers (Score:2)
almost all (Score:3)
All books that I have bought myself I have either read or am in the process of doing so. Yes, I usually read 2-3 books at the same time. Usually one light, easy read, fiction or humor and one that requires more mental work to digest so I can pick my read depending on the time and energy I have. And then there's sometimes a third one that just jumps in and wants to be read right now.
Now, for books that I've received as presents, the rate isn't 100%. A couple of them will probably stay unread forever.
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I pretty much believe the printed books will disappear in the near future.
Yes, right after the year of the Linux-powered flying car.
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But books are great. If you collect enough of them, you will become well respected and people will assume you are smart, whether you have read them or not.
And they are fully endorsed by LeVar Burton.
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"people will assume you are smart."
undesired consequence. i am just like any other human i am stupid. i read enough books to be smart, but it has recently been pointed out to me that i am not in fact smart.
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Books? Where we're going we don't need books.
I pretty much believe the printed books will disappear in the near future.
I pretty much believe that you will disappear sooner than that. And you're right that you won't need them anymore by then.
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I know that theoretically I can put my iPad in a ziplock back to read in the bath, but personally I'm more comfortable with taking paperbacks. I don't see this changing in the short term.
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"obligitory" being the key word here.
Signed,
The Grammar Nazi.
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Nah. I like fuzzy logic :)
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I was wondering where the "I don't buy any books" option was. I can't remember the last time I bought one and read it. 10+ years now? I don't care to read ebooks, I'm on my computer enough as it is, so I stopped completely.
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i agree. and honstly there should also be a "i don't read books" option... i am sure i won't be alone in that category (unless counting in the course/ technical manuals etc.). And that would have been the right for punchline "literacy is overrated" :)
not that i do not know the "story" (for some intents and purposes but not all) of many books, it is just that reading them (the story and not whole damn book) on wikipedia in 5 or less minutes is far more easy. many times during normal human/ internet discussi
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The purpose of recreational reading is not simply to acquire a new plot - it's the journey the author takes you on that is the delight. Their choice of words, the pacing, flavour text, nuance.
I weep at the thought of considering yourself literate because you read a synopsis on Wikipedia.
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Wow, to get into the 10% range, I would have had to have gotten somewhere around 80 to 100 new books this holiday season.
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Percentages seem the wrong measure.
I have about 60 books in this house, but it's rented and I'm young, so that's some favourites, some useful ones (recipe books etc), and whatever I've bought in the last 18 months. More are at my parent's house (kid/teenager books, mostly), and I borrow two or three from the library about every 6 weeks.
Of the 60, about 15 are unread -- library books have a deadline, so they usually get priority.
I also have a stack of magazines that I haven't got round to reading.
I've spent
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I simply see it so that life is too short for fiction.
And here you are posting on Slashdot. Sounds like you're doing a bang up job with your thrill-a-minute lifestyle.
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If that's true for fiction, it's true for (at least) a large proportion of all art of all forms.