How Many Books is "too Many" at Once?
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How Many Books is "too Many" at Once?
frequently hear myself telling people that I just don’t have enough time to read deeply anymore—“the kids!”, “the startup!”—but if I picked up a book instead of reflexively opening Twitter every couple of hours, I’m sure I would have read my way through a library in the last 10 years.
Hamish McKenzie • Time to read
Keep track of your progress. I’ve been keeping a list of every book I read since 2001, and I feel great every time I add a title to the current year, whether I loved it or not. In more dedicated times, I made a point to write brief notes about what I did or didn’t like in a separate document as a kind of reading log, to help jog the memory when, as
... See moreBlake Butler • Maximizing Time for Reading
“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.”
— Virginia Woolf
I’d say that perhaps 5-7 really good books on a subject would give you the sort of mastery I’m talking about. It would give you the sort of competence that, say, an advanced graduate student in the subject area might have before writing a dissertation. Choose the books wisely.
Over the last decade or so, more and more people have begun to report an overpowering feeling, whenever they pick up a book, that gets labeled “restlessness” or “distraction”—but which is actually best understood as a form of impatience, a revulsion at the fact that the act of reading takes longer than they’d like.