I Learned to Read Again

HumanEater

Screen addiction is a thing for me, I'm addicted to my phone computer and tv and i don't know how to manage it. I know its just an escape mean for me, a tool to not be there but it stop me from doing other more interesting stuff

nylonstrung

It does feel like reading books is one of the best activities for reconditioning your brain in the wake of screen/dopamine addiction

sixtyj

Paul Graham recently: The people who still read won't just be better informed. They'll be (with a couple exceptions) the only ones who can think well. You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well. https://x.com/paulg/status/2075980847228801132

pseudonymidy

Is there value in identifying the difference between reading a longer article like this one and an actual book? Reading the news from the AP/Reuters and a book on history? I spend lots of time online, primarily on my phone, reading. I don’t watch videos and I don’t use social media aside from browsing the Reddit front page. I try to justify my online escapes because I’m reading a substack, a bit of news, an interesting HN link about someone’s project. I know I’m fooling myself. Closing the door on the internet and opening a page on an ereader or a physical book is absolutely a different activity. While the content of the book is important (and hopefully well written and captivating!) I regard it now with the added benefit of exercising my attention span. An interesting book I read called Peak Mind makes the simple point that your life consists of what you pay attention to. Since then I’ve been trying (and failing, and trying) to be more conscious of where I spend my attention and how I can strengthen it against the well researched and incredibly effective distraction engines in my daily life.

MariusGjerd

at work we started making a libary with books we want to read to keep us sane and adopting good and old practices in the world of ai. its very easy to get blind nowdays but reading have helped me alot

justincarter

Is reading morally superior? It seems like greater society (with the apps) is rapidly changing back to an oral culture which seems to be humanity’s default setting. Edit - via the visual boost of short form video

buzzwords

Interesting, I struggle to read. I always have. But I genuinely enjoyed it. Few years back I told a colleague that by the time I reach the end of paragraph I forget how it started. He told me sounds like a learning difficulty. So I did a test, thinking I was dyslexic. It turns out I have ADHD with particularly bad short term memory. Anyways my question for everyone here, how do you read with ADHD? How do you over come reading the same passage multiple time?

loughnane

> I hit my reading peak when I was eleven or twelve. This has long been the way. Mortimer Adler pointed out in the 70s (at the latest) that reading instruction (ie how to extract meaning from marks on a page) doesn’t really advance after 6th grade. After that we still give kids harder things to read, but scarcely provide them with strategies. His How to read a book was an attempt at filling in the gap. It’s one of my favorite books.

alana314

I found Amazon's Whispersync (audiobook + ebook synced) helpful for keeping me engaged in books in the smartphone era. This is a plug, but I made my own epub + text to speech reader for iOS for keeping myself engaged in reading, and have been reading/listening to classics such as Crime and Punishment this way: https://heard.quest/

Ostatnigrosh

I deeply resonate with this. Even when I began reading, I felt myself wanting to jump away into my email or some other needless task. After getting through the premise, it felt almost like a challenge to read the entire blog. Very well done.

sachinpkale

"Reading a long, serious book—seemed like checking out, Scrolling was alright" - couldn't agree more on this paragraph.

sam1r

>> He didn’t just mean that there would be a deluge of school reading, he meant that there would be so much going on around campus that reading for fun would be a kind of admission of social failure It’s very clear that op’s father doesn’t value education first nor does he care to provide that influence to his children. Such a sad situation.