[dunkelheit]

This should be read as a kind of "contrarian advice" i.e. advice designed not to be taken too literally but to counteract common wisdom that is often accepted uncritically. Common wisdom is of course "you should read more".

Personally I like reading very much and some time ago I started reading a lot of non-fiction of the kind listed in the article. It is a nice feeling when you like to do something and common wisdom encourages you to do more of it. But then I noticed that I don't get much out of these books other than a modicum of entertainment and some superficial erudition. So I stopped wasting my time. Now if I just want to read, I read fiction - it is more entertaining and honest.

In my opinion proper reading of a non-fiction book is a slow process when you try to really understand the ideas, criticize them and apply them in real life and it really blurs the line between reading and doing. A good rule of thumb is that some artifact (at the very least it may be some book notes) should appear as a result of this process. But it is very easy to fall back to "just reading" - reading a science textbook but not doing the problems, reading a software engineering book without writing any code, reading a business book without operating a business. If you do that, all you are doing is reading a fairly boring fiction book.