| I am in love with books and the notion that you can talk with another person long dead without any distortion or distraction. Some rules I abide by: 1. Any book that you expect to read once and once only (popular science, pulp fiction, toilet-reading) rent from the library. Keep it by your bed at night and give-er by the lamplight. 2. Any book that you can read, word-over-word, end-on-end, without confusion or introspection can be consumed in condensed form. Condensed forms come in many guises:(audio-books, blog-feeds, wiki-pages etc.) 3. You are missing out on all the glories that are not defined by 1 and 2. A good book should be a conversation, held at length, over time. You asked for philosphy in another comment: Victor Frankyl: Man in search of meaning Marcus Aurelius: Meditations Jung: Development of Personality, Archetypes/Aion Nietsche: all and any For philosophical fiction: Goethe: Faust Hemingway: Death in the afternoon (this was my first glimpse into why books can provide lightness of body, displacement of time: wait for the 4th-wall-breaking-rapport with the old woman) David Foster Wallace:Rise Simba, Infinite Jest, etc. https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-... There have been studies that your brain scans feeds and webpages differently than text on a page. You set yourself up to not pay attention / are just "scraping the good bits" Someone mentioned a while back that Infinite Jest (1000 page tome + 300 pages endnotes!) had ~50 pages that made the whole thing worth it. The immediate following comment was "why not just read the 50 pages?". It is the context around which we find our content that gives it worth. The internet allows you to bypass the context. |
This +1. Practicing reading longform books helps your brain work on regulating and keeping a longer and longer attention span, which can be hugely helpful.
As experiments go, it might be worth swapping for a while, and seeing if you notice a change in attention and concentration. I notice when I stop reading books, I get a lot more impatient and I can't focus as well. (N=1, YMMV)