Tag: reading

Categories
Culture

Nudging people towards overlooked books with inspired recommendations

Liked How to Decide which Books to Recomend? by Sara Jakša (Blog of Sara Jakša)

But that also means, that if they are not willing to provide the context, I can decide to recommend whatever I want.

One good thing would be, if I could recommend the books, that are not normally read by other people.

It’s so hard to recommend books to people who haven’t read much and don’t know what they like! I love Sara’s perspective to see it as an opportunity to recommend less-read books outside of the usual titles you’d find on a booklist, or that “everyone” has read. And really, isn’t that what people are looking for — a book they can love, a story that really resonated with someone else? Book lists are a shortcut to taste, but have traditionally not been good at including titles written by women, queer folk, and people of color — so that’s another opportunity to point people to more diverse authors than the standard bestseller list too 🙂

(Like Sara, I would usually also recommend Uprooted 😉 My less popular readalike might be Swordheart by T. Kingfisher.)

Categories
Learning

Curating for yourself, curating with others

Replied to The Memex Method – Cory Doctorow – Medium by Cory Doctorow (Medium)

Clay Shirky has described the process of reading blogs as the inverse of reading traditional sources of news and opinion. In the traditional world, an editor selects (from among pitches from writers for things that might interest a readership), and then publishes (the selected pieces).

But for blog readers, the process is inverted: bloggers publish (everything that seems significant to them) and then readers select (which of those publications are worthy of their interests)

I much prefer following people to publications, and curating for myself what’s interesting out of what those people have curated for themselves. There’s a good bit of noise, but there’s also a lot of serendipity — neat things I would never have encountered on my own, that I wouldn’t have thought to investigate.

While news publications focus on appearing neutral, people (bloggers and newsletterers) have opinions and share context often missing from news articles. I *want* others’ opinions, especially from people who are better informed than I am. I’m interested in news and information as it relates to people, not as discrete incidents. I care more about the trends and the roots of an event, which are all too often left out of the news. Individuals are publishing from a rich, deep, broad perspective in a way publications cannot have, the same way corporations and brands are not people (no matter how they exploit their social media managers).

See also:

Article pairing: stop reading the news

Overlapping Communities, “Curated” Discovery between Real People

Finding Personal Websites

Algorithmic recommendations create “curiosity ruts”

Co-browsing

 

(More from the same Doctorow piece.)

Categories
Getting Shit Done Learning

Demanding value from our time

Liked Do I Have Time for This? by Amanda Montei (Mad Woman)

One thing I am never not thinking about, though, is how all nonfiction today feels pushed into providing solutions to inexorable problems—and how our habits as readers, and what we want from nonfiction texts, increasingly reflect that “historically specific… method of valuing work and existence” that Odell explores. We want a book to be productive, a good use of our time.

I’m also thinking this week about scarcity— about how we want a book to do a thing for us, an activity to be productive, because we live with a scarcity mentality around time.

See also:

Discerning the value of note-taking

So Many Books

 

Via DANIËL VAN DER WINDEN

Categories
Culture

Genre is a conversation

Quoted On “Prose-Forward” Writing and the Pleasures of Different Genre Conversations by Lincoln Michel (Counter Craft)

My preferred metaphor for genres (and I include literary fiction here), is that they are conversations. Great long-running conversations between authors alive and dead, and also between readers and critics… As with any groups, these conversations develop their own jargon. Their own in-jokes, references, and concerns. Some books speak only to one conversation. Other books to multiple ones.

Categories
Featured Reflection

Reviewing 7 months of Kindle Unlimited

I hate subscriptions for the same reason companies love selling them: recurring expenses. However, I am a heavy fiction reader and am planning to self-publish. Both from a user standpoint and prospective author side, I wanted to try out Kindle Unlimited.

I read and write romance, which is popular on KU, so there is a large catalog to choose from. In particular, I’m interested in science fiction romance, which is poorly represented by trad publishing and primarily concentrated (currently) in self publishing. I also wanted to read a lot of self-published works to understand the market.

How much I read from KU

I tried Kindle Unlimited for two months this spring. I previously tried it for several months in 2022.

This year, over two months:

  • I read 20 KU titles
  • I DNF’d 11 KU titles

Last year, over five months:

  • I read 38 KU titles
  • I DNF’d 9 KU titles
Continue reading “Reviewing 7 months of Kindle Unlimited”
Categories
Featured Fun Lifestyle

How to read more books

Replied to 8 Ways to Read a Lot More Books (hbr.org)

I read a lot of books. I agree with several of this author’s suggestions for reading more*:

  • Quit more books, earlier
  • Make your space comfortable for reading, and set it up to encourage you to read books over other activities
  • Always be bringing in new books and cycling out others
  • Track your reading

But I think he forgot an important thing: you should read books you actually enjoy. Reading will become much easier when you recognize that not everyone’s reading tastes will match yours — even your family and friends. Just because someone recommends a book directly to you doesn’t mean you’ll like it, or even that you have to try it. Just because a book is on a “best of” list doesn’t mean it’ll be meaningful to you.

Don’t treat reading as a chore, the brain equivalent of eating your spinach. Honor your own interests and read at whim, for pleasure. That means you need to learn to know yourself as a reader. The more you read, the better you’ll learn your own tastes, so you can choose books you’ll enjoy in the future and feel confident about quitting books you don’t.

*And if if turns out you’re actually not that into books as a storytelling medium, that’s totally fine too! There is nothing inherently virtuous about reading books versus watching video or listening to podcasts. If what you’re worried about is your ability to pay attention to long-form storytelling, you don’t have to win back your attention through books.

Categories
Featured Ponderings Reflection Writing

Reclaiming intentionality in browsing and blogging

I’ve been feeling overwhelmed recently with keeping up on everything I’d like to read online. I’ve also struggled to finish writing blog posts, especially longer articles that tie together many things I’ve been reading and thinking.

I wonder if I’m being too passive in what I consume, and reactive in what I blog about. Most of what I write online lately is in response to or prompted by something I’ve read. I’ve built my own wide stream of information coming in, curating my sources and being selective about what to read from the stream — but I’m still letting others shape what I’m thinking about.

Some of this is good and important — listening to others, participating in the cultural conversation, following curiosity, embracing serendipity. My intake can’t only come from what others curate for me, though. I suspect my balance of intake is off: I need a greater amount of what I read to be something I’ve actively sought out. I’m good at this in my book reading; I can extend my approach from there. To claim ownership of my attention, I should more proactively choose what I spend time thinking about. By starting from a concept rather than discovering one as I go, I could blog more purposefully as well. In fiction writing, I hate prompts, but they do make blogging easy. I can create my own prompts to blog about.

A lot of what comes my way through my RSS feeds does fall into my focal areas, since I’ve chosen who to follow based on shared interests. This style of reading broadly without intent supports blogging that synthesizes many sources through filtering and pattern-matching for insights. This type of writing is connective (and valuable), but doesn’t necessarily go deep. I want to also do more directed thinking: to set out on my reading with a question to intentionally research, a hypothesis of my own to investigate. For now I’m adventuring through content, seeing what there is to see. That’s a good place to start; sometimes, now I have the lay of the land, I should also pursue quests.

Categories
Featured Technology The Internet

What makes RSS better than social timelines?

screenshot of Feedly showing folders and stream of titles and excerpts
My RSS feed on Feedly, showing folders on the left and the stream of posts in reverse chronological order on the right -- this shows title view but Feedly offers several view options that showcase featured images and longer excerpts as well
Replied to The Fail Whale Cascade by Luke Harris (lkhrs.com)

I’m bored of what I call “the timeline era”. Scanning an unending stream of disconnected posts for topics of interest is no longer fun, I prefer deciding what to read based on titles, or topic-based discussion.

I am a huge fan of RSS and have never stopped using it to follow blogs and webcomics. But lately as I’ve read lots of people talking about timelines, a question has been niggling at me: what does make an RSS feed* feel better to use than “the timeline” of social media? They are both streams of information, but I prefer RSS.

*by RSS feed, I mean the stream composed of multiple individual feeds — it is a little confusing that the singular and plural/collective of feed are the same.

Continuing in the vein of exploring what makes a blog a blog, I’m curious why an RSS feed feels better than social media timelines. Are we conflating our like of blogs with a like of RSS, or is there something about RSS feeds inherently that we really do prefer to other timelines?

I think it’s useful to dig into what elements of the experience make a substantive difference, so we can make better design choices with new tools in the future. I’m interested not in the technical details here (yay RSS is open and not owned by a corporation, boo it’s kind of a pain to explain and set up) — I’m interested in how we use the technology, and how we feel about using it.

Continue reading “What makes RSS better than social timelines?”
Categories
Learning

Lean forward and lean back reading

Bookmarked SCREENS AND READING (screensresearchhypertext.com)

JOHN SCHWARTZ talks to clients about “sitting forward” or “sitting back” styles of reading. Media theorist HELEN KATZ describes those styles thus:

Lean forward, where the reader is actively controlling the flow of information.

*Lean back**, where the reader passively consumes information in a way that the author has directed.

Categories
Learning

The point of reading

Replied to The Imperfectionist: How to forget what you read by Oliver Burkeman (ckarchive.com)

This is an understandable response to the information environment in which we find ourselves, I think. After all, there’s just so much useful and interesting stuff out there, and so little time, that it feels incumbent on us to take ownership, so to speak, of the little we do manage to consume – either by literally memorising it, or storing it in some well-organised external system. Otherwise, wasn’t reading it in the first place a waste of our precious time?

This utilitarian perspective is easy to internalize in productivityland. But it shares the same core as the mindset that books aren’t worth reading, that truths ought to be distillable down into a short listicle, that fiction is a waste.

I suspect part of the urge to read more, learn more, is related to self-doubt. When we lack confidence in our opinions, when we lean on quoting others instead of using our own words, it’s rooted in fear that we are not enough. We seek more information to affirm our beliefs; the quest for certainty is a classic expression of anxiety. As a recovering perfectionist, I have suffered from difficulty making decisions and lack of confidence in my choices that I hoped learning more and practicing more would resolve. (Obviously it’s a balance — learning nothing and basing opinions solely on vibes isn’t a great approach either.)

It’s easy to operate on the assumption that the main point of picking up a book – a non-fiction or work-related book, at any rate – is to add to your storehouse of data, hoarding information and insights like a squirrel hoarding nuts, ready for some future moment when you’ll finally take advantage of it all.

 

But that’s a recipe for living permanently in the future, never quite reaping the value of life in the present moment. Better, I’d say, to think of reading not as preparation for living later on, but as one way of engaging with the world, one way of living, right here in the present.

[T]he point of reading, much of the time, isn’t to vacuum up data, but to shape your sensibility.

👏👏👏

Sometimes we should trust the vibes. Our individualist perspective means that each person is expected to become their own expert in every topic so they can have “informed opinions.” Instead, what if we let ourselves lean on community as well as expertise to guide us? Accept that we cannot master all subjects, and don’t need to hold a strong opinion on everything. I want my nonfiction to have opinions, not pretend at neutrality. And I think that’s linked to what Burkeman’s talking about: we’re choosing whose opinions to listen to when we read an article or a book.