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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15158 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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So I read 89 books last year (details can be found in the wellness Wednesday thread). Many people here and more so in real life seem to pretty surprised, and impressed. I'm not sure if this is me being a time (or hobby) snob, but I'm a little dissapointed in this kind of reaction. In the real world this makes some sense: TV and scrolling are much more appealing than a book after a long day at work, but I was hoping to see more serious readers in a place that's as text and argument heavy as the motte.

Reading a lot of books isn't as hard as it seems. The average american spends something like 4+ hours on the internet+TV. If you take 1 of those hours and convert them into reading every day you get 365 hours a year. At 50 pages/hour, that's 15k pages a year, or about 50 300-page books. I read slightly faster and slightly more, but also a significant amount in Spanish, which is slower. So probably 2 hrs/day at an average of 50 pages/hour. That's about 30k pages. If I look at my goodreads, I read 33,885 pages total. I keep more detailed stats for Spanish. Looks like I read for a total of 227 hours for a total of 11k pages, which is about 45 pages/hour. Of course these numbers vary from person to person, and book to book. All very do-able for the average Mottzian. It just means largely giving up other forms of entertaininment, like video games or TV, and perhaps more importantly, not being a workaholic.

So are my expectations for this place off? Am I overestimating the importance of books to the average Mottzian (and in self-cultivation in general)? Underestimating people's daily time commitments?

So probably 2 hrs/day Am I ...Underestimating people's daily time commitments?

I have four kids, all very young so yeah. 2 hours a day to hobbies is not realistic for me. Although, if you're willing to count childrens books I read several hundred last year. I read with my kids almost every night. The olderones get chapter books and the younger ones Dr. Seuss and such.

What chapter books are you reading your kids? If I ever find a woman who will tolerant my weirdness, I'm planning on reading Harry Potter, the Hobbit, the Wizard of Earthsea and probably some others from my childhood.

We started the Hobbit, but my son got kind of scared when we got to the goblins (he's 6).

We've been working through the Chronicles of Narnia now. Treasure Island is in the queue.

There's nothing that inherently elevates fiction books over other forms of entertainment. In fact (multiplayer) video games are intrinsically social and communal in a way that books are not. I've done a lot of traveling and met a lot of people because of video games.

Of course this conversation is predicated on a distinction between "higher" and "lower" entertainment, and a distinction between "entertainment" and "work" in general. This distinction is dubious:

Time and time again, when questioned or interviewed, one is asked about one’s hobbies. When the illustrated weeklies report on the life of one of those giants of the culture industry, they rarely forego the opportunity to report, with varying degrees of intimacy, on the hobbies of the person in question. I am shocked by the question when I come up against it. I have no hobby. Not that I am the kind of workaholic, who is incapable of doing anything with his time but applying himself industriously to the required task. But, as far as my activities beyond the bounds of my recognised profession are concerned, I take them all, without exception, very seriously. So much so, that I should be horrified by the very idea that they had anything to do with hobbies – preoccupations with which I had become mindlessly infatuated merely in order to kill the time – had I not become hardened by experience to such examples of this now widespread, barbarous mentality. Making music, listening to music, reading with all my attention, these activities are part and parcel of my life; to call them hobbies would make a mockery of them.

The teleology of the technology is completely different. Books (and inernet blogs) shape us to follow logical, thought out arguments. The teology of video games is different. Video games put you in the drivers seat, which can be extremely valuable (for example I don't think you could recreate the same thematic coherence of Dark Souls in a book). However, video games cannot put you in the head of someone else the way a novel can. The Medium is the Message.

Most of the games, yes. But some of games can certainly put you in the head of someone else: Disco Elysium, Mouthwashing, Pathologic series, Omori, Signalis. They are much more of an exception to the rule, though.

Most books are written by a single author and you get a look inside a specific person's head. Most games are written by committee and you are less likely to get a coherent psychology and theme. There are exceptions in both mediums.

Reading is a shared endeavor that the writer starts but is completed by the reader. The words the author provides are the building block for the imaginative experience the reader creates in their own heads, supplying the sights, sounds, smells inside.

Gaming is also a shared endeavor, but different. The game developers provide visuals and audio, the player makes decisions and solves challenges.

There is massive potential in both mediums, and I hesitate to say that one could be substituted for the other.

I agree, they can't be substituted and the examples I gave are specifically the exceptions to the rule.

Quantity of books read, in itself, doesn't matter much. It's possible that someone who reads 5 books a year gets more out of them than someone else who reads 50 books a year gets out of those books.

Schopenhauer's criticism is timeless, especially the namedropping of those doomed to be forgotten.. Where are the authors? Where is the reader? Where is the award-giver?

Yup. I'd rather read one great book five times than five decent books once.

So I read 89 books last year (details can be found in the wellness Wednesday thread). Many people here and more so in real life seem to pretty surprised, and impressed. I'm not sure if this is me being a time (or hobby) snob, but I'm a little dissapointed in this kind of reaction.

So I discussed this a little in my own WW post, but I think part of the problem you're running into is that "Reading X Number of Books" is a bad metric for comparing across people. It's good for a personal goal with yourself as long as you don't Goodhart yourself, but comparing across people gets to be confusing and useless very quickly. Every part of that goal can be Goodhart'd:

"Reading X Number of Books" : Some books I skim, some books I read every word. Some books if I don't understand something, I stop and re-read it or even look up what it means, some I skate on by and hope that either I'll figure it out from context later. Some books, like Plato or Dante or Joyce, I've read along with a college lecture course, section by section, deep reading passages throughout. Some I've motored through in a day. Some books I've read hundreds of pages but never finished.

"Reading X Number of Books" : I read War and Peace last year, that's five 300 page books by page count. I read Ulysses a couple years back, that's ten scifi pulp novels by difficulty. And even if you go by page count, you can Goodhart typesetting: I've read several books (notably Springora's Consent and Yellowface) which made typesetting decisions for margins and placement of blank pages that extended what would have obviously been Novellas or pamphlets into properly sized books.

"Reading X Number of Books" : What is a book? Is a collection of essays a book? Then what makes reading a collection of essays reading a book and reading Substack every day or the Sunday Times every week for a month not a book? What about something like Karina Longworth's book, Seduction, which 90% feels like a script for one of her podcast series? Is Don Quixote one book or two? Is the Bible one book or 73?

And I'm not accusing anyone of anything, rather these measurements are all personal, I doubt any two of us would have exactly the same answers to each one of them. So a lot of this, beyond timing, is me imagining you reading more books the way I read more books.

I do find reading physical books to be valuable, in a way that reading newspapers and magazines isn't, in a way that audiobooks aren't, in a way that Substack isn't. I make time for it, almost every day, in my life. But all things in moderation. I don't think I'd be three times better if I read three times as many books. And if I had an extra hour, I'd get as much or more out of an extra hour with family, an extra hour walking my dog another three miles, an extra hour working out, etc.

Thanks for the detailed comment. It is very easy to Goodhart yourself. For the first week of 2025, I had my goodreads goal set to 100 books. I quickly noticed how this was influencing my reading decisions. I was going for shorter books, and planning my reading in a way that didn't leave much room for what whim or interest. I quickly decided to change this back to the usual 52.

I like to think of reading as an alternative to scrolling and as a workout for my mind. In the same way that it's probably good to do some kind of cardio three times a week, I think it's good to sit for ~1-2 hours at least a couple times a week and read (I like to do every day). More reading than that is either for an assignment (these days philosophy book club or Spanish), or as an alternative to scrolling (although I am realizing that there are numerous house and life chores that probably should take precedence over that). This year I would like to dedicate one complete evening or afternoon to reading a week to see if it helps me focus or get into a book more (3-4 hours) but otherwise keep my amount of overall reading unchanged. Like you say, all things in moderation, and too much reading means neglect of other duties.

I read 15,539 pages last year, according to Goodreads. There might be a handful of physical books, PDFs of books I read from my computer, and rereads left off there. And all the kids books (we read Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe, Charlie and the Chocolate factory, and a whole host of small picture books I cannot remember the name of. If those count then I beat the sheer number of books you read, though not page count.)

With four young kids, I seldom get an hour to myself before 8 PM, and even after 8 PM I am often interrupted. Most of my reading happens in snippets on my phone. Sometimes I'm able to read a physical book in the play area and the kids will leave me alone, sometimes the youngest ones want to sit on my lap and rip the pages up. I think I will get back to reading more once the kids are older.

Edit: What I think is more important is how much you're taking away from the books you read. Are you reading to spend the time on something or are you reading to pull something away from the book? Are you getting a good mix of genres and styles or are you interested in a specific topic?

I follow https://closereads.substack.com/ and their Daily Poem podcast and read along with everything but the Monthly Mysteries (I just don't care about mystery novels.) Having a group to discuss the novels with is great. Outside of those books, I read Sci-Fi/Fantasy and Philosophy/Theology/Spirituality. Occasionally I read a parenting book, though less so now that I have the hang of it.

I think those books certainly count, and I harbor a certain amount of jealousy that you have kids to share that with. I do not envy the lack of leisure time however! Grass is greener I suppose.

Edit: Thank you for that substack recommendation! Sounds perfect for me!

Most of my long-form reading in the last decade has been with my kids, and I think it's really highlighted the distinction between "leisure time" and "free time".

On the one hand, those hours (and others doing enriching things with family) have been some of the most enjoyable of my life, spent at activities of my own choosing, so how can I not call that "leisure time"?

On the other hand, up until I had children, everything I did in my free time was something I could start doing on a whim and stop doing on another whim and restart on a third whim. But in that sense, many of my leisure activities today are less "free time" than my actual job is - I have a great relationship with my boss and coworkers doing work I love, but I also have a lot of savings and a decent resume and saying "I quit" about my job would still feel less encumbered by obligation than saying it about e.g. reading with my kids.

There are a lot of things that you can get surprisingly good at with just a one-hour investment daily. I picked up running about 10 years ago and currently run right around an hour per day based on logs (some variance by week, of course). This results in ~55 miles per week of running and now, nearly 40 years old, I'm competitive with college runners. If you offered me more running or more books, I'd absolutely take the running - I'm just limited by injury avoidance. Of course, if I really wanted to dedicate myself to aerobic fitness, I could tack on another few hours of biking and swimming without much of an injury tax to pay.

Of course, I could still fit in more reading as well - it's not like my schedule is genuinely that tightly packed. The point is that at some level, you have to start picking and choosing which things you want to be good at and when you're going to stop trying to self-cultivate and just play Slay the Spire or something. I think reading 33,885 pages in a year is great. I think being as strong as @FiveHourMarathon is great. I think being an excellent parent (as many Mottizens surely are) is even better! But, ultimately, one is limited in their mental and physical resources and we cannot be all things to all people.

So, yeah, I guess the punchline is that you're overestimating books to the average local denizen in all likelihood. I like reading (and read voraciously as a teen), but I don't like it more than going to bar trivia with friends, going to my run club with friends, watching the Bills game on Sunday, or just shitposting on the internet. Replacing the latter with more reading would be good, but I bet I won't do it.

Congrats on the running! I also too run around 7 hours a week (although I would like to run closer to 10-11, injury prevention is holding me back). I agree it's very hard to balance more than a few hobbies. I'm struggling with this as I try to learn Italian on top of my English and Spanish, and also with fitting in biking and swimming during triathlon season (swimming is the real problem because I have a stationary bike in my bedroom).

One thing I miss about taking the subway to work is that I don't read 1-2 books a week anymore.

And some writers have written books that have changed my whole way of thinking.

But one thing that bothers me about reading books is that for something I have spent an incredible amount of time on, I have forgetten most of them and they're still rather cumbersome to refer back to. Despite drowning in information technology, books are kind of crappy. Additionally, a ton of books could have been an interesting blog post series but they've been puffed up and watered down to fill a 300 page book with a dumb title.

I have forgetten most of them and they're still rather cumbersome to refer back to.

I find a way to get an e-book copy of the things I read (Kindle, Anna's Archive, etc.) and I can often find a passage pretty quickly. I just need to be able to remember one or two key words from the passage in order to get the search correct.

I have forgetten most of them

Have you forgotten what they taught you, though? I find with a lot of non-fiction I lose episodic memory of the book but I retain semantic memory of much of its theses ... which is really the right subconscious prioritization, I think. I find knowing assorted facts/theories/hypotheses useful far more often than I find knowing where I got them useful, because even when I need to look up a reference I don't really care that it be the same reference. And even the parts I forget are often things like supporting arguments that still served a value by indicating whether I should consider the central arguments worthwhile.

Additionally, a ton of books could have been an interesting blog post series but they've been puffed up and watered down to fill a 300 page book with a dumb title.

This is definitely true, but I'm not sure whether it's a bigger waste of time to have to speed-read through such books' puffery or to have to search through a bunch of uninteresting blog posts to find the most interesting ones. Publishers' selections aren't a great filter, but so far social media isn't either. I bet a significant fraction of Mottizans are still people who originally found it because even a filter as simple as "read Scott-Alexander-adjacent things" can still be competitive with the alternatives.

Additionally, a ton of books could have been an interesting blog post series but they've been puffed up and watered down to fill a 300 page book with a dumb title.

Hanania has a good article about this.

I didn't think it was a good article, but I did enjoy tearing it apart.

Every time I see this post, I think "most Hanania posts should be Tweets."

I tend to avoid popular non-fiction for this exact reason

A guideline (not a rule) I follow is to read zero political theory / philosophy / sociology etc. That is less than 30 - 40 years old.

This acts as a filter. 1) For exactly "could've been a blog post" kinds of books and 2) For well written books that are, unfortunately, just a re-hashing of an earlier theory.

A lot of value comes from those books and authors that have - to use the cliche - stood the test of time. The only downside here is that if you go really far back, the language can get a little tedious. The Wealth of Nations is as true and relevant as ever, but its a slog. Then again, Plato's Republic reads pretty easily (wait, that's a translation. Nevermind).

This isn't a hard and fast rule, like I said. Thinking Fast and Slow is legitimately amazing. But the exceptions to the rule usually tend to be obvious like that.

Some errata:

  • Avoid almost all books written by generalist journalists. Not only are they "could've been a blog post", they are unbearably self-indulgent. The author creates him or herself as the main character and there are dozens of totally tangential anecdotes that are meant to be "relatable" but really serve no purpose whatsoever. Specialty journalists can be hit or miss. I like reading financial histories (think Barbarians at the Gate) and John Carreyrou from the WSJ is great. If you can tell a journalist puts in real work, reporting, and research into their articles, their books might be good. If they are essentially a columnist or write with a little too much personal interjection - avoid.

  • I think everyone should have a stable of about 1 - 2 dozen books that they work through again and again in addition to reading new stuff. Fiction and non-fiction. These are your all time greats and you know it when you read it.

  • Figure out a marginalia system you like. Don't try to create some sort of personal Zettelkasten perfect system. The whole point is interacting with the text as you read it. Retention goes up but, more importantly, thoughtful synthesis skyrockets. I can remember reading Eric Foner's Reconstruction in college; gobbling it up whole in 2 days, loving it, closing it, and thinking "I have no idea what the fuck I just read but it was awesome." Now, even sloppy chickenscratch marginalia reading "I think this idea is stupid" creates more meaningful and deep understanding of a text.

In strong agreement with all of these. You can find some really good translations of Ancients from the turn of the last century that aren't too tedious. My translation of The Histories and The Republic were both done by some guy in 1898.

I'm slowly building up my reread all the time list. There are at least four in fiction: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, The Magicians by Lev Grossman, The Lord of the Rings, and A Song of Ice and Fire (also Harry Potter but this is for language learning, not deep philosophical content). In non-fiction, the only book I have consistently reread is Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson: this is usually an annual thing. I would like to reread some of the philosophy I've read this year; Fear and Trembling, Master & His Emissary, and The Tragic Sense of Life come to mind. I'm especially excited for the second one: as I read more philosophy, learn more languages and study more history and art, McGilchrists ideas will hopefully become more and more understandable and sollid.

In terms of marginalia, I try to journal for 5 minutes after every reading session. I'm slowly unlearning my fear of "defacing" books, so with the stuff I buy, especially for philosophy book club, the books are slowly filling up with notes.

Edward Tufte, who's books are notoriously beautiful and specially printed, says that if you aren't marking up your books, you overpaid.

He is correct.

About 75% of my books come from the university libary unfortunately, so no marking up for me there. Sounds like I need to get cracking on that other 25% though.

In that case, you might want to get a small notepad (not a notebook!) and actually look into developing your own simplifed / modified Zettlekasten method.

Any suggestions on how to get started? I looked into Zettlekasten a little and it seems to be pretty impossible without some kind of digital note taking system which I don't want to do

My tally of books read in a year has dropped drastically given my predilection towards reading Chinese Xianxia, where a single novel might run over 3000 chapters, and a mere thousand is considered a short one. This is awful if it's a bad novel (you should give up way earlier, of course), but amazing when you get a rare book you'd rather never end.

Add in web serials and other online books, and it's hard to put a number on them.

I'd read more standard books, but it seems I have largely exhausted the well available given my rather particular tastes, and even then most of them were doorstoppers.

At any rate, I probably spend 4-6 hours a day reading, period, and at about 450 WPM if my e-reader app is accurate, so I'm consuming around 60 million words a year.

Wow! Those numbers put me to shame!

89 books in a year is quite a few. I'm a fairly voracious reader and I don't come close to that. That's 1.7 books per week!! To make that happen, I would have to give up almost all my free time outside of work to reading. And that's simply never going to happen - I enjoy reading, but I also enjoy programming, playing music, spending time with my wife, cooking, building models, and playing video games too. Reading is fun and important, but not so fun and important that it deserves to crowd out every other use of leisure time.

I'm definitely very lucky to have a lot of leisure time right now. 15 minute walk commute, no kids, no aged parents to take care of

I literally can not sit down and read a book after a whole day of starting at a screen with text on it. I just manage sneaking in some audiobooks when traveling between cities or rarely on a chill saturday.

I very much relate to this, and I worry about it, because back when I was a college student I’d read long-form fiction for pleasure all the time. My inclination to do so has been in steady decline since then.

One of my resolutions for 2025 is to try rebuilding my pleasure-reading habits via simpler, more accessible, and more addictive reading projects — cheesy fantasy, military sci-fi, Black Library texts, LitRPGs, etc.. Once I've refreshed the relevant pathways in my brain and once again enjoy long-form reading as a go-to leisure activity, I can get ambitious again. With all that in mind, I’m so far a couple of thousand pages into Alexander Wales’ “Worth the Candle” series and absolutely loving it.

Black Library texts

You’ve read Ciaphas Cain, right? If so, are there any other Black Library books you recommend? If not, I strongly recommend you do.

Despite being a huge fan of the 40K universe (and an enthusiastic modeler/painter), I've never actually read any Black Library books, just some old Warhammer fantasy stuff from the 1990s. I take it you'd recommend the Ciaphias Cain books then?

Truth be told they’re the only ones I’ve read properly. But they’re good adventures that take themselves seriously enough to be high-stakes but not so seriously that they stray into grimdarkness.

They’re human, in a good way, and they don’t have that ‘licensed fiction’ feeling you can sometimes get. They’re published in 3-book omnibuses and the first is “Hero of the Imperium”.

BTW I’m just getting back into painting myself. Would be happy to swap pics by DM :)

Fire Warrior by Peter Fehervari is an excellent novel, and not just by Warhammer novel standards. Would highly recommend, it's top-shelf psychological horror and military SF.

As opposed to Fire Warrior, the video game, which should not be anyone's first introduction to the franchise.

The whole Horus Heresy series is also pretty decent.

Ciaphas Cain is a good introductory series as well, as long as you recognize it's not the norm. It's very much on the lighter grey side of the grim dark black on black setting, though with enough elements to understand parts of its disfunction. It avoids some of the worst habits of the franchise's tendency towards purple prose or overly in-depth combat sequences, but has its own familiar tropes it can fall into.

If you need a frame of reference, Cain is a more comedic take on the Harry Flashman premise- someone who is a self-described coward and scoundrel who ends up looking the hero. The series is presented as Cain's unpublished memoirs, collected and edited by a close acquaintance, so there's a general contrast between how Cain presents himself, how others in the moment perceive him, and how the audience of the memoirs sees him.

The series isn't a linear narrative, but rather a series of self-contained adventurers, so there's no real issue in picking and choosing. You'll get basically teasers alluding to other adventures, nothing that spoils things.

If you'd like recommendations of where to start-

For the Emperor - First novel, key characters and premise introduced, makes everything else make more sense. Probably the best all-in-one for whether you'd like the series as a whole, especially since this is the starting point for Cain's adventurers with his most-reoccurring supporting cast. If you don't like this book, you probably won't like the series.

Death or Glory - Chronologically this takes place before For the Emperor, but it was written after, so many of the characters introduced there aren't present here, even as this campaign is the basis of various allusions and future plot threads. Because of its more limited scope as 'the thing that really got Cain famous,' it also makes a good starting point. Generally commits the hardest to the question of 'how does a self-described coward become a famous hero?'

Amazing! Thank you.

Drop your thoughts in a Friday Fun thread when you finish, and drop an @ when you're finished. I'd be interested.

Honestly, one of the fun things of being anywhere adjacent to the franchise as a hobby is watching new people get involved.

The Infinite and the Divine by Robert Rath is often recommended, and deservedly so. I've known people who aren't even into Warhammer 40k who enjoyed it after the insistence of their more 40k-imbibed friends. The narration by Richard Reed is well done as well.

In short, it follows the feud between a kleptomaniac historian and an acerbic court wizard, except are both immortal space robots of technology beyond comprehension, with massive egos that entirely are entirely comprehensible, which allows incredibly petty efforts to bicker and nettle each other.

There was a moment of contemplative silence.

‘Do you have a statue of yourself, Orikan?’

I collect Necrons, I have to read this!

But the idea of being able to write fiction from a Necron perspective boggles me: I grew up with 3rd edition where the Necrons were mindless, enslaved reapers. Still not keen on the Newcrons tbh, I feel like it ruins their mystique and we already have undead pseudo-Egyptians in the Tomb Kings. But maybe Rath can change my mind.

I initially agreed with you back in the day, but I think in the end the change was for the better, if we are accepting the 40K universe is about more than just the tabletop game. If you want stories based in that universe, every single necron just being mindless is a problem. Like Tyranids, who struggle to be anything but almost a force of nature when written about in novels because there isn't a perspective in there that allows them to be protagonists in their own story.

And from the pov of the average guardsman all the basic infantry necrons are still mindless, remorseless, killing machines, it is only the higher echelons who have maintained sentience (Much like the Tomb Kings of course.)

If he doesn't, I doubt anyone will.

I will say that, personally, I've found the transition to be beneficial for the 40k setting. 40k already has a universal 'force of nature' antagonist, and that's the Tyranids. Oldcrons were just competing for a niche, and the transition has opened space for a number of interesting dynamics that offer an alternative narrative space. There's still narrative space for omnicidal machines, but giving the newcrons personality has allowed them to have, well, personality.

It just means largely giving up other forms of entertaininment, like video games or TV, and perhaps more importantly, not being a workaholic

Am I overestimating the importance of books to the average Mottzian (and in self-cultivation in general)?

This it it IMO. While I would consider myself someone who enjoys reading (I try to read a book every two weeks or so) I certainly wouldn't consider giving up everything else I enjoy doing in favor of only reading books the best use of my time. There's many more worthwhile movies, video games, internet text etc that's worth engaging with that I'll never experience in my lifetime, to speak nothing of all the pleasurable non-consumption activities I could be doing, so it really seems ludicrous on the face of it to give everything else up to max out my books/year stat.

To go on a vaguely CW tangent, and I'm only bringing this up because your post brought this to mind and not because I'm trying to say you're doing this, is that I think there's a general tendency to elevate some types of consumption as being more virtuous than others, when really they're all just intellectually gratifying activities stratified by ease of access as a proxy for wealth and perceived intellect.

For example, I don't consider the consumption of books, international travel, and live artistic performances any more or less superior than the consumption of internet blogs, local outings and tv shows, yet it's the first class of activities that are considered higher status because they better signal intelligence, disposable income and free time.

While I have no problem with the many people that really do just enjoy the first class of pleasurable things in and of themselves, I have to admit that I find myself reflexively on guard when I meet someone who makes how many books they read, how many countries they've been to or how many live shows they've seen the center of their personality.

Increasingly I find that many people in the PMC class use their hobbies as a way of bludgeoning others for their lack of virtue and to improve their own status rather than because they actually inherently enjoy doing these things (although I suppose elites have been doing this since antiquity, so I can't really point at modern PMCs in particular).

Good books are more engrossing, detailed and better written than good tv shows. They are also more time consuming and less relaxing experience.

For example, I don't consider the consumption of books, international travel, and live artistic performances any more or less superior than the consumption of internet blogs, local outings and tv shows, yet it's the first class of activities that are considered higher status because they better signal intelligence, disposable income and free time.

I actually would consider certain blogs to be superior to books both as a way to transmit your ideas and to read them. Books can still be better in terms of being more detailed on the issue but the benefit of succinctness and immediacy can't be understated. That and in terms of gate keeping gives blogs an additional value since you are going to find blogs that I would consider more intellectually honest as a higher % of blogs than books as a proportion of books. That and you can communicate with people while if you start talking to your book, usually nobody replies back

I would say that these hobbies aren't just high-status because they signal wealth, but because they can be used to signal taste, and taste is the virtue of the haute-bourgeois. There are better and worse ways to do each of those, and failing is obviously tacky (e.g. reading Harlequin smut/Star Wars novels, gushing about your holiday to Ibiza/Pattaya/Vegas, idk maybe taylor swift).

I have to admit that I find myself reflexively on guard when I meet someone who makes how many books they read, how many countries they've been to or how many live shows they've seen the center of their personality.

This is your tackiness detector going off.

The alternatives to the high-status pursuits you list are noticeably less legible in terms of taste. Partly this is because they do not, in fact, have the high highs that the people engaging in those high-status activities are seeking. No blog is comparable to a Great Book, etc. But, also, it's because they basically require you to already have deep knowledge about the blogosphere or your local area in order to judge whether or not someone has good taste in those hobbies (TV shows are something of a different matter in the HBO era).

No blog is comparable to a Great Book, etc.

I'm pretty sure I remember it from this article, but the joke at the beginning stuck with me and seems relevant:

There is an old joke. A student at Oxford attends a cocktail party with members of the faculty. Hoping to impress these august dons, the student casually mentions, “I was reading Gibbon the other night …” Later, the student’s faculty mentor pulls him aside to chide him for the comment. “One must never say one is reading Gibbon,” he says. “One must always say one is re-reading Gibbon.”

Funnily enough, I disagree with Mr. Dizzler - I think out of these "higher perceived than actual value" activities, travel is the one with the closest value, and live music second.

Typically when I see someone read a ton of books, they're crappy modern romance novels or self-help slop. You can read 50 pages/hour of these sorts of books but they're not providing any value, especially not over a great movie or TV show (much less a video game).

Think about the current state of music, too. We aren't even listening to nice CDs anymore. A hard core of hipsters and status chasers have vinyls, but I don't know anyone with an actual high quality sound system besides me. We're all listening to the equivalent of 192kbps MP3s from spotify. Especially for bands that open for others, they have access to only the crappiest recording studios. The difference between hearing them live and on a streaming services is significant, and then the concert experience of being around people is fun.

For travel, the reality distortion field around locations and cultures has never been stronger. Every secondhand report about a country or city from a normie is colored through a political lens, and common attractions have never been more accessible/overwhelmed because of the internet. To paraphrase a reddit comment I made a few years ago:

I've been able to rant with a rare italian libertarian in his castle apartment covered with cherubic frescoes, get invited to a BDSM convention, experience the underappreciated beauty of a Croatian white wine, join the world tango festival, and belt out songs in a crowded pub. The french, german, and chinese people that have visited my southeastern hometown city have come away with a new love for football, meat and three cuisine, and guns.

These are all experiences that required travel, and don't even touch on any of what I've gotten to do domestically or the incredible natural beauty I've gotten to experience firsthand. I absolutely wish I could do it more, and regret not having done so before having children.

All this being said, however, I largely agree with you. I find that these hobbies are venerated in a way far outsize their value for precisely the reasons you describe. I love travel, shows, and reading, and hate social media flexing for all 3 with passion.

I agree with you about travel, but I have to disagree with you about books vs. TV. The teleology of the technology is completely different. Books (and inernet blogs) shape us to follow logical, thought out arguments. TV shapes us to care primarily about appearances. The Medium is the Message.

At 50 pages/hour, that's 15k pages a year,

This right here is the load-bearing part. I read in Japanese at maybe 10 pages/hour. Not only does this mean that books take (at least) 5 times longer but they aren't designed to be read at this pace. It's much harder to stay immersed in a plot when you can only read about one scene an hour and each book takes 20/30 hours i.e. more than a week of reasonably focused effort to complete. In English, on the other hand, I blaze through most books at easily 100 pages/hour with little or no perceived effort and I've always been a voracious reader.

Lee Child (a bestselling popular writer) once wrote that the most common compliment he got from ordinary people was 'I finished your book'. To get ordinary people (i.e. slow readers) through a full novel requires a level of page turning suspense that most writers can't achieve.

Personally, I would sell one of the less-important organs to double or triple my Japanese reading speed but none of the suggested tricks seem to work for long.

(Any advice very welcome!)

Mad respect to you man! I don't have any Japanese advice, but I know with Spanish, as I kept reading my speed increased quite a lot (I was reading around 10 pages an hour when I first started out). So I would imagine the more you read in Japanese, the easier it might get. Something I've been trying with learning Italian is using the audiobook alongside the print book. You can set it to 0.75 or 0.8 speed and read much faster than by yourself. This might help a lot with Japanese, where I imagine a lot of the difficulty is with the association of Kana/Kanji with the sound of the word and thus the meaning.

My wife was very nice and got me some children's books in Spanish when she was visiting Mexico last year. It's very humbling how I can't even make it through the back cover blurb without being stumped on things I'm reading. I took Spanish as my language requirement in college, and I started practicing again with Duolingo a year or so ago, but it turns out I still would be put to shame by a 7-year-old in my grasp of the language.

The first three books are going to be very hard. I took some highschool Spanish and basically took a break for ~7 years before starting to get serious about the language in 2020. The first thing I read was Harry Potter and it was decidely not fun until book 3. If you're interested, I keep a pretty detailed log of my spanish learning here. Here is the first post in the series, which may be the most useful to you.

But you try, and that is worthy of respect, just as it sounds like she is if she gave it with the spirit and intentions you received it with.

Bi- or multi-lingualism is something many people do, but it's always worthy of respect all the same. Especially if you could get away in your life without it, or move too often to justify it, and even more so if you try later in life than earlier. Deliberate learning after your formative years is even harder, but putting in hard work to improve yourself is always meritorious.

To paraphrase a parable- a polygot who picked up every language with ease is less impressive than a bi-lingual who did it with much difficulty, because what impresses are things that are hard, not easy.

Kudos to you, and feel no shame.

(Plus, sometimes you get some funny dynamics if you try to learn via media you already somewhat know. Think 'spanish Harry Potter,' or 'Mexicans love Dragon Ball Z.')

Thanks! I’ve read, or perhaps more accurately ‘skimmed’ about 70/80 books in the last 5 years but something just won’t click. I’ve actually got slower as I get better, because I understand more of the characters now and I can’t just skip over them the way I used to. That’s why I wonder downthread if it’s not an effect of formative training.

I will try your suggestion re: audiobooks :)

So I had a similar experience with spanish where my reading (and percieved language level actually) went down as my language ability went up. You notice a lot more detail and words that you just skimmed over before you now have the ability to try and parse out because you understand the surrouding context. Luckily at least for me this effect seems to be temporary, my reading speed has rebounded and continues to get slightly faster (although when I'm tired Spanish still is very hard to read). For context I've read ~86 books in Spanish all the way through. I would imagine this would all take a lot longer for Japanese, which is a langauge much further away from English.

when I'm tired Spanish still is very hard to read

Tell me about it, lol.

Thanks, really, this is interesting to hear. The vast majority of learners I know are either too new / too bad to give applicable advice, too Asian, or near-fluent but uninterested in reading anything longer than an essay comprehension passage.

I spent the last couple of hours trying your audiobook + novel tip and it worked a lot better than the last similar thing I tried a few years ago. I’ll keep experimenting with it.

Has Japanese the same information density per page?

Roughly. Novels are 250-400 pages as a rule, like English ones. I think I have some kind of block or that I screwed up my formative training somehow - not everyone seems to have this reading-speed problem. Certainly the average Japanese reader goes far faster than I do as per Amazon Kindle stars and private conversations with friends.

My pet theory is that reading speed depends on how written words are originally conceptualised: as visual transliterations for sounds or as unique conceptual objects. This would explain how someone can be an unusually fast reader in one language but slow in another. It might also explain why the whole-word people are convinced their approach is better: the (fraction of) children who can learn the whole word way become much faster and more effortless readers even though phonics (sounding out the words) teaches more children to be literate overall.

This theory also explains why speed-reading instructors try to teach their students not to subvocalise, and why in my experience this doesn’t actually work: true fast readers don’t conceive of the written word as being auditory and don’t subvocalise, but slow readers who force themselves not to subvocalise are just impairing their own cognition. True fast readers get effortlessness+speed+comprehension and don’t consciously skip, while ‘speed’ readers get speed only at the cost of significant skipping and comprehension loss.

I managed 6 full books last year, and about 200 'chapters' of works I've read in the past and saw fit to revisit, and maybe 1500+ pages of articles or journals or guides. I realized my lack of completing books cover to cover mirrors my lack of completing TV shows season to season or even video games: I'm old(ish).

Not that age makes me incapable of enjoying the new. More that age makes me have a larger corpus of works to compare new consumed media against, and if a new work fails to hook me I immediately tune out and go for a Greatest Hits run to tickle the nostalgia dopamine of reading that work the first time. New works failing to capture that for me largely stinks of just old age cantankerousness, and the threshold of excitement to breach is not worth the gnawing knowledge that i've read BETTER and this work just doesn't' cut it.

The sole exception is reading new books for my kids. Little shits that they are, they hold no interest for Journey To The West or Water Margin, but for them I can power through my irritation at the archaic prose and tired tropes. Maybe one day I will finally be able to read King Lear without falling asleep, just for their sake.

I don't keep count, but I probably read a few dozen books a year. My childhood reading habit fell off some time in high school and I have not yet fully recovered. I find that while once I was able to read hundreds of pages in a single sitting, I now find myself reading a chapter or two each of five different books in a day (this takes me somewhere between 45 minutes and 2 hours depending on the day and the books). Presumably I have the internet and my cell phone to thank for ruining my attention span, but at least this way I'm still making my way through a very long backlog of ebooks, impulse purchases at thrift stores, and recommendations from friends, bloggers, and friendly mottizens.

I think around these parts you will find an interesting mix of people with reading habits like yours or mine, defenders of Richard Hanania's thesis that books are a waste of time (some of which is deeply felt and some of which is just reflexive contrarianism), and those whose revealed preference is the latter but feel bad about it.

I disagree so strongly with Hananina. Maybe that works for "slop" nonfiction: something like Atomic Habits or a Cal Newport book (maybe slop isn't the right word because I enjoy these books, but they can easily be distilled into a blog post), but for more complicated works of nonfiction like serious philosophy or historical analysis where mountains of evidence and argumentation need to be presented to convince the reader, a few page blog post will not suffice. And fiction is just not easily able to be replaced by the short form. The short story is fundamentally different from the novel (although not worse), and TV is not a substitute for the kind of inner insight into another person's mind we get from the written word.

I would also argue that reading changes the way we think about the world. Neil Postman argues this at length in Amusing Ourselves to Death, but a culture based on the written word is going to care much more about the logic and consistency than a culture trained in the deceptive, apperance based world of television. Rob Henderson, Bryan Hobart, and Ted Gioia are all reading stans for reasons similar to this, although it worries me that the first two authors mainly seem to consume popular nonfiction: very little serious scholarship or works of fiction.

Yes, it's a sign that somebody doesn't read literary fiction, history, or serious philosophy. It's also a result of a culture where serious engagement with text isn't valued in education (or in wider discourse). Even a typical university education will have a lot of surveying intended to give you a paragraph-length summary of some great work in your head, and the problem is worsened for autodidacts who aren't forced to spend serious time with any texts, unless they get obsessed with one. Needless to say, this results in a wider culture where people think what matters is getting a lot of summarized versions of other thinkers in their heads, then bouncing those legible, easily-digested summaries off each other in blog posts and podcasts. It's particularly amusing in philosophy when people try to summarize thinkers who really can't be boiled down into a paragraph-length take, ending up in a sort of Philosophy Comics-esque collection of caricatures.

Couldn't have put it better myself. I once dated a philosophy PhD student, and while she had a very deep understanding of the nitty gritty in her specific subfield, her understanding of other (very important mind you) philosophers was very much a paragraph level hot take. Pissed me off to no end.

I read a lot of books, albeit a lot of them are audiobooks. There is some debate among "serious readers" as to whether this counts as reading, but fuck em, if reading is a better use of your time than watching Netflix, listening to audiobooks is a better use of my commute than listening to music.

Audiobooks count as reading for sure. I think it's hard to consume certain books in this format (dense history or philosophy come to mind), but for fiction? No problem! It's certainly way better than podcasts, and a nice change from music.

In my opinion1, reading refers to the act of getting meaning from lettering using your eyes. But you're certainly still consuming books.

1I resisted the urge to say 'book'.

I was a voracious reader as a child (best friends with the school librarian-type of nerd), and remained so through my early twenties. At some point in my mid-twenties, though, I consciously considered that I did not typically retain much beyond a nugget or three of wisdom from any given book. For the time invested, I felt like I could learn more about a broader number of topics by simply reading a well-curated selection of articles. Maybe it was my attention span being eroded by social media and technological overload, and this was my attempt to justify it to myself, but I do still largely believe it to be accurate.

I still read a handful of books each year, but I rarely come away feeling that it was a markedly better use of time than reading articles and journals (or even just reading The Motte). About the only major advantage I can identify is that book reading is decidedly higher-status.

I think there's also an advantage to being exposed to a given idea for a longer period of time and books give the author more time to demonstrate the flaws in his or her argument. It's very much easier to write a snappy article with few rhetorical weak points than it is a book on the same topic.

What sorts of books do you read?

75-80% non-fiction on whatever topic is of interest at the moment, and the remainder whatever classic/modern classic fiction I may have missed in my first 3.5 decades of reading.

I read about 35-40 books last year, in my defense some of them were really long (no one ever accused david halberstam of brevity). It's kind of a tragedy that so many people stop reading when they're not forced to. There are also disturbing stats about how half of American adults can't read above a 5th grade level.

Somewhat related, remember the goldfinch, bestseller from about a decade ago? Literary critics were disturbed by how popular it was despite being 'children's literature'. Is that still a criticism people level about modern fiction?

The literary establishment is totally off the rails. Out of the NYT's List of Best books of 2024, I think I knew of someone who read 1, and seen maybe 4 or 5 of the books in an actual book store (and I am a frequent bookstore visitor). What the literrati want the proles to like I think is less relevant than ever.

That said, it does disturb me that the most popular books these days seem to be some variety of the same fantasy smut tropes. Basically porn for women. Think fourth wing, A Court of Thorns and Roses, Twilight if you want a throwback. This is dissapointing and sad to because books can and should be so much more than a vessel for you to act out your own fantasies. For me, reading is about experiencing the other, or in other words culture shock. If all you want to read is basically self-insert porngraphy, I think there's something wrong.

Congrats on the 35-40 books. That's a really good amount, especially if they are long ones!

I will go to bat for Twilight. The first one is legitimately good. Yes, it’s purple-prose-y but so is actual adolescent romance. And the second half especially gets closer to ‘experiencing the other’ than you might expect. There’s a moment in the second half that always comes to mind when you get a glimpse of just how weird it is to be in the presence of a tiny, cute-as-a-button girl who is not only considerably older than you but is a predator completely capable of ripping you to shreds and is merely choosing not to do so.

Sadly, the rest of the series mostly loses sight of this and the atmosphere / world building becomes increasingly vague and unconvincing.

I haven't actually read Twilight: we tried on a roadtrip when I was in middle school, but my mom turned it off after about an hour. Sounds like I need to check it out now though. I stand by my hatred of Fourth Wing and ACOTAR.

I think books get absolutely shredded by blog posts and feature articles in these parts. I've definitely spent many hours reading SSC and TLP over the year, likewise Foreign Affairs.

I think 89 books in the current year is pretty impressive though, I only managed 48 last year and I still felt like all I did was read things.

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