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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.
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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.
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