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sixes_and_sevens comments on Open thread Jan. 5-11, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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This is probably like walking into a crack den and asking the patrons how they deal with impulse control, but...
How do you tame your reading lists? Last year I bought more than twice as many books as I read, so I've put a moratorium on buying new books for the first six months of 2015 while I deplete the pile. Do any of you have some sort of rational scheme, incentive structure or social mechanism that mediates your reading or assists in selecting what to read next?
I've managed to partly transmute my "I want to buy that now" impulse into sending a sample to my kindle. Then if I never get past the first few pages I've not actually spent any money, if I reach the end of the sample and still want to continue I know I'm likely to keep going .
I wish I had your problem; mine is to find books I want to read. I very often re-read ones that are already on my shelves, for lack of anything new. However, this suggests a possible approach to your issue: When buying a book, check whether you are actually and genuinely excited to read it, so that you will open it the minute it arrives from Amazon. If not - put it in a "maybe later" pile. If it's more a case of "sure, sounds good" or, even worse, "I want to signal having read that", then give it a miss.
If you need to read stuff for work or for Serious Social Purposes like a book club, then treat it like work - set aside a certain time of day or week, and during that time, read.
I'm not particularly excited to read, say, an intermediate textbook on medical statistics. In spite of this, I'm confident that the world will make more sense after I read it, and I'd like that outcome. This describes my attitude to a significant proportion of the books I intend to read.
This and other interactions have caused me to re-evaluate just how ascetic my reading habits are.
How did you learn to read so fast?
I read a lot. (I wish I could give you some actionable advice here, but there's nothing I can point to. I suspect it may be innate?)
I think I'm semi-skimming, subconsciously. I've noticed myself missing descriptions of characters before when something relevant comes up later on. That said, I'm still quite fast with reading things like internet essays, where missing words does hurt your comprehension badly, so I don't think that's all of it.
Atlas Shrugged in a day? Boy, do I want to see you take Infinite Jest.
I have to want to read the book for it to work. Looking up Infinite Jest, I'd probably prefer swallowing barbed wire to reading it.
(Atlas was back during my hardline-libertarian phase, so it was a lot more appealing. It also helped that the day in question was the day of the 2003 blackout, so there was nothing to do but read).
This was more of a side effect of deciding to pare down on my possessions than an intervention specifically aimed at buying fewer books, but I rarely buy books anymore just because I want to read them. I get books on LibGen or at the university library. In the rare event in which a book turns out to be a really valuable reference I may then buy it.
My library system lets you request books from anywhere in the county from your home computer. I put the book on hold, and then I get an e-mail when it arrives. Also, when a book isn't in the library system, I'll often buy an ebook edition or wait for it to enter the system.
Yup! Also a put it on hold person. I always wind up reading library books first because they have to be returned, and it makes it easier for me to carve out time that I want to carve out for reading, because the library book has a deadline.
Do you mostly buy physical or digital books?
My digital unread list is hundreds of titles long, and it doesn't bother me much. It pales in comparison to my "read later" bookmark list.
My physical unread pile already occupies half a wall of my room, and just for being there it gives me aesthetic pleasure and bragging privileges. I used to think I should be worried, but I decided to embrace the pile. I guess it still hasn't reached the point where I should really be worried.
A mixture of the two, but there's not really any psychological distinction between them. Once I resolve to read something, it has the same amount of "weight" regardless of the medium.
For physical I hold myself to a "half read" rule. That still means a growing collection, mind. I prune aggressively but only from things I've already read, which unfortunately means I have a rump of books that I suspect are mediocre and therefore don't particularly want to read, but don't feel justified in getting rid of, whereas I get rid of books that are probably better than that if I've read them and don't think they're good enough to keep.
I don't have a solution but thankfully FiftyTwo's approach works now.Hopefully I can slowly shrink my physical pile to the point where it fits on my bookshelves.