Wednesday 14 February 2018

Q: When did you last read a book? [updated]



"Why read books and know a lot about one thing, when you can be on social media and know extremely little about everything?"~ Lalo Dagach
REF:

UPDATE: From Russ Roberts's '12 Rules for Life':
5. Read Read Read
Videos and television are great fun. But don't spend too much time on them. Leave lots of time for getting smarter by reading. Read widely. Read some books more than once. Write in your books. Don't finish every book you start. You might be able to read 2500 books in your lifetime. Maybe a few more than that. It's still a very small number. Choose wisely.
Choose wisely. But read, read, read!
xxx

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3 comments:

Dinwar said...

I think there are benefits to both pathways. Shallow knowledge allows you to touch on a huge number of fields, and find ones that strike your interest. Then you switch to deep knowledge--reading books, reading journal articles, and in general learning the subject. The trick is to be able to go from shallow to deep knowledge.

That's one reason academic conferences can be so fun. You have a bunch of people, all interested in the same general field, so the conversations tend to be about that field. You can skim the surface of that field if you wish, and have access to a ready source of deep knowledge of that field if the fancy strikes you. You switch back and forth between these two modes automatically, without thinking about it. The best sort of websites allow this as well, but most (Facebook, Twitter, etc) forget that aspect of conversation.

Peter Cresswell said...

Yep, excellent point. Websites like Five Books are great for that. And I use that example because, as it happens, I found (and passed on) a great post this morning on the Best Five Books to Read About Richard Wagner. And where did I find the post?
On twitter.

Richard Wiig said...

For anyone who might not have come across it before:

https://librivox.org