1 in 4 adults read no books last year

I like to read a lot, but I don't get to do it as much as I'd like to. Earlier in the year I was pretty good about reading 15-30 minutes a night, I'd read while on the bus, and spend a bit of my lunch time reading. It was nice to start doing it again, since I usually don't read at all during the school year since between textbooks, homeworks, and technical papers I hardly want to read another word.

Of course, then my girlfriend came out for the summer and doesn't let me read at right before I go to sleep because she wants to do something else. I miss my books.

(Currently stuck in the middle of this one about Tesla that the professor I work for gave me. He's a pretty neat dude, but I swear the author has ADD and no knowledge of science whatsoever.)

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by a lurker

actually, in my younger years, I bought the first one, I think it was inferno. But it was too dull to get through and I think I quit within fifty pages.

My attention span was fried by video games and shitty decathelons by scientologists. I'm just glad that it got fried before I read too much awful sci-fi and fantasy books. Terry Goodkind was bad enough.

I managed to finish it and all I could wonder was how it became popular in the first place. And, really, if hell is that boring, imagine how purgatory must be.

Lurker, at least L. Ron Hubbard taught us how two lesbians into S&M go about raping a guy!

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Bradylama

The internet does not care about academic standards or review.

Do books?

Originally Posted by Pangalin

Books are an extremely efficient method of conveying information, THEREFORE:

People who get information from books get that information highly efficiently, THEREFORE:

Those people can more easily absorb a like quantity of information as compared to those gleaning said information from other sources, THEREFORE:

You're just dumb as hell.

I dunno, as long as they are, I think watching the Lord of the Rings Trilogy is a much faster method of obtaining the essentials of the novel than trying to trudge through 100000 pages of the blandest writing this side of Brady's LJ.

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by Bradylama

More so than the internet, I daresay.

I guess he could go to a library and access a database but, UH, LOTS OF BOOKS IN THE LIBRARY.

More so than the internet, but not nearly as much as a peer-reviewed journal. I think the Time Cube guy has a book, but last I checked he hasn't been published in Nature.

Originally Posted by Pangalin

Do you seriously think I was including fiction in my calculation, or are you just trolling me

Even if you don't, it still matters what kind of learner you are. Some people are visual, some people are auditory, some people have to write material in order to learn it, and some have to do something in order to learn it. A person that is best at learning through hearing isn't going to be getting a whole lot out of books.

To me this feels kinda like the argument that some people I've met seem to believe that unless you listen to classical music then you can't actually be that smart.

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Originally Posted by Pangalin

'sup audio books

Seriously, while it's all fine to learn-through-doing (or through-hearing, through-seeing, etc), that isn't Kain's problem. He's perfectly capable of reading the sports page for information that he wants from it. He just doesn't read books, arbitrarily. I've never heard of learning-by-reading-newsprint-only. We could probably fool him into reading Crime and Punishment if we disguised it as the Sunday Times and sprinkled pictures of basketball players here and there.

I suppose this whole thing might be how I've never actually felt satisfied after I finish a book even though I read a ton. I'll usually get a good way into it, finally start to enjoy it, then the ending happens and I'm all "ok that was kinda weak." Of course, I also don't like most long books because I've found so few authors actually have 600 pages of worthwhile material to write.

I don't even know why I bother reading all of the books I do.

I was speaking idiomatically.

How was The Talisman? My grandmother gave it to me a while ago and said it's really good, but I'm pretty reluctant to get into another ridiculously long novel by an author that generally doesn't interest me.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?