Harish Alagappa

Category: books

  • How to Find the Time to Read Books, Even with a Short Attention Span

    How to Find the Time to Read Books, Even with a Short Attention Span

    We all want to read more, but we also think reading books is an impossibly difficult task.

    The “You millennials, always on your phones, bah humbug!” crowd have convinced us that social media and the internet got us addicted to instant gratification and that the process of long-form reading is now too tedious for our attention-deficit brains.

    But here’s a different way of looking at it, one that helped me finish reading 4 books, cover-to-cover, in the first two months of the year.

    It’s not an amazing number, I know I’ve still been lazy as hell, but it’s a significant improvement over my lowest point a few years ago, when I only read 4 books in a whole year.

    I measured my reading speed. It’s around 400 words per minute. Not great, not terrible. There are websites all over the internet where you can measure your reading speed, like this one. Like the results of any internet site, take them with a heaping handful of salt.

    An average 400-page book contains around 100,000 words.

    At 400 wpm, that’s 250 minutes. With breaks, let’s say four and a half hours.

    That’s like four episodes of The Crown or The Queen’s Gambit. Or one Lord of the Rings extended edition movie.

    If you can binge a full miniseries in a single day, you can read a full book in a single day. Or if you can re-watch episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine after work every day, maybe use that time to finish a book in less than a week.

    Originally shared on LinkedIn

  • I Was Called Out in a Book by a “Fake” Author

    I Was Called Out in a Book by a “Fake” Author

    I’ve been reading The Listening Society, a book on the political ideology of metamodernism written under the nom de plume Hanzi Freinacht.

    I don’t know much about the real authors behind the book (and its sequel, Nordic Ideology, which I plan to read soon) but I find myself drawn to the ideas presented in it for two reasons.

    First, I’m generally fascinated by post-postmodern ideas and personally feel the way forward is some amalgamation of incredulity towards meta-narratives (Jean-Francois Lyotard’s definition of postmodernism) and something like David Foster Wallace’s New Sincerity.

    And Reason B. I’ve never seen a book describe me so well as these two paragraphs.

    BTW, the “triple H” people described here are “Hackers, Hipsters, and Hippies” and have nothing to do (afaik) with WWE’s Hunter Hearst Helmsley, a.k.a The Game.