Reading the right books is great. 95% of published books are garbage (much like 95% of TV). I've read an awful lot of books, and finally realized that very few books are worth the time to read.

I have started to find a perverse pleasure in reading bad books. At least this is why I tell myself when I am wringing reading out of something awful I've bought.

"Oh my god, they're not going to do predictable thing __X__ are they? Bwahaha"

"Hahahaha, this dialog is completely unbelievable"

"Welp, that unwinds all the interesting things happening in that character's arc."

A couple things that laughter can't even redeem:

- Incessant deus ex machina. The prose can be good, the dialog believable, the world interesting, and the characters likable... but if all the problems just get waved away in some random unpredictable way, that's infuriating.

- Even worse: when a POV character has an ace up their sleeve the entire time that could have been played at any point to avoid all the conflict, and the only reason why we're in suspense is that POV character didn't share that with us.

I’ve done the same but with TV! My all time favorite TV show is “The 100”. It’s incredibly dumb and has so many plot holes it’s honestly amazing. However it never gets boring! Really would recommend it if you like that kind of stuff.

I hear that L Ron Hubbard's writing is spectacularly terrible

Same, but my genre has become terrible historical romance. I get many groans of enjoyment from the terrible similes (no, you can't compare what she's experiencing to that; it wasn't invented for another 150 years), the inaccuracies, and being able to plot the whole thing within the first 10 pages mostly accurately.

These books give me hope I could write a book.

The problem with books is that, while there are a lot of good books with good content, 5% of it is good content while 95% is filler material to get the book to a certain amount of pages in order to sell it.

I read a ton and this is my #1 complaint about nonfiction (and sometimes fiction too). I’ve read two books recently that broke this pattern (replacing guilt by Nate Soared, and hell yeah or no by Derek Sivers). It was a huge breath of fresh air, to not find myself skimming over the 32nd time the author feels the need to restate the premise of the book in only slightly different terms. Most authors just don’t have 200 pages of insight into whatever they’re writing about; I’m not sure why exactly they all feel the need to write 200-300 pages anyway.

I’m not sure where the disconnect lies, between the people that view this as a huge problem with nonfiction and the rest. I don’t think it’s book selection, because I’ll often read a book where I felt the last half was 90% rehashing, and in the reviews no one else will mention that the author ran out of interesting things to say halfway through.

I find this true for some of the recent horde of nonfiction books with names like “numb: the astounding new science of how your leg falls asleep”. Their topic is usually fascinating, but the content is full of random stories, speculation, and drawn out conclusions.

I wonder though whether this is a situation where everyone agrees that only 5% of a book is good, but no one agrees on which 5%.

+1. I find non-fiction books infuriating to read due to the endless repetition and pointless anecdotes, typically in books for the US market.

Well that's just not true at all

Walter, it would be great if you could share your list of good books!

If I could only remember them all!

If you ask me at different times I'll give different answers, but some are just on top:

War of the Worlds, Lord of the Rings, The Mote in God's Eye, Replay, Earth Abides, 20000 Leagues Under The Sea, 2001, Nothing Like It In The World, Reach For The Sky, Winnie The Pooh, The Last of the Mohicans, The Hunt for Red October, With the Old Breed, Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman, Moby Dick, Shogun, Romeo and Juliet

I envy anyone reading these for the first time!

I agree! I'm a voracious reader but I am very put off by books that I find to be, to borrow the phrase, "garbage." I spend a lot of time curating my reading list, as a result, and I'm always on the lookout for solid recommendations.

Hey Scruple, it would be great if you could share your reading list or recommendations.

Hey there. I'm not sure where I'd start, to be honest. My wife and I recently had our 3rd child. As a result, I've been opting for easier reading material over the last ~4 months. I don't really maintain reading lists, or lists of reading recommendations. But, I do endorse the books that I read and enjoy.

Here are the books I've read in the last 4 months, not in order:

* Frank Herbert - Dune

* J.R.R. Tolkein - The LotR trilogy + The Silmarillion

* Stephen King - 'Salem's Lot

* Stephen King (short story) - Jerusalem's Lot

* Stephen King (short story) - The Night Flier

* Stephen King (short story) - The Children of the Corn

* Stephen King - The Stand (uncut version)

* Stanisław Lem - The Cyberiad

* John Whyndham - The Day of The Triffids

* Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky - Roadside Picnic

* Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon the Deep

Okay, so... Dune was a re-read ahead of the film release. LotR was a re-read that was provoked by some conversations I had with a group of friends (who form a loose book and movie club) after we discussed the Dune film and books / universe.

Lots of comparisons were being drawn to LotR (both the books and the film adaptations) and I wanted to confirm that my memory of Tolkein's prowess and effectiveness as a writer were accurate (they were).

I had never read Stephen King before this year and I found that I quite liked him. I started with 'Salem's Lot and Jerusalem's Lot because of the TV series Chapelwaite (an adaptation of Jerusalem's Lot -- I am a fan of horror film and television) which I want to watch.

I really liked King, so I pushed a little deeper. I'll come back to him later this year.

The books that remain are Sci-Fi books that I had either had on my own backlog (Roadside Picnic and A Fire Upon the Deep) or were recommendations that I saw in HN comments (The Cyberiad and The Day of the Triffids).

edit/ There were probably between 4 and 6 books that I started, read a few chapters of, and put down in this time frame, too, FWIW.

This is unfortunately true. It's hard to find the books that will shake your world, apart of the obvious ones like the classic Russian authors. There are plenty of "if you like book x you'll also like y" recommendation sites out there but so far I have had zero success with their findings.

How to find good books?

I expect you already have some books you’ve been ‘noticing’. They might get recommended a lot on Hacker News - Atomic Habits, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, A Thousand Brains, that sort of thing. Time to learn what all the fuss is about!

A habit I’ve picked up is to follow the deaths of famous authors (the NYT will feature one on regularly on their home page). When that happens, I like to read about their life and oeuvre and pick up one of their most famous books, which is usually both very interesting and worthwhile.

You can also just go to Barnes and Noble and wander around. Find the genre you like, poke around, and you’ll probably recognize some of the titles or authors, which is often a good sign.

If you have some favorite authors, look up their lesser known books! The fact that you liked their other work is a good sign.

Over time, you will develop a long list of books on your list so you can start getting more selective. Check the Goodreads reviews. Try to understand how this book fits into the bigger picture and whether it or the subject seem significant to you.

Honestly, it’s hard to go wrong early on. Imagine you were just being exposed to film/tv for the first time and you ask for recommendations. ‘I dunno, Breaking Bad? The Godfather? Titanic?’ Even though there’s a lot of trash out there, the best books, like the best movies, are easy to find and there are tons of rankings and compilations.

Develop questions you want to answer and then find the books that will help you to do so. If you have an active interest in a book you'll get a lot more out of it.

Don't just read books because they have a good reputation in general.

That's a great idea, but still, You should remember that You do not even know all questions You can ask, thus reading books that has reputation can broaden horizon in ways that You can't event imagine (or alternatively You can try to build computer that will find the question).

A reasonably good start:

Business oriented: try your hand at any of the best books on x, by forbes. Google the list "forbes list of best books". Its prob circa 2010ish. They put books on leadership (annapurna, great read), entrepreneurship, product (beijing jeep), etc etc. Some really solid stuff

Pulitzer lists: Just go on wikipedia anf look at winners by year. For example, controversial but interesting : guns germs and steel.

Reco engines: I think i used tastekid a loog time ago. Type in a book, it would give you recommendations on books you might like. With advances in ML, I'm sure there are tons of engines doing the same now

> guns germs and steel

Sorry, but ick. A less popular viewpoint of this is "Triumph of the West" by Roberts. "Connections" by Burke is very good, too.

A few news orgs in my area have a jury going which every month selects ten non-fiction books. I regularly buy one off of that list. It's in German though. While some of the books are originally English, they only provide the translated title and the list is of limited use if you don't read German.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachb%C3%BCcher_des_Monats

Read.

This is just like the great of life - don't fear failure.

Reading a book you wind up hating is way better then spending that time trying to optimize your process to avoid bad books.

If you do want to look for more promising things, reading is still your best tool.

I used to use what I called the two-minute test:

At a bookstore or library, pull a book off the shelf, read it for two minutes, then put it back.

Often you'll find you really don't want to put it back.

If so, then give it a shot.

One thing I found out a few days ago was that I was extremely easy to be distracted when learning from computer resources (pdf, online videos).

I wish I could revert to my university learning style (late 1990s~early 2000s) which has zero internet and we had to figure out things from books even for experimental classes (e.g. back then no one had the luxury to have one's own electronics lab for introductory electronics classes, so we had to cherish the time in lan sections and read books for questions we couldn't solve in lab). It was a bit like learning programming in 60/70s -- you submit a program to mainframe and get the result next morning.

Good books are hard to come by after you read quite a few. To me most now read like rehashes of what I read before.

Ah but how do you know if a book is good until you’ve read it? I’m an avid reader and I’ve yet to run out of new books to read, going on 25 years of reading novels at this point.

Same way that you won’t know whether drugs are really that bad unless you’ve personally tried them, which doesn’t mean you must try them. You build a taste for books, skim through it, read reviews from people you trust... I suppose everyone has their own way of measuring a book before diving into it, and one can of course quit in the middle of it should one make the wrong decision.

Bad analogy. The entire premise of that hypothetical situation with trying drugs is that the potential risk of trying the bad ones is high (potentially your health or life).

In contrast, what’s the price of reading a book and realizing it is awful? Literally nothing except the time you spent reading it. Hardly life-ruining.

If your problem is just the metaphor, just replace it with someone's momma's cooking that everyone raves about. You can taste a bit of it and you don't have to eat the whole thing, neither do you have to try it. The point stands. And honestly the concern is rather petty.

It's seriously annoying how people get pedantic with metaphors.

It's a damn metaphor - if we wanted to be precise we'd roll with the whole damn explanation without metaphors.

> do you know if a book is good

Usually by the cover.

No, I'm not kidding. Publishers aren't stupid, they're going to put their best foot forward on the front & back covers.

For example, for scifi, the following lines on the back cover are cause for putting it back on the shelf:

1. journey to the end of the universe

2. journey to the end of time

3. the fate of the galaxy hangs in the balance

Those novels always turn out to be bad :-/

Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy does all of those and is worth a read. Mostly you want to read each story template roughly once, hitchhikers guide to the galaxy is pretty unique and touches on a lot of story templates so is efficient.

The back cover of that book begins:

> Seconds before Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who, for the last fifteen years, has been posing as an out-of-work actor.

The second paragraph back there does start "Together, this dynamic pair begin a journey through space aided by...", but IMO the Hitchhiker's Guide doesn't really fit the proposed pattern very well: There's a lot more to it than just the bland stock phrases.

HHG is satire, which is judged differently.

But I do think that simple stories are also worth a read if you haven't read those kinds yet. There is a reason for kids to read simple stories, if you didn't read them before it might be worth to read them even as an adult to fill a hole. So basically if it looks like you have already read the story then there is no need to read it again.

Btw, I didn't downvote you, I never up/downvote people. I do like responding to downvoted people though.

I put down at least 1/4 to 1/3 of the books that I start. I have very limited time to read (3 kids under 3 years, etc.). I won't spend that resource doing something that I am not enjoying. How do you do it?

About to have our 3rd so I can relate. I have a backlog of books and I just slowly chip away at them. Nights, nap time on the weekends sometimes.

That’s interesting! I have interests in history and fiction as well so the surface area probably feels much larger to me. I’m also a slow reader — sadly, though my siblings can read hundreds of pages an hour, I’m more like ‘hours per hundred page.’

I had opposite experience. I attempted to start reading fiction again multiple times. Most books were boring. That includes classics - they were much less great then I remembered. It includes also pure "for fun" books.

Some did interested me, but they were rare. When I have to try 15 books to find 1 I like, it becomes frustrating and expensive.

There's a lot of talk about good books, but I do think when I was younger I challenged myself more by reading difficult books at the edge of my reading abilities. That stuff was rewarding but also exhausting. These days I'm exhausted by plenty of other stuff so easy books are more satisfying.

> doom scrolling

that made me think "what a great term"

“When you’re through learning, you’re through.” -John Wooden