Go to jail. I read over 800 books that way. Still installed TikTok the day I got out, though.

Your perspective is as always refreshing and unique. Thank you :) I hope to do my reading outside of jail and I still haven't installed TikTok and never will but I think my kids would be happy to agree with your position (probably minus the jail bit too).

It was once said that the only time in a man's life that he will be able to read Proust's In Search of Lost Time is in jail. So I had someone send it to me and of course I was released the next day.

p.s. I exaggerated slightly, it took me 3 days before I installed TikTok. I'd watched silly viral videos that appeared on the news for years and so I was intrigued about it. I've loved it ever since. Just gotta get it set up right so your filter bubble is what you're into. I get half my tech news from HN and the other half from TikTok.

How long were you in for to read that many books?

I used to read 500 books in a single summer as a teenager. I don't know how much free time you have in prison, but I can totally see doing 800 books in just a year or two.

I would have classed myself as a bookworm when I was younger, but there's no way I could have read anywhere near that many books in that timespan. I would say that whilst I believe you, you're also an extreme outlier with that figure.

Five and a half books a day, every day, all summer seems high.

What counts as "a book" here (the seven volume À la recherche du temps perdu seems a bit of challenge to rip through in a day) ?

Hah, yeah, see my comment here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39331379

Heh - confined for the summer gives a bit of an incentive, sorry about that.

All the same it's a high number, .. I'm guessing more than a few were light pulps and the best you could find given the library at hand?

I read a lot of books, several thousand, from 12 to 17, and kept a log of them - later I worked in (and led) a team that digested a few thousand technical documents a day (with a heavy dose of computer assistence to find|pick out key parts), there's a lot of material you can fly through quickly and not miss much, there are rare books that can take a year or a lifetime to fully digest and finish with.

10 years. I read a lot of magazines as well, though, otherwise the number would be a bit higher!

> if forced to

That's definitely problematic and not where anyone wants this to go, right?

No. I was referring to forcing yourself if you wanted to run the experiment.

> forcing yourself

Ah yes that's quite a different matter.

My thoughts are that sure, when you are living and working alone, as happens to many of us at times, it is possible to successfully apply "force". Like making objects of temptation unavailable, maybe using a time-locked safe or taking a week away at tech-detox bootcamp.

IIRC Johann Hari in "Stolen Focus" seemed to think this only ever created a temporary relief, a bit like dieting and then gaining rebound weight.

What I wrote about in Digital Vegan was based on my interaction with heroin addicts, and is all about the friction that comes from peer pressure and groups that reinforce (mutually enforce) behaviours. Friends are a bigger problem than self-will in the arena of addiction. External force, even in peer relations, tends to have the opposite effects.

>month long camping retreat

Not dissing your idea, which is accurate, but I can't not-find it funny to then remark that most Americans couldn't even take a 2 week vacation without cheating with sick days.