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Showing posts from June, 2018

Books I stopped reading and why

It's a frustratingly apt cliche that there’s too much out there for us to consume, and this is no less true with the realm of books. With the kind of books I tend to read – semi-serious non-fiction (history, politics, sociology, philosophy and economics) – the paradoxical evolution is that the more you read the more ignorant you feel. This sounds counter-intuitive because learning what you previously did not know should justifiably eradicate any ignorance you had. But this almost never works out when reading books in the social sciences and history. Books tend to reference other books, which are themselves dependent upon the research of other books, and so on. Never do you feel that you have a complete grasp of any branch of knowledge when you’re constantly being referred to other branches of knowledge that you feel you should know by now.  What most of the books I've given up have in common is that they are very long. Reading long books is exactly the same as reading short b