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So I read 89 books last year (details can be found in the wellness Wednesday thread). Many people here and more so in real life seem to pretty surprised, and impressed. I'm not sure if this is me being a time (or hobby) snob, but I'm a little dissapointed in this kind of reaction. In the real world this makes some sense: TV and scrolling are much more appealing than a book after a long day at work, but I was hoping to see more serious readers in a place that's as text and argument heavy as the motte.
Reading a lot of books isn't as hard as it seems. The average american spends something like 4+ hours on the internet+TV. If you take 1 of those hours and convert them into reading every day you get 365 hours a year. At 50 pages/hour, that's 15k pages a year, or about 50 300-page books. I read slightly faster and slightly more, but also a significant amount in Spanish, which is slower. So probably 2 hrs/day at an average of 50 pages/hour. That's about 30k pages. If I look at my goodreads, I read 33,885 pages total. I keep more detailed stats for Spanish. Looks like I read for a total of 227 hours for a total of 11k pages, which is about 45 pages/hour. Of course these numbers vary from person to person, and book to book. All very do-able for the average Mottzian. It just means largely giving up other forms of entertaininment, like video games or TV, and perhaps more importantly, not being a workaholic.
So are my expectations for this place off? Am I overestimating the importance of books to the average Mottzian (and in self-cultivation in general)? Underestimating people's daily time commitments?
This it it IMO. While I would consider myself someone who enjoys reading (I try to read a book every two weeks or so) I certainly wouldn't consider giving up everything else I enjoy doing in favor of only reading books the best use of my time. There's many more worthwhile movies, video games, internet text etc that's worth engaging with that I'll never experience in my lifetime, to speak nothing of all the pleasurable non-consumption activities I could be doing, so it really seems ludicrous on the face of it to give everything else up to max out my books/year stat.
To go on a vaguely CW tangent, and I'm only bringing this up because your post brought this to mind and not because I'm trying to say you're doing this, is that I think there's a general tendency to elevate some types of consumption as being more virtuous than others, when really they're all just intellectually gratifying activities stratified by ease of access as a proxy for wealth and perceived intellect.
For example, I don't consider the consumption of books, international travel, and live artistic performances any more or less superior than the consumption of internet blogs, local outings and tv shows, yet it's the first class of activities that are considered higher status because they better signal intelligence, disposable income and free time.
While I have no problem with the many people that really do just enjoy the first class of pleasurable things in and of themselves, I have to admit that I find myself reflexively on guard when I meet someone who makes how many books they read, how many countries they've been to or how many live shows they've seen the center of their personality.
Increasingly I find that many people in the PMC class use their hobbies as a way of bludgeoning others for their lack of virtue and to improve their own status rather than because they actually inherently enjoy doing these things (although I suppose elites have been doing this since antiquity, so I can't really point at modern PMCs in particular).
Good books are more engrossing, detailed and better written than good tv shows. They are also more time consuming and less relaxing experience.
I actually would consider certain blogs to be superior to books both as a way to transmit your ideas and to read them. Books can still be better in terms of being more detailed on the issue but the benefit of succinctness and immediacy can't be understated. That and in terms of gate keeping gives blogs an additional value since you are going to find blogs that I would consider more intellectually honest as a higher % of blogs than books as a proportion of books. That and you can communicate with people while if you start talking to your book, usually nobody replies back
Are the top n% of books better than the top n% of tv shows, or does a book need to clear a higher bar to be "good?" I've been re-watching some favorite tv shows and they're all proving their re-watch value. Take "Mad Men" as an example of how engrossing and detailed a good tv show can be: the tvtropes page for anachronisms has only inconsequential examples, suggesting that the motivation for compiling examples is an appreciation for the show getting everything of consequence right.
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