I don't read much books anymore, because I don't have any library near me, but I used to read about 3-6 hours per day.
to remember more things, there is a pretty good exercise that is to read at first 2 or 3 articles when you wake up, and try to remember the content when you go to bed, after a while, you will be able to remember most of it.
you can also try to read before going to bed and remember on the wake up.
A lot.
oddly enough I very, very rarely read narrative books though. i am always reading a text of some sort to learn something about something I have an interest in. I love paper books.
Web forums, articles, scholarly journals I read a lot of too. I love to learn things.
that is not mean that narrative is bad. In fact when I was finishing undergrad I had a girl who had english as a second language so she asked me to help out. Her class was reading 1984. It was the first time for me to read that book and I was captivated by every word.
Also I loved my literature class. We read Beowulf, the Sonnets, canterbury tales, my favorite Dr. Faustes and some others but I cant remember them all. Those are great classics for a reason. I liked them all but enjoyed the sonnets and other ancient short form stories the least.
I do read a lot of plays and screenplays as well. My favorite to watch and read is American Beauty.
ESR
I read a couple of newspapers every day (the guardian and independent, uk papers) but I also read Shakespeare, I could read his tragedies and comedies over and over again. Although I like stories I like learning from articles and doing my own research.
Does anyone here read poetry and stuff?
Usually every day before bed or during some free period after work, usually between games or whatever else.
I have a big stack of non-fiction books I'm working on right now and usually only have one or two story books going at a time. I just recently finished Asoiaf book 4 so I'm waiting to start book 5 before I read another story.
as was said early on reading something you find fascinating can greatly help in your ability to articulate things to others, i.e. remembering shit. I like writing sci-fi and fiction/fantasy so i generally read science journals, theories, hypothesis etc. But i also read things that aren't written by Hawking or whomever is notable. I like reading things on the fringe and way past it. They help me get into other people's head space and by putting what they're saying or losing their minds about against my own common sense.
I read everyday for hours at a time. Mainly because I'm editing my own work but even still I do spend time reading articles on websites or the random assorted books i find on authonomy.com. Tonnes of amateur writers not all great but some good reads there.
I'd say starting with some of the generally applauded works by Bradburry, Orwell, Asimov, or HG Wells. Explore the classics and you should be able to find something that tickles your fancy. If you made it through this much of my post I applaud you lol. I tend to be overly verbose at times.
I don't read much do to the fact that the books I can get at my library are the equivalent of watching TLC with some MTV mixed in between.
If you are going to be reading a lot of academic literature (journal articles) or other things that tend to be in pdf format then get a good document manager like Mendeley (it's free). This allows you to keep track of what you have read, group things by keywords, highlight important things and make notes.
I read four or five journal articles a day and go through a couple of books a week - I'd be lost without keeping track of all of it in Mendeley.
I love reading, I'm reading on my kindle! I also love reading non fiction
Pretty much 100% of the books I read are for school
Most of what I'm focusing on reading is French articles so I can put my vocab and grammar to use. I can feel my French rotting. I don't like that. I read lemonde.fr and journaldunet.com. Anyone here have any online French material they would like to share? Reading for pleasure however is places like Arstechnica and The Verge. I'm going to have to clear out my lists and repopulate because some of my sites are getting full of ads and the quality of writing is going down hill.
Commute from NJ to NYC takes me about an hour and a half during morning rush hour and an hour in the afternoon, so about two and a half hours a day I read. At the moment Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes The Complete Novels and Stories Volume 1. Before that was Sven Hassel collection, that went fast......
But, like others have said, not enough. And maaan, there are so many good books out there!
Too much to make a list xD
I don't sleep much so my reading is fair amount. My reading runs from sifi/fantasy to tech to material sciences and on.
These days I'm trying to learn all I can about industrial ceramics and how to make them as tough and durable as possible. This goes towards my long term goal to build my take on a Radax Engine.
Well I read mostly for fun.
As for the frequency - generally about four to five books a month. Recently I've got into 40k quite a lot, but I try to mix it up with classics - just finished Brave New World and now I'm reading The Master and Marguarita.
I have a 3 hour long commute twice a week, so that helps. But I try to read at least an hour every day.
Also for some reason I can't stand to read books at home, I just get distracted. Better to go out somewhere nobody goes, get something to drink and a doughnut or two and immerse yourself in the story.
Game of Thrones!!! But yeah I do the same thing, if I am not reading articles/ forums, etc. then I read comic books. Other than that I feel like I don't really have time to read books. If I'm going to read a book I need to be stress-free and really relaxed, because I have a hard time really paying attention when I have many things to think about or to do.
2-4 chapters/papers per day, split among leisure and academic reading.
1 hours per day cause lately all my books are related on my work at http://www.tapaturva.fi/ and i really need to finish it immediately .
i find i always have one non-fiction and one fiction book that i'm reading at any one time... if you commute by train or plane it's great.
My full time job is more or less centered around translation, so you could say I'm working with text for something like 5 hours a day. I also communicate with a lot of people via instant messaging software so in a way, my work is a non-stop stream of text. I also do a lot of overtime, to the point that I've more than doubled my paycheck on a few occasions.
Over the last couple of years it felt that I just don't want to touch any more text than I have to. I used to subscribe to New Scientist for ten years, a weekly British science magazine with something like 40-50 pages of text, but at this point I'm six months months behind and I've let my subscription expire until I at least catch up.
Haven't read anything like a novel in a few years now. I've got a few lying around, but I want to catch up with the NS magazine and a lot of other stuff first. I've really fallen behind on games and movies over the last couple of years as well and I'm catching up on those right now. A full-time job can really drain you out of life.
Used to have a very active blogging life, posting something like a two page article several times a week, but that had been abandoned for a while now.
If I were to actually suggest something... Don't trust science articles online. Especially if they don't link to any real, peer-reviewed scientific journals. A lot of the most sensational stuff they talk about is a PR stunt or psychological research done with half a dozen students (not a large enough sample to actually prove anything substantial. More of a hint at where future research could be directed). You really need to learn to be critical and look for references. Read some real research articles if you get a chance, just to get a feel of how much you really need to explore to fully cover a narrow topic.
In terms of books, I've read just about all of Terry Pratchett. I like it, but I'm not sure it made me a better or smarter person. I just enjoyed it a lot. Books on specific subject were often a lot more educational and they often cover the subject in a much more structured and approachable manner than random articles or Wikipedia. They can also be heavily biased towards a certain opinion, so be careful and take time to look up anything you find counter-intuitive, strange or just new.
Finding a subject that interests you and reading some of the prolific authors in the field can be very interesting. I think I've really gotten into neuroscience and read quite a few book on the subject now. Books by V.S. Ramachandran and Oliver Sacks probably taught me more about the human condition and experience than most of the other books combined.
Speaking of which, Oliver Sacks is a bit of a hard read. It feels like two thirds of the text are footnotes, which fairly often don't fit on an entire page and by the time you are done, it can be hard to remember what the actual chapter was about. But you get to expand your dictionary with words like palipraxia and resipiscence (Googling both words together brings up two results. One is the book I'm holding in my hands right now and the other is a list of thousands of words. Can I still count it as a Googlewhack?)
The wisdom is cogent in this litteraire Jedi Master.
This post should be mandatory reading for everyone ... Thank you
I am curious though ... why would you google both words within a single query?