I think the subjects where I've read only three books or less were:
* things I wasn't that interested in to begin with
* topics that I could absorb as much as I needed from 1-3 books
* cases where I could only get 1-3 books on a topic.
I've inhaled whole libraries. Our Pagan collection is over a thousand books. I'm sure we've got hundreds of cookbooks and I've read dozens of them out loud on road trips. I have a small bookcase of linguistic and women's studies books. There are multiple shelves of books on gardening, plants, and other nature topics. Hell, I've got at least half a shelf of Golden Guides alone, and if I'm going to absorb any natural science from scratch, that is my go-to source. If I lean around the corner of my desk, I can see the bookcase of jumpstart-civilization texts.
Three books is about "yeah, this is good enough groundwowrk" by my standards. If I need more depth or detail, that much will give me an idea where to look next.
But then I think about how other people tend to treat me as a walking encyclopedia ("I am the Library.") and I suspect that 3 books = expert is true for most of those folks. 0_o
Oh, and the time estimate to read those 3 books? 3-4 months. Maybe if they were, I dunno, thermonuclear astrophysics or written in Navajo?
I can kill a book in a day. I can kill more than one if they are short and/or light reading. I used to write papers by checking out an armload of books on Friday, reading them (or at least the relevant parts) Friday night and Saturday morning, writing the paper later Saturday, proofing it Sunday, and turning it in Monday morning. It drove some of my teachers buggy. If I'm going on a weekend trip, I want at least one book per day, and 2+ is better, because if I'm in a car or lounging around for hours with nothing to do but read, a book won't last me long at all.
>>Seriously, I haven't been in position to have the time and brain space to do much research reading in the last year, so my way of working was to pick a topic, whether gardening or mathematics or pre-Egyptian civilizations, was to focus on the topic for a month. Even at my worst, that was four to six books in a month.<<
That's a good approach.
>> Oh, wow. I need to rethink my usual diatribe against modern education. It's woefully incomplete.<<
Yeah. It really, really is. But a big part of the problem is just that if kids don't come into school as bookworms, they quickly learn to hate reading, because school makes it really fucking miserable. The result is that most adults don't read because nobody can force them to.
Re: Question:
HORROR. <<
Yeah, I know, that was my reaction too.
I think the subjects where I've read only three books or less were:
* things I wasn't that interested in to begin with
* topics that I could absorb as much as I needed from 1-3 books
* cases where I could only get 1-3 books on a topic.
I've inhaled whole libraries. Our Pagan collection is over a thousand books. I'm sure we've got hundreds of cookbooks and I've read dozens of them out loud on road trips. I have a small bookcase of linguistic and women's studies books. There are multiple shelves of books on gardening, plants, and other nature topics. Hell, I've got at least half a shelf of Golden Guides alone, and if I'm going to absorb any natural science from scratch, that is my go-to source. If I lean around the corner of my desk, I can see the bookcase of jumpstart-civilization texts.
Three books is about "yeah, this is good enough groundwowrk" by my standards. If I need more depth or detail, that much will give me an idea where to look next.
But then I think about how other people tend to treat me as a walking encyclopedia ("I am the Library.") and I suspect that 3 books = expert is true for most of those folks. 0_o
See my post on "How to Get Good at Anything" and its reference to the 3 Book Rule.
Oh, and the time estimate to read those 3 books? 3-4 months. Maybe if they were, I dunno, thermonuclear astrophysics or written in Navajo?
I can kill a book in a day. I can kill more than one if they are short and/or light reading. I used to write papers by checking out an armload of books on Friday, reading them (or at least the relevant parts) Friday night and Saturday morning, writing the paper later Saturday, proofing it Sunday, and turning it in Monday morning. It drove some of my teachers buggy. If I'm going on a weekend trip, I want at least one book per day, and 2+ is better, because if I'm in a car or lounging around for hours with nothing to do but read, a book won't last me long at all.
>>Seriously, I haven't been in position to have the time and brain space to do much research reading in the last year, so my way of working was to pick a topic, whether gardening or mathematics or pre-Egyptian civilizations, was to focus on the topic for a month. Even at my worst, that was four to six books in a month.<<
That's a good approach.
>> Oh, wow. I need to rethink my usual diatribe against modern education. It's woefully incomplete.<<
Yeah. It really, really is. But a big part of the problem is just that if kids don't come into school as bookworms, they quickly learn to hate reading, because school makes it really fucking miserable. The result is that most adults don't read because nobody can force them to.