Lex Fridman's Reading Plan in Numbers (opens in new tab)

His statement on Ukraine was quite something to behold. He condemned Putin's invasion in exactly 7 words - "I condemn Vladimir's Putin invasion of Ukraine".

And then immediately proceeded to condemn US interventions "in 40 nations" and "many studies finding that US is culpable for an unfathomable number of civilians deaths". Of course, his life dream is to interview Putin (as stated a few times on Rogan).

https://youtu.be/jRQAG77ifzE?t=120

This is not much different than binge watching/consuming any cultural product.

Reading is still considered more high-brow than, say, playing videogames, and for the most part it is, simply because our species have been producing literature for quite some time, and we have a large amount of masterpieces and real gems.

But I've seen people reading dumb shit at a rapid pace, bad literature is not better than bad TV/Radio/Comics/Games/Youtube/Etc.

I hope that at some point we'll stop sacralizing things because they are old.

This was an interesting analysis. I noticed that it says 200 pages for Metamorphosis, my copy (W W Norton) is 126 pages of large print, including a forward and afterword. It's really a short story.

Also, though I suspect it evens out, personally my reading speed varies a lot depending on the author. Orwell, or ironically Kafka reads pretty fast. Something like the Brother's Karamazof (which I've started twice and failed to get anywhere with) I have to read way more slowly.

It was pretty sad when I saw Lex Fridman tweeted Elon Musk to volunteer to run Twitter. How delusional can one be?

https://twitter.com/lexfridman/status/1604624131626090497

You could read some of these in a day, especially 1984, the pages just fly by. I was initially going to mock the idea, but they're actually quite well chosen for the task at hand. Surprised he hasn't already read some of these though, they're not exactly obscure. And that he hasn't read Player of Games is actually quite a shock, for a techbro, but I think Excession would be a better choice of Iain M Banks book, for him.

Sapiens is a waste of time, given it's subtle anti-human bent, completely bizarre for an anthropological text.

And Dune in a week. Good luck with that.

"But most critics accused him of posturing – that you can’t read those books at that pace," ... "I read [The Brothers Karamazov] in 2021 over 21 days (Sep 10 to Oct 1), and yeah, I don’t think you’d want to read it any faster than that, certainly not one week."

So most of "the critics" were right that this particular book shouldn't be read in a week? So weird to then read this framed as "I think Lex wins this one." Twitter is constantly quibbling and I don't care what books that guys reads, but odd to see this blogpost go to lengths to argue 'well actually he meant the average book on the list will take a week, not each individual book'

If you're going to speed-run masterpieces why not just watch the movies.

But given Lex's flexibility with the truth I suspect his plan wasn't serious anyway.

Later in the list he has Gödel Escher Bach - which seems unfathomable to read in a week to me. I used to keep this with me while I was working overnights - can't imagine you'd get much out of it if you read it in a week.

That said, my personal conspiracy theory is that he's using books he's already read as buffers for the longer harder books. If he doesn't really reread, and has read ~30% of the list already, it's much more reasonable.

Yeah, I mostly agree that, as a plan to read in 6 months, the list Lex provides is reasonable, if a bit snobby.

It's the "do each one in a 7 day period" that is silly (I say, having read 13 books in December and ~45 last year)

Would love for the table columns to be sortable

Why are we gossiping about someone's reading list? Why is this on HN?

A book a week is not difficult for anyone who enjoys reading and can devote even a modest amount of time doing it. Reading The Brothers Karamazov in a week is harder, but fine as a stunt. A ~300 page book in a week requires the average reader to read for about an hour a day. The equivalent would be running about 5 miles a day: hard if you don't like to run, a completely reasonable goal if you do.

The only weird thing about this, to me, is scheduling out your entire reading list in a sequence. For me, the joy of reading is in reading whatever I want to read next, or putting down a book to finish another book first. It would be like scheduling out your meals six months in advance, trying to predict what you'll want to eat for lunch on the third Tuesday in April. But, different strokes for different folks.

Software engineers can estimate the most arbitrary things like a popular podcaster's reading list for the year down to an average daily page count and monthly burndown.

It should be noted that Lex listens books in audio format as he mentioned many times in his videos. So, the analysis is interesting but doesn't take into account audio vs text format as also listening speed. Like I mostly listen fiction books at x1.5 or x1.75. E.g. in 2022 I read/listened 71 books. About 50 of them were fiction. So, I listened and the rest non-fiction that's more useful to read and make notes.

I like how the article is saying how it's doable and more defending someone with such a reading list. I'm not a big fan of fiction myself and almost exclusively stick to non-fiction (history, biology, engineering, and technology related topics) but would advocate someone trying out this list or similar. The books mentioned are pretty standard core in my opinion. My SO reads a lot and is a member/host of multiple book clubs so good for folks who are into this. I'm ambivalent about this being based off Fridman, would folks react differently if it was Paul Graham or some other known figure?

I like Nassim Taleb's point about Lex's reading list.

That you can only get a very shallow understanding of the text going this fast. I think it's a reasonable criticism. If shallow breadth is Lex's goal, then it's fine. But if any sort of deep understanding is required, then going fast won't work.

source: https://forall.social/@nntaleb/109626986647565519

I feel like reading books at a very rapid pace is kind of like going to film/music/art festivals and trying to catch everything. In the end, you'll have some very memorable ones, many you'll remember, but also a lot of stuff you'll barely remember a week later.

he talked about starting mondays and ending fridays, but the analysis is counting weekends. strip those away and the numbers are way off. he also talked about doing a weekly review for each book, not something you can keep up if reading one of the books takes you over a month (21d per op, over weekdays)

No technical / scientific books though. I wonder if they also ingest a lot of them.

This is silly. Anyone who's been to grad school can you tell that of course you can read a book a week, or more.

I don't know why people think this list is so crazy. When I was in grad school, I usually took 4 courses per semester. Each of them would require us to read about 100 pages per week. No one though it was an insane idea.

This discussion also reminded me of a guy on YouTube I used to watch - The Completionist. Every week he completes a single video game. Fully completing a video game can take way, way, way longer than finishing a book (especially if it's an open-world game or a game that includes a multiplayer mode), but in minds of a lot of people those two are completely incomparable.

Maybe he _re-reads_ a lot of these classic books. Then he can go through them faster.

I speculate that he had read Brothers Karamazov in Russian (his mother tongue) before).

I find it sad that reading levels are so low for so many people that they consider this totally outside the realms of possibility.