I can't answer for parent, but I've read 50 books so far this year.
I'd say I spend at least 2-3 hours a day reading, mostly at night before bed and also in the morning. On the weekends this is higher as I spend almost the whole morning reading.
When my first child arrives soon I imagine this will change significantly. :)
I have resorted to reading audiobooks on my commute to/from the office.
With a 25 minute commute (one way), I can finish on average 2 to 3 books per month by audio. This is in addition to the other reading I can get done in during the days and on weekends.
Eat That Frog! (Brian Tracy)- Lots of useful productivity tips. Motivating and practical.
Bleachers (John Grisham) - I learned a lot about the culture behind American Football and school/college sports.
The Wide Lens (Ron Adner) - I learned a systematic approach towards evaluating ideas and the environment around them so that I could determine what needs to change (outside of my innovations) that must be encouraged for my ideas to succeed.
The Martian (Andy Weir) - I got a "feel" for living on Mars being a reality potentially sooner than I appreciated.
Brownlow North (K Moody Stuart) - A book about a Scottish Evangelist. It was superb to see where he started from in his preaching, how he differed from everyone else, and how that was probably the key to his startling effectiveness.
Songs of the Spirit: The Place of Psalms in the Worship of God (Ed: Kenneth Stewart) - I learned an appreciation for the book of Psalms, though written long before it, it is clearly (by how it's written, what it discusses in the past tense, and what's only understood now) FOR the New Testament church.
In my Father's House (Corrie ten Boom) - a beautiful insight into what a Christian household can look like.
I'm not going to list all 42, but here are the highlights:
How to Read a Book (Adler)
World Order (Kissinger)
Der Grundrisse (Marx)
The Grand Chessboard (Brzezinski)
Manufacturing Consent (Chomsky)
Gulag Archipelago (Solhenitzyn)
On War (Clausewitz)
The Hidden Persuaders (Packard)
Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (Dennett)
The Strategy of Desire (Dichter)
Skills acquired: intentional syntopical reading, prediction of geopolitical hinge points, and identification of absent context in media... I'm always looking for another book to read.
Do you often read blog posts? I think the only way I would manage to read 42 books in 6 months is if I stopped reading blog posts and programming resources. I'd like to know how you've manage to read 42 books
I'm wondering the same. Of you look at the books being listed in this thread, though, it's apparent there is little fiction or other material to truly savour: everything is skim-friendly.
You could probably get through one of these a week while on the elliptical or during your commute.
I wish people would qualify their posts with relationship status and employment type. If you have a partner whom you value, and are in the formative months (pre-alpha) of a start-up as a main developer (or hybrid, or one-man operation), is it really beneficial for so much new information to be making its way into your head?
Not OP but I "read" about 150+ books each year (90 so far this year) and usually more than half of those are audiobooks that I listen to at high speed (2.5x-3x) while doing other things. The others I usually read at the gym. I don't often read blogs, but if I did I doubt they'd interfere with the audiobook fraction, anyway.
Cryoshon - what's "Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (Dennett)" like, I picked it up in a bookshop the other day as it was in the 'recommended' but the title really put me off (too markety) - is it any good?
belated reply: it's okay. a bit philosophy-undergrad centric, but entertaining nonetheless. if you're not acquainted with formal philosophy and philosophy of mind, i'd pick it up. dennett is notoriously biased to materialism, but he's intellectually honest.
I have just finished the Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov, I can't believe it took me so long to get round to reading such classic sci-fi. Definitely recommended.
By "Foundation Trilogy" you mean the original 'Foundation' stories as gathered in the first three books ("Foundation", "Foundation and Empire" and "Second Foundation")?
No, most (non-pedantic) Asimov fans refer to the first three books (F, F&E, SF - which yes are technically collections of short stories glued together as one) as "the Foundation Trilogy". I do recommend reading the Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth, they're worthy sequels to the "trilogy".
The Robot novels are also a top read and tie in with the later Foundation books in a satisfying way:
I've read, at the behest of my spouse, The Hobbit and the trilogy of the Lord of the Rings. As someone who was never really "into" the whole world Tolkien had created, I must say I was won over by the end. Who wouldn't want to be a hobbit? At least, a hobbit who is not Frodo.
Every year or two I give a light reading to Andy Hertzfeld's compilation "Revolution in the Valley", which is a print edition of many (and probably some extras) of the stories available on www.folklore.org
I am also midway through "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (Robert M. Pirsig) and I must recommend it. It's got a lot of philosophy in it that I think is both accessible and transcendent all at once. It's actively changing my world view.
In terms of skills acquired, I don't typically read for that purpose. I learn skills primarily by active work, not passive ingestion of information.
Agincourt by Juliet Barker
The story of a nerd, who loved forensic accounting and was thought unwarlike; but was knew an innovation when it was shot through his face (during an earlier battle in Wales) and used it to end the Age of Chivalry - i.e. Henry V.
What I learned was "always take enough arrows": even if your (relatively few) knights have to walk 'cause the horses are laden with literally millions of arrows. I'll write up a review one of these days, fine book. He was fighting piracy (it wasn't a needless war) so I don't he'd have liked Tor.
Skills - need to exercise the ones I have, not pile on more, just now.
Solo: An American Dreamer in Europe by Wright Morris, a memoir of spending part of 1932 and 1933 in Austria, Italy, and France. Not on the whole as rewarding as his other memoirs Will's Boy and A Cloak of Light, but interesting enough.
Adolphe and Le Cahier Rouge by Benjamin Constant. The former a devastating short novel, the latter a memoir, a portrait of the artist as a young twerp. (The things we boomers would say if something comparable had been published by a millenial!)
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff, a novel read for a book club. The less said, the better.
Autobiography by Henry James. Very slow going, but rewarding, a mind at work.
My Promised Land by Avi Shalets. A history of Israel and the Zionist project by an Israeli journalist. It covers a lot of ground that most Americans (I infer from my book club) don't know. It seemed to me that it could have been maybe 15% shorter, and that David Remnick should have impounded Shalets's thesaurus.
Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder by Isaiah Berlin. Well worth reading, but requiring more time than just its own reading, for now I have to read some Herder. I have already fought my way through some Hamann; the translation is heavily footnoted, as necessary for those of us who aren't handy with Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, and don't have the Bible memorized.
Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit (vol. ii) by Egon Friedell. Clive James's recommendation in Cultural Amnesia put me onto this one. Most interesting, but slow going because my German is rusty.
[Edit: got rid of most of the "most interesting"s.]
Books: Manshu (Classical Chinese history book), Instrument Engineer's Handbook, lots of embedded books, some young child development books, Forgotten Masters of Thai Photography and a few other photography tomes, an airport trash novel.
Skills: Lots of hardware stuff (component sourcing/plumbing/pneumatics/etc.), additional detail in financial forecasting, video pitches, woodcut printing.
I spend a couple hours once or twice a month in a used book store. I browse the history, fiction, classics, science/math sections and look for titles that align with what I've been thinking about lately. I also have a mental list of authors that I will buy on sight.
I like the browsing atmosphere of the small bookstore. Also I find it hard to get past all the titles that are currently being hyped if I go to amazon. I read more old books than I do new ones. But if I have a title in mind that I want to buy right away, amazon is my first stop
"The Myth of the Rational Voter" by Bryan Caplan
"Fanatical Prospecting" by Jeb Blount
"Fooling Some of the People All of the Time" by David Einhorn
"Confidence Game" by Christine Richard
"Mouth Matters; How Your Mouth Ages Your Body and What YOU Can Do About It" by Carol Vander Stoep
"Adventures in Stochastic Processes" by Sidney & Resnick
"The Great Deformation" by David Stockman
"Efficient Electrical Systems Design Handbook" by Thumann & Franz
"The Goal" by Eliyahu Goldratt
"Notes on Discrete Mathematics" by Miguel Lerma
"Stochastic Calculus with Infinitesimals" by Frederik S. Herzberg
"Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms" by David Mackay
"Coming Apart" by Charles Murray
"The Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph Tainter
"In Other Words: The Science And Psychology Of Second-language Acquisition" by Ellen Bialystok and Kenji Hakuta