HN Reader

> Unfortunately, reading books for entertainment is ridiculous. You do not live in a log cabin on the prairie. You have Netflix, you have video games, you have TikTok, you have Twitter (you really spend too much time on Twitter anon). No one reads books for entertainment anymore, because paper is an inferior entertainment platform.

That's a hard disagree from me - I'm not a heavy reader but I'll still easily get through a couple of fiction books every month. TV/Movies are far less information dense (ie interesting) that even a light fiction book.

I'll happily watch a show or movie on TV with the family - there's a lot to be said for shared entertainment, but there's a reason for the trope "the book was better than the movie".

> There are two sides to this debate: entertainment or information. Unfortunately, reading books for entertainment is ridiculous. You do not live in a log cabin on the prairie. You have Netflix, you have video games, you have TikTok, you have Twitter (you really spend too much time on Twitter anon). No one reads books for entertainment anymore, because paper is an inferior entertainment platform.

I'm not reading this article any more. The author is either nuts or a troll, maybe both.

Also, I think he admits to spending too much time on Twitter? Any time on Twitter is too much time. Even Elon agrees that it has gone to shit[1].

[1] https://nitter.space/elonmusk/status/2013482798884233622

I love old books but this post is reactionary nonsense. It can only resort to weird ad hominem arguments about how Mary Beard hasn't tutored any princes and therefore her perspective must be lacking. Without any specifics about weaknesses in her writing or historical analysis.

The idea that perspective is so important smells, to me, too much like the kind of post-truth internet-poisoned modern world where everything is an op-ed and allegiances are to those with the right commitments.

The dismissal of all fiction seemed like a tongue-in-cheek opener designed to be undercut later, but no. Actually the author does just dismiss fiction because apparently Netflix and Twitter are so much better. Maybe the author knew their entire argument was insupportable and had to jettison as much baggage from the sinking ship as possible to give it a chance to make it to shore.

Obviously a lot of this was exaggerated for effect (dare I say attempting to entertain the reader, even though reading for entertainment is apparently obsolete), but I still couldn't agree with any of it. Clearly "everyone alive today has the same perspective" is not true because I can't really imagine having the perspective of the author.

> The average ancient historian led troops, tutored a prince, governed a province, advised a king, made a fortune, fell from favor, was exiled, and buried 7 of their 10 children.

No they didn't? I'm sure there are exceptions but I'm not even sure what exceptional case you're trying to use as the "average". The average ancient historian was a highly educated man who wrote a lot and corresponded with other highly educated people. "advised a king", sure, but it's not that unusual in modern times for academics to be appointed as advisors to world leaders. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is a famous case in the US.

> And worse, they all passed the same tests at the same institutions.

Just read a book by someone who didn't go to one of the colleges you don't like? If you're worried about groupthink because all the historians were friends and worked together, you're going to have a much bigger problem finding independent ancient historians.

> Meanwhile Xenophon was an Athenian student of Socrates

Yeah man exactly, they were all students of Socrates, is that not the same problem?

> Thankfully it’s still possible to find people with unique experiences and perspectives.

What if you're looking for the perspective of someone who isn't in the 0.1% of the most educated people on the planet? Do you think you're more likely to find that in ancient historical works or modern books?

Finally, who do you think is finding, translating, and discussing these ancient historical works? Who decides which ones become famous and are published in English so you can read them? Unless you're doing original research, I think you'll find you're still subject to the perspectives of the modern historian.

>And while attending those institutions, they all adopted the same opinions. Anyone who did otherwise was filtered out before they could become a professor with a publishing deal. Everything is like this now.

> Thankfully it’s still possible to find people with unique experiences and perspectives. But you can’t find them by traveling around the world. The world is too hyperconnected now, and everyone is converging to the same opinions. You have to find them by traveling back in time.

Has this person ever touched grass?

I can get my apartment’s lift to the ground floor and without even setting a foot in the street I’ll find the building's caretaker, who was in the military while my country almost fell into a dictatorship and partied in gay clubs during the AIDS epidemic. Ask him any question about current politics and I can tell you his answer won’t converge to the same point as Cambridge students’.

Believe it or not people have unique experiences nowadays too. Many of them also write. They might just not be found in a preppy classroom’s recommended reading list.

You know who viewed the writing of history as political entertainment? Ancient Romans!

In SPQR, Mary Beard elaborates that much of what we "know" about ancient Rome was recorded by men with political projects. Sometimes it was to glorify the empire or republic; sometimes it was to grind an axe against their personal enemies (looking at you, Cicero). Then their records were often interpreted once again by scholars in the early-modern-to-pre-contemporary era where they became accepted history. (1)

So yes, Beard never conquered Asia minor and thinks women should be full citizens (unlike the Romans), but her scholarship is both informative and IMO entertaining. Perhaps moreso than ancient writers.

(1) Drawing the line at WWII when using Roman history as an example is a peculiar choice because the study and glorification of Rome was _very_ popular in certain European countries in the preceding century.

I almost gave up on this after the first couple of paragraphs but I’m glad I stuck with it. It’s an interesting perspective.

I’ll recommend on old book I randomly found a couple years ago: We Took to the Woods. It was surprisingly fascinating.

> ... Have you read all of these? If not, why would you even consider picking up another book written by another Cambridge professor?

Because a Cambridge professor can translate works from that time and place into language and concepts that I can understand. And they can provide context that is necessary to understand what they are really talking about.

> Unfortunately, reading books for entertainment is ridiculous. You do not live in a log cabin on the prairie. You have Netflix, you have video games, you have TikTok, you have Twitter (you really spend too much time on Twitter anon). No one reads books for entertainment anymore, because paper is an inferior entertainment platform.

I see that this has already been criticised here, but to add my two cents, I believe that reading books has become one of the very last widely available (perhaps free?) entertainment media that is not anxiety inducing and mentally draining. 10 years ago reading books may have been a kind of a snobbish activity, but now it is one of very few things to engage in before you go to bed that will help you relax and get good sleep.

One of the authors on their substack posted a quote that claims to be from Thucydides: https://substack.com/@atlaspress/note/c-203197501 but is actually from a biography of a British Empire general.

The other author, on their substack (https://romanhelmetguy.substack.com) is posting excerpts of various "Venetian Reports" but doesn't seem to bother with any references to what these are actually from, or who translated them, or for that matter any analysis at all.

> Contrast Xenophon with Mary Beard, who studied at Cambridge and now teaches at Cambridge. She holds the same opinions as everyone else at Cambridge. She’s remarked before that, “I actually can’t understand what it would be to be a woman without being a feminist.” This seems like a peculiar failing for an ancient historian.

One can read old books to get a perspective on what "great" old writers think, and one can read Mary Beard to get the perspective of a "great" Cambridge don. You can even read writers that you don't agree with!

The "new books aren't worth reading" title is click-bait as is the rest of the article.

> But your great grandfather was reading Cicero in Latin.

My great-grandfathers certainly were not.

Perhaps it is worth noting that Brett Devreaux skewered this guy (regarding a different topic) in his latest acoup.blog.

I'm actually sympathetic with his perspective, and I was frustrated by Mary Beard's "SQPR" when she kept saying things like "of course, this list of consuls cannot possibly be right", because, of course ancient people can't even keep a quality list over 300 years. And in any case, they were a lot closer to it that Beard is, so it's as good as it's going to get. I find what passes for virtue in elite circles to be appalling, self-righteous, and uninteresting, so I'm not likely to be reading new books without good quality recommendations. (But that would be the case anyway, I only have N book-readings to spend in my life, no point spending them on anything poor.)

But fiction is absolutely worth reading. First, as entertainment it beats all the passive forms. Also, books don't dumb things down to the lowest denominator like American television does. But you can actually learn a lot from fiction. O'Henry gives a picture of NYC in 1900, Jane Austen gives a flavor of lower-elite Edwardian life, etc. Good fiction tends to deal with tensions of life, like duty/delight, or in Austen's case the need to marry well to have enough money to live like you were raised but you also need to find a man worth marrying. And, of course, the perspectives you get reading Iliad, Beowulf, Treasure Island, and Tolkien are all very different, which will expand your mind, too.

I'm somewhat sympathetic to the conclusion, but from a different perspective. One of the interesting things I've found about literature is that it's hard to fully appreciate the nuances in the decade it's written.

It's a bit like nose blindness; you don't appreciate the subtle way that your house smells until you've been away from it for a while. Books have a similar "smell" in the sense that it becomes easier to see what aspects are tethered to a particular era and what aspects are more universal when some time has passed. Even "fun" works like Snow Crash have aspects of this; there are parts of the book that stand out as pretty timeless and others that feel early 90s-west coast ways of viewing the world and people. When I read it for the first time years ago, none of that really stood out.

Same thing applies to film though. Ignoring pacing, My Dinner with Andre is IMHO way more fascinating to watch today than it was 45 years ago, because what's wheat and what's chaff is clearer in retrospect.

> The only people who still read books for entertainment are women who prefer their porn to have DIY visuals. The stats back me up on this. If you’re tempted to disagree, go walk the aisles of Barnes & Noble.

I found this interesting. I have a young child who is a voracious reader. I thus often find myself at Barnes and Noble or the UK equivalent, Waterstones. These places are often quite busy and have rows and rows of books. It blows my mind that in the days of TikTok, YouTube and The Algorithm these places are solvent let alone successful? Are people today actually reading?

That’s certainly an opinion. I’m not convinced that it's a good one, but it’s an interesting one.

I think it’s probably important to remember two things: 1) the novel is a relatively modern invention — Don Quixote is often thought of as the first novel, and it was written in 1605, but 2) fiction clearly is not. The Iliad, for instance. In fact, what we think of as “history”, a recounting of events strongly tied to facts, is also a relatively new invention. It is my understanding that ancient authors were more interested in telling you what was true, in a spitirual, philosophical, or moral sense than in telling you strictly what happened. Obviously this is more clear when reading e.g. religious texts like the Bible, but my understanding is that it’s also true of more “straight” histories — Roman historians were not above inventing entire speeches for which there were not extant records and placing them in the mount of a Julius Caesar or whoever. So strictly speaking if you’re reading sources as old as the OP suggests, there’s no getting away from what we would call fiction.

My wife and I have an ongoing conflict of taste in matters of literature. She prefers what I consider to be absolutely depressing high literature. One of her favorites is The House of Mirth, wherein the protagonist starts out wealthy, slowly goes into debt, ends up impoverished and addicted to morphine, and ends the book by committing suicide. She says she likes these stories because they’re “more realistic”. I claim that no, they aren’t, and even if they were I read specifically because I get enough realism by waking up in the morning, thank you very much, and although I’m not averse to deep thoughts in my literature I usually prefer it with a side of likeable characters.

Anyway, my point is: to pick an example, LOTR is a book of fiction written after WWII, and although Tolkien was an expert on and was drawing from a deep pool of literary traditions that predate written language, he was also addressing modern concerns, and that’s what makes the book more interesting than Beowulf. It’s don’t care that it’s labeled “fiction”; the concepts it explores are as true, in the ancient sense, as straight Greek philosophy, and maybe even as applicable. And if you want to read for information, you’re almost certainly going to get better information by reading a modern history of Rome than by reading Polybius.

I'm going to live in the world where this is genius satire and not an out-of-touch traditionalist who take hot showers and eats prepackaged rolled oats and yogurt for breakfast

Well-written books, especially the wealth of contemporary works now available in translation, affects me, and presumably many others alike, more deeply than almost anything else. I eagerly await my few hours of nightly isolation to explore new writing from around the world. There's lots to explore, trust me.

Somebody deeply hurt this person and their anti-women stance is so bitterly apparent in their writing that they felt the need to write something not worth reading.

The problem is this blog post fails the exact same rule of thumb. Predictable confected contrariaism much like so many others.

> Because everyone alive today has the same perspective, and none of us have experienced a wide breadth of anything.

Is the author living in completely different alternative reality then I do?

> The average ancient historian led troops, tutored a prince, governed a province, advised a king, made a fortune, fell from favor, was exiled, and buried 7 of their 10 children. The average modern historian passed a few tests then wrote a book on their laptop next to their cat.

Who are all those ancient historians author talks about? Isnt actually studying history better background for writing about history then "making a fortune, being politician and having many dead kids"?

But obviously what you wont find in the books of these super high level people ... is experience majority of the people who lived earth never had. Nor even had option to have. Frequently because of their lives suffered greatly by actions of these great conquerors.

So tldr, Mary Beard is bad at being historian, because she studied history. Also, because she credits feminism for her own understanding of what it is being a woman. Also, because she is estimated to have liberal opinions on climate change, democracy and religion. In the world where everyone is having the same opinions on those ... we will ignore the fact that fascism is currently not just on the rise, but literally winning the institutions.

When it comes to Roman history, and for those that can read French, I heartedly recommend Histoire romaine - Tome 1 - de origines à Auguste, by François Hinard, beats the Mary Beard slop by a very long mile. I only knew the most general facts about the Romans going into this book, but after reading it I can say I'm way better informed on who the Romans were and how and thought.

Also, I was literally thinking about these very lines just before clicking on this link:

> The average modern historian passed a few tests then wrote a book on their laptop next to their cat. And worse, they all passed the same tests at the same institutions.

not specifically about historians (even though I mostly had them in mind). Not sure if there's an easy solution for that, at least not when it comes to "soft" sciences. For what it's worth it looks like the scientific departments the less influenced by the Anglo worldview are the least affected by that, but they're getting very few and far between.

[1] https://www.fayard.fr/livre/histoire-romaine-tome-1-97828185...

>No one reads books for entertainment anymore, because paper is an inferior entertainment platform

There are more forms of entertainment and people have diversified how they spend their leisure time. I don't think that it necessarily follows that it's an inferior platform unless your only metric is "more people is more good".

>Because everyone alive today has the same perspective, and none of us have experienced a wide breadth of anything

Completely bonkers statement.

>I don’t know if she’s ever talked publicly about religion or democracy or climate change or immigration, but I could tell you exactly what she thinks about these things anyway. So why would you bother reading what she thinks about Rome? The answers are just as predictable

I mean, I could take a stab at what a dork named Roman Helmet Guy is going to think too.

Is this sarcasm? I read it like sarcasm but reading your reaction it seems it's not? Do this person really believe what he wrote?

> So we’re left with one answer: information. But what kind of information are you trying to learn from a fiction book? The book is literally labelled FALSE on the cover.

I learned so many things from fictional works.

Authors don’t just make up lies and say whatever they want. Fiction does not mean everything is nonsense. The worlds that you read about have to be believable and for that to be possible, things have to at least be partially consistent with what we understand of the world.

So many authors do real research when they write a fiction novel so that the world that they’re building can be convincing.

For instance:

* I learned how to drive a stick shift from a Young Bond novel. The author didn’t make anything up, they actually described the way that the clutch mechanism works, and how the character was controlling it with the pedals.

* I learned about Navajo code talkers from a fictional book about World War II.

* I learned about cowpox being used as a smallpox vaccine from a fictional book about a new smallpox outbreak in New York City.

* I learned that Gatorade was developed in Florida from Taken by Edward Bloor.

* I learned a lot about the reformation and the Quakers and early colonial America from the Baroque Cycle, because Neal Stephenson did real research to write that book.

Is everything that happened in the book real? No, because obviously Daniel Waterhouse didn’t exist, didn’t found MIT, and didn’t have some mechanical LLM in the 1600s.

Did some of the things in the book actually happen in real life in order for the author to set that book in the time period? Yes. Like IOUs from goldsmiths acting as paper money, and the standardization of coinage by Isaac Newton.

There is so much factual information encoded into the pages of fictional works that this is the stupidest thing I have ever read on any platform in any circumstance ever.

Pure anti-intellectualism of the highest order. An attempt to undo The Enlightenment.

> Unfortunately, reading books for entertainment is ridiculous. […] The only people who still read books for entertainment are women who prefer their porn to have DIY visuals. The stats back me up on this. If you’re tempted to disagree, go walk the aisles of Barnes & Noble.

Instead of "walking the aisles of Barnes & Noble," I wonder if the author of this piece has tried looking up actual sales figures? Yes, people do buy books. Mostly fiction. More than a billion books are sold per year in the US. Sales of books have been steady & mostly rising over the past two decades. Romance is the most popular fiction genre, but not by huge margin. Thrillers are the runner-up, then science fiction, then fantasy.

It's really not promising that this article opens with flagrant conjecture.

> The average ancient historian led troops […] The average modern historian passed a few tests

The average ancient historian just made stuff up sometimes. A guy like Plutarch writes with a massive slant, and because the average ancient historian was one of maybe 5 guys, he's often all we've got. The average modern historian, by contrast, does the actual rigorous scholarship required to get concrete information out of historical sources. I'm no historian, and I have little exposure to historiography, but even I can tell this is a ridiculous way to look at history.

> Contrast Xenophon with Mary Beard, who studied at Cambridge and now teaches at Cambridge.

Sure, let's. What will we discuss? The quality of her scholarship? Inaccuracies in her work?

> She holds the same opinions as everyone else at Cambridge. She’s remarked before that, “I actually can’t understand what it would be to be a woman without being a feminist.” This seems like a peculiar failing for an ancient historian.

Clearly that was too much to hope for. We're discussing "wokeness" or whatever. I don't see what it has to do with her body of work. Anyway, she's obviously saying she can't understand contemporary women who are not feminists, but maybe that flew over the author's head.

> I don’t know if she’s ever talked publicly about religion or democracy or climate change or immigration, but I could tell you exactly what she thinks about these things anyway. So why would you bother reading what she thinks about Rome?

Because she knows more about Rome than I do, obviously. She's a historian, not a political pundit. Anyway, I thought reading books for entertainment was "ridiculous," but here you are, reading about Rome. That's entertainment. It's okay—I like Rome too. You don't have to pretend like you're reading about the second Punic war to "cultivate wisdom." You can admit you enjoy it.

> There are hundreds of people with just as much experience of the human condition as Xenophon who have written great books throughout the millennia […] Bernal Díaz del Castillo was a conquistador who wrote about conquering the Aztec Empire. […] Have you read all of these? If not, why would you even consider picking up another book written by another Cambridge professor?

Right, but those aren't historians. Those are memoirists, and their accounts of their own lives are not reliable. Bernal Díaz del Castillo the conquistador was not a neutral observer of the Aztec Empire.

Gee, if only there were some rigorous, academic discipline where experts (perhaps Cambridge professors) sifted through primary sources to discover the truth…

> you can’t find [people with "unique experiences and perspectives"] by traveling around the world. The world is too hyperconnected now, and everyone is converging to the same opinions.

Go downtown and sit next to the first person you see begging on the street. I guarantee they've had experiences which would astonish you, and you won't even have travelled outside the city limits. Honestly, some people are so quick to assume they know everything.