Last week when I was in a hospital waiting room, I knocked out A Brief History of Time in one sitting. That thing's been on my bookshelf for at least ten years untouched. I'm not sure it significantly enhanced my life (though it helped my understanding of the fabric of the universe, I guess?), but it felt like an accomplishment.

I spent a good chunk of the last few years in physical therapy. Before sessions in the waiting room, and during the period of the session where they're applying heat/cooling or electricity I got a lot of reading done.

I had a rule, broken recently and I need to restore it, of no electronics in my sitting room. Made it a very productive reading area as well. No laptop, tablet, kindle [0], or phone. At most I listened to music in it. Part of the problem was I started reading some programming books and wanted to code up things along with the text (like working through math exercises while reading a math book). I need to start handwriting the code and type it up at the desk later.

[0] It's a Kindle Fire in my case. Which offers some of the same distractions, despite being lower power, as a tablet or phone. I did use it in there when I was actually reading on it sometimes. But it's a risk.

> Part of the problem was I started reading some programming books and wanted to code up things along with the text (like working through math exercises while reading a math book).

I tagged along on my then-girlfriend's business trip to LA because I had never been to California. She had the car and work during the day so there wasn't much I could do until she got back in the evenings. I had brought along a book on perl and learned both perl syntax and regular expressions one afternoon. Having to check everything by hand until I got back home required that I really understood the syntax and helped me retain it in a way that I think would have been more difficult if I just had a computer telling me if it was right or wrong.

Yep. Practically, I learned to program mostly by reading BASIC listings back around 1990-1992 and would have time on my parents' computer in the afternoon/evening to try and type things up. A lot of my code was hypothetical (never executed).

In college at GT circa 2000, this was how the first CS course was also taught (with a pseudocode language). I liked it, I learned the ins and outs of data structures and algorithms (though not a specific language), but most student hated it. I've periodically handwritten substantial (but not huge, think 1-5k lines) amounts of code to good effect. Usually, when typed in the errors were mostly transcription errors. Of course, I also elided large repetitive sections and developed a shorthand (like I'd use indentation rather than noting every curly brace, used min..max notation, etc.).

I originally learned Haskell with this approach (I came across the notebook I'd used while preparing for my move earlier this year) as well, but that language is particularly well-suited to being handwritten compared to many other languages (it's brief, but not imprecise, and promotes algebraic reasoning).

> It's a Kindle Fire in my case. Which offers some of the same distractions, despite being lower power

A Kindle Fire is an Android tablet with a bad launcher and no Google services pre-installed. If you're not reading books that need a tablet (color, animations?, illustrations you want to zoom on), you'd probably do better with an eInk Kindle. They have a web browser, but at least the ones I've had, the browser is so terrible, it actively makes you not want to use it.

I agree, but I selected the Fire specifically for PDF reading, and its support for AnkiDroid and Rosetta Stone. And it was a lot cheaper than any other tablet I found.

And yeah, the browser is pretty mediocre so it's not a huge distraction, but it is a distraction for me.

I think you raised a valid point about "offers some of the same distractions."

I found I got less reading done (but more screen time) when I used an Android tablet (Kindle or Samsung) as my e-reader than I did when I use my dedicated SONY ebook reader.

Funnily enough, I got into the habit of reading books on my phone. It actually started to hurt my wrists, because I ended up reading every free moment I had.

Walking somewhere? Reading at the same time. Cooking? Reading. Eating food? Reading. Walking through the supermarket? Reading. Sitting on a bus? Reading. Lying down in bed, because I'm feeling tired? Reading.

If my phone had been waterproof I would've probably read in the shower/bath as well.

For the same reason, my ex always avoided food places with TVs in them whenever she could.

I hate going to restaurants or bars with friends/colleagues/family where the bar or restaurant has a TV showing whatever it is showing. Everyone inevitably gravitates to watching the TV rather than having a conversation. I can have dinner in front of a TV at home.