I'm EE major and feel tired to read books too. My solution is reading the book, optionally listening to the book, and taking notes together. I feel that taking notes can force me to understand what I read. When I can't compose the notes, I ask LLM or read the thing again or Brave/DuckDuckGo it. I use Neovim to takes notes in LaTeX and Piper with Elleo/pied for TTS BTW.
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2026
20 points (88.5% liked)
No Stupid Questions
49801 readers
756 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Have you tried using YouTube to learn different topics?
Before ChatGPT became popular, yes
I would suggest to watch a YouTube video/class about that topic before reading it in the book. I hope that this technique works out for you.
Can't really help you. I could never make myself do homework or do the required reading. It's a miracle I got a diploma out of it. I sure as heck didn't get the degree.
My mental health was in the toilet (metaphorically) and I didn't really recognise or understand that at the time. I'm still unofficially diagnosed for attention span disorders, but I claim "pretty fricking obvious" on that.
The depression was a side effect of the pressure of being unable to do what as needed and basically started shutting down what I could still do.
I spent a lot of time telling myself the odds that I was somehow magically going to make it through, but I didn't.
In the end, rather than struggle on for another year, I went and got a job instead. In today's job market, I'm not sure I would have got one, but at the time it was somewhat easier. Nevertheless, it was not a well-paid job. But it served as a stepping stone to a better one.
I never did fully address my mental health though, and that bit me quite severely a decade and a half down the line.
Hint, hint.
You may need help other than "How do I force myself to read these books?"
Well, I think that too but mental illness is considered an insult where I live. Once I was all alone and not being with my parents, my mom went super angry and yelled at me which could be translated in English as fuck off you sick brain, depression patient. It is considered as something spiritual and you cannot express that. Even being attracted to same gender too is considered a mental illness by my parents and I guess, I would be left undiagnosed and untreated cuz even if I made them agree, the therapies are expensive and most of the time the psychiatrists and therapists will just say "read the scripture, do your prayers, marry" like wtf, why am I paying you? This shit is eating me up and it feels like I am being destined to ruin my life. I try to make myself believe that life is good and I am fine but there is something in me that screams no, you are not fine, world is shit, you are shit too. Sometimes I wanna end myself but I cannot cuz if I fail, I can also end up in jail.
I mean yeah, it's work. It's not going to be fun. Building up tolerance for things that "aren't fun" is a skillset. You have to develop it over time. Make yourself read an hour once a week for a month. Then up it two hours. Then up it to three hours. Etc.
I was thinking but now the quizzes and exams are arriving so I go in panic mode like oh man! I have to read this much chapters and this chapter is so big, how will I read, and so this leaves me demotivated.
If you're gonna eat a whale, you gotta do it one bite at a time.
It would help if you are curious about the subject matter. Curiosity is an amazing motivator for reading.
What secrets does the book contain? What is it going to teach you about the universe? What parts of this book do you already understand?
What's the chance there's something in that book that will help you reframe something else in your life with new information?
What information in the book is going to be on the test?
If you want to know the answers to those questions, or the other questions that you might have floating around in your head, the only way to get them is to read the book.
Don't read it because you're being forced to read it. Read it because you want to know more. You want to be the kind of person who knows things. And the only way to actually know things, to have crystalline knowledge, is to read the books that contain the information that the people that have come before you have sorted out and assembled for you to absorb.
Surely you have a goal in life. You wouldn't be forcing yourself to study in college if you weren't trying to reach a goal. Reading these books are parts of the path that you're taking to reach your goal.
If you can internalize this concept and apply it to those books, reading those books is not going to be a chore. It will become fun. It will become exciting. You will read faster and flip through pages faster and train yourself on how to absorb information quickly.
People achieve what they believe they are supposed to achieve. They go in the direction that seems most right to them.
Seems like reading these books are the right direction for you, and once you make it through, your mental muscle will be much more defined and impressive for the effort.
Pomodoro.
You can do just about anything for 20 mins. So set a timer and read for 20mins. Then you get to stop. Then set another timer and take 20 mins off. Then 20 reading again and so on.
One you are in the groove with that, then you reduce the off-time to 15 mins, then 10 and finally 5 mins - so 20 mins reading and 5 mins break and repeat.
Pomodoro helped me too. Tomato is the best: https://github.com/nsh07/Tomato and it's available on F-Droid.
At lot of it comes down to attitude. I remember a coach I heard responding to someone who said "I find it impossible to get out of bed when my alarm goes off. All I want to do is hit the snooze" and the coach said something like this, "Really? All it takes to get out of bed when your alarm goes off is to put your feet on the floor and stand up. If you woke up completely tired in the middle of the night but your bed was on fire I bet you would have no problem getting right out. That means you can easily get out of bed as soon as you decide its what you need to do. Decide the night before, when that alarm goes off in the morning you will put your feet on the floor and stand right up."
Yeah, "just do it". Mental health is fake and has no impact on your body. /S
Create the situation where there is nothing to do except reading.
Make the time. Make an appointment with yourself. Put the books to the place where you plan to read them. Shut off everything else, computer, laptop, music. Don't put a clock near you. It's not about "getting through this chore". Focus on reading. If it's a room with a window, the rising and setting of the sun will give you enough of a clue how early or late it is.
I just don’t feel attracted to those books.
Boohoo. Do it.
I like reading different type of books, not them
Sometimes you gotta do things you don't like.
Maybe try to find people to study with. Preferably from your class, but even setting up a few hours a week with any other students to have coffee together and just read in a quiet space can help you stay on task. Make use of your library and treat it like a job.
People spend too much time doing everything in the same physical space, and having books downloaded on devices doesn't help at all. How is your boring textbook supposed to compete with the universe of more attractive activities on your computer? Create an environment for yourself that facilitates study. Structure your life around it.
The CS books are boring, mostly. I was lucky in that I loved everything about the major- but working on actual code problems is where the joy has always been for me. Any other required book, in any other course? Nope.
The odd thing that worked for me was a comfortable chair (proper lazy boy) and isolating the world and distractions. Classical music pumped in via proper buds/cans- but not piano, and nothing with vocals. I had to make that book my whole world.
Its an ADHD thing I think.. I’ve also since learned the phrase “structured procrastination,” so maybe look into that term.
This sounds crazy but tell yourself "wow this is really interesting".
You can't make yourself do it. That's like dividing by zero. You can choose to do it. Do you want to learn the topic? If so, you can choose to start reading the book.
Isn't CS supposed to be kinda fun? I mean, put interactive. Learn something, then immediately put it into practice and troubleshoot it?
Or is your educational system the stupid kind, where you just memorize shit in books and spit it back out with no expectation you know what it means?
I used to love it before going into it but when I went, I lost all my interest in it and especially since everything just revolves around AI, it feels like I am contributing to the humanity's destruction.
That might definitely be dampening your motivation, no?
But there is a crisis in programming now, as people are figuring out exactly how to use AI to program (a different task than keeping bosses & investors happy.) I think programming might be fun again eventually, but maybe not.
Yeah I like learning retro languages like Pascal, Fortran, and other old ones and doing things that I wanna do rather than integrating AI into every single piece of code. Everything we study these days are discussed through the lens of AI and everyone just want to do things with AI, into AI. Even some teachers create exams using ChatGPT.
Yup. It's kind of an open question that you want to do programming if its just going to be baby sitting AI. I wish I could give you an answer, but I'm simultaneously not a programmer and can't see into the future. I definitely know that the mindsets of an old school programmer and a modern vibe monkey are RADICALLY different; you may be suited for one and not the other. I´d see if you can find people making educated guesses about the future of programming and then decide if you want to take part in it.