It's not obsolete, more foundational and representative of one viewpoint out of several. I'm not qualified particularly to say more. I am enjoying Godel, Escher, Bach in the extreme but I haven't reached the parts that are supposedly more troublesome. I haven't taken any math in some time so I'll probably attempt to draw big picture conclusions more than follow individual arguments. We'll see. I challenged myself on hubski a month or so ago to read 30 books this summer and I'm at 26. I imagine I'll get closer to 50. Will make a big post at the end with suggestions and so on.
jesus. Do you enjoy/retain those books? I read fairly slowly, I guess you could call it leisurely, but when I'm assigned a book at school or have a deadline to read it, I'm paralyzed and can't do it at all- certainly not while enjoying it at the same time.
Well, sure. Compartmentalized recall. It goes without saying that I enjoy them, it's free knowledge. I don't understand why the source of a book has to do with your enjoyment of it, but that seems to be a pretty common phenomenon with school books.
I'm not aware that it's a term per se. I meant it literally. I've read around 45 books so far this summer and I couldn't sit here and name them all but if you named the title of one I could give you the plot, the characters or events, what I thought about it, etc. To me that counts as retention, because your memory is rarely going to be tested in the former fashion.