Reading

Treat your reading list like a river

There's definitely a role for such techniques; but in the end, the only way to deal with a too-many-needles problem is to confront the fact that it's insoluble – that you definitely won't be fitting everything in. (Of course some such problems, where just scraping a living feels impossible, demand political solutions too – a topic for another time.) It's not a question of rearranging your to-do list so as to make space for…

The violent act of reading

I had a series of long conversations with my wonderful colleagues today. And as I was reflecting on them, what surprised me was the number of times I kept talking about reading: why they should read, why I read, how reading has helped me, and all the endless virtues of reading. I think everybody wants to read. But…

Reading books is the most glorious pastime

One more comment from the heart: I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised. Homo Ludens dances, sings, produces meaningful gestures, strikes poses, dresses up, revels, and performs elaborate rituals. I don't wish to diminish the significance of these distractions—without them human life would pass in unimaginable monotony and, possibly, dispersion and defeat.…

An AI reading companion

A simple app to read eBooks with an AI reading companion by the side.

Build something you care about and benefits others

Everyone seems to want “scale” and “impact” and seems to think that means having a massive operation. But doing something right on a small scale breeds imitators—it is like a seed. Great Books institutions were always small, but they have been enormously influential. There’s nothing more “scalable” than wheat or bread, but no one owns all the wheat nor the bread-making recipes. It doesn’t take much thinking to see that this…

You don't know much

The more deeply I read, the less I have to say. It's funny how that works. I notice that my own thoughts, my own experiences, even my own relationships aren't as uniquely interesting as I want them to be. I still value the life I've built, but I recognize how much more it could be. By reading deeply, I realize how much more interesting I could be. That's worth passing on.

AI and the compression of everything

This reflection was sparked by this tweet from Peter Steinberger, whom you should absolutely follow on Twitter and read on his blog. I came across his account recently and started reading his writing. For an amateur web coder, his blog is surprisingly rich with practical, thoughtful tips. I've also been poking around…

LLMs as your reading partner

One area where I've found large language models to be remarkably useful is while reading, especially when I'm reading difficult, dense, or intellectually demanding books. Take Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, for example. It's an extraordinarily rich book, but also incredibly dense and abstruse. This was well…

How to read more

I read somewhere that authors are voracious readers. I would imagine so. When I read, I also feel the urge to create something of my own. Likewise, I don’t think I’ve ever come across a writer who doesn’t read. Come to think of it, reading and writing are one and the same. Off the top of my head, I can already think of three similarities. First, unlike TV or video games, you don’t get instant gratification. That’s why you…

Reading as escalation

A few thoughts on reading.

Henry Oliver on how to have good taste

When we prioritise our own reaction to art, we assume that those reactions are about the art. But if you are misreading a piece of writing, without knowing it, your feelings will be more to do with you than with the writing, and thus not a response to the writing at all. When we misunderstand what we read, our feelings make us pay more attention to what is familiar in the writing than to what is unfamiliar. Thus believing…

C.S. Lewis on reading old books

None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done…

Kafka on reading

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us…

Why read?

Rose: So what's happened to us that gives us that kind of society in which people of the best young minds have not read? Harold Bloom: Well, the screen. The screen, the screen. Television screen, movie screen, the television screen, the movie screen, and now overwhelmingly, computer screen, and yes, in particular, the great gray ocean of the Internet, which frightens me deeply because if young people go into, or onto,…