Reading well is an endurance sport. I sometimes talk to people who want to become serious readers and so pick up Kafka’s The Trial or something like that—it is about as pleasant as running a marathon untrained.
Wow. It's October 1st, and this might be the best article I will read all month.
So much in there deeply inspires me, both on reading techniques and on the intellectual rigor required to craft environments for deep thinking. The quality of our thinking is not determined by the volume we read, but by the rigor of our engagement and the questions we dare to chase.
I read Mortimer Adler's book when I was 26 (I am now 32) and have since become an avid reader, starting around 100 books a year and finishing 40. I am extremely picky as well, but your piece pointed to sources I have not yet tried.
I am most struck by your embrace of "real confusion" as a signpost of progress.
Your internet-less "default life" is something I want to adopt. I have just returned from a week with 200 humans in a French castle without phones or computers, and I still marvel at the quality of thoughts and interactions that environment made possible.
I would be curious to learn more about your routine. How, for example, do you remain in exchange with other thinkers and this community while protecting your focus? I also wonder if you have a retention system for organizing what you read (beyond writing about it)—any particular tools for thought you use?
I really like the way you describe reading as an endurance sport that you have to train for. My sister and I are both reading a fantasy book right now, but she feels embarrassed by it because she fears it makes her look dumb. I asked her if she thought I was dumb for reading it, but she said no because I read other, "less dumb" things as well.
I don't agree with her, but your essay made me think about why she may feel this way. Sometimes I read to be entertained, the way I watch reality tv, and sometimes I read to learn. And I know that by reading things purely for joy, it keeps me reading when I may have less mental capacity to be really working out hard in the mental gym. If you see anyone that's in immaculate shape, even they fluctuate in their dedication to the gym based on what their personal lives allow for (Hugh Jackman will talk about how when he trains for being Wolverine in X-men he only eats chicken breast and that is not how he looks in his regular life). This is why I often read a book that's easy on my mental processing at the same time as one that's more difficult to keep me excited about reading. If I ever accidentally read only one book, and it's difficult and loses my attention (aka, I try to read a book akin to the experience your friend had reading The Trial, and then fall off the wagon for a while) I have a few entry-books that get me back in the swing of things easily (often something by David Sedaris, or a romance/fantasy). They're similar to getting myself back in the gym after not going for a while. I have found this helps with the fatigue, and act as 1) a fail-safe workout plan for when I've been skimping at the gym or 2) built-in rest days when training.
I have never had someone describe the searching/chasing dichotomy and it's beautiful. Once again, you're always pushing me to think, and it's really cool when I see you address things in your essays that I talk to about my friends, but add new perspective / citations I hadn't seen before. When you wrote "But with good writing, this is an illusion: it keeps getting more and more interesting the deeper I process it"... this is how I feel about your work. I often re-read your essays or even print them out and give them to friends after I highlight them.
PS- Do you publish your reading list? Would love to see what 50 books made the cut this year.
Wow. It's October 1st, and this might be the best article I will read all month.
So much in there deeply inspires me, both on reading techniques and on the intellectual rigor required to craft environments for deep thinking. The quality of our thinking is not determined by the volume we read, but by the rigor of our engagement and the questions we dare to chase.
I read Mortimer Adler's book when I was 26 (I am now 32) and have since become an avid reader, starting around 100 books a year and finishing 40. I am extremely picky as well, but your piece pointed to sources I have not yet tried.
I am most struck by your embrace of "real confusion" as a signpost of progress.
Your internet-less "default life" is something I want to adopt. I have just returned from a week with 200 humans in a French castle without phones or computers, and I still marvel at the quality of thoughts and interactions that environment made possible.
I would be curious to learn more about your routine. How, for example, do you remain in exchange with other thinkers and this community while protecting your focus? I also wonder if you have a retention system for organizing what you read (beyond writing about it)—any particular tools for thought you use?
I love this so much. My reading system is simple, intentionally loose, yet quietly structured: I read what I want, but not necessarily when I want: https://www.whitenoise.email/p/the-rule-of-3-books-fiction-facts
I really like the way you describe reading as an endurance sport that you have to train for. My sister and I are both reading a fantasy book right now, but she feels embarrassed by it because she fears it makes her look dumb. I asked her if she thought I was dumb for reading it, but she said no because I read other, "less dumb" things as well.
I don't agree with her, but your essay made me think about why she may feel this way. Sometimes I read to be entertained, the way I watch reality tv, and sometimes I read to learn. And I know that by reading things purely for joy, it keeps me reading when I may have less mental capacity to be really working out hard in the mental gym. If you see anyone that's in immaculate shape, even they fluctuate in their dedication to the gym based on what their personal lives allow for (Hugh Jackman will talk about how when he trains for being Wolverine in X-men he only eats chicken breast and that is not how he looks in his regular life). This is why I often read a book that's easy on my mental processing at the same time as one that's more difficult to keep me excited about reading. If I ever accidentally read only one book, and it's difficult and loses my attention (aka, I try to read a book akin to the experience your friend had reading The Trial, and then fall off the wagon for a while) I have a few entry-books that get me back in the swing of things easily (often something by David Sedaris, or a romance/fantasy). They're similar to getting myself back in the gym after not going for a while. I have found this helps with the fatigue, and act as 1) a fail-safe workout plan for when I've been skimping at the gym or 2) built-in rest days when training.
I have never had someone describe the searching/chasing dichotomy and it's beautiful. Once again, you're always pushing me to think, and it's really cool when I see you address things in your essays that I talk to about my friends, but add new perspective / citations I hadn't seen before. When you wrote "But with good writing, this is an illusion: it keeps getting more and more interesting the deeper I process it"... this is how I feel about your work. I often re-read your essays or even print them out and give them to friends after I highlight them.
PS- Do you publish your reading list? Would love to see what 50 books made the cut this year.
Thank you for giving me a new use case for LLMs!