Books. 1 essay and 14 notes.

Yuen Yuen Ang is one of the most thoughtful commentators on all things China, and everything she writes—including her books—is a must-read if you wish to understand the phenomenon that is China. She just made her book, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, free and openly downloadable.

As I’ve mentioned, I have an enduring fascination with China, and much of what I know about it is informed by the mental models and heuristics from Yuen Yuen Ang’s work. I highly recommend downloading the book and reading it.

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There are so many books and articles I want to read, videos I want to watch, podcasts I want to listen to, and posts I want to write. But my desires always clash headfirst with reality: time is finite, while the list of things I want to consume is infinite. ​For the longest time, I felt anxious and constantly looked…

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…

I was re-reading Stephen Fry’s Mythos and A.C. Grayling’s Philosophy and Life, and both books reminded me of something I think is still underrated: LLMs as reading companions. Both books are filled with things I don’t know enough about. In the case of Mythos, it’s Greek mythology. In the case of Philosophy and Life…

True dat. Even commentators who spend a lot of time fretting about the modern-day ‘crisis of distraction’ rarely seem to grasp the full implications of this. For example, you hear it said that attention is a ‘finite resource’, and finite it certainly is: according to one calculation, by the psychologist Timothy Wilson…

What an inspiring man and what an inspiring story:

“I was facing this issue for a long time. The elephants were getting more aggressive. I lived in fear of them attacking the library. Finally, I decided that if I shifted it, I would also move my house. Protecting the knowledge the library gave was important.” He did not want the learning it stood for to be disrupted.

So he shifted the library a few kilometres, though still within the forested region of Edamalakudi. “The very week I left,” he says, tuskers “demolished the whole old structure in minutes.” But, he adds proudly, “I’d moved all the books out of there.” Being a forest dweller, he understood that something was going on with the great beasts. And bears no bitterness towards them. Moving, though, was a wise decision as they ravaged the entire structure. And Chinnathambi had no wish to literally discover the elephant in the room.

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

Zena Hitz on great books.

Rachel Christine on whether books can teach you anything:

This is perhaps tangential, but I think the “books can’t teach you anything” argument comes from the accurate observation that most modern novels honestly can’t teach you anything. Classic literature was consumed with the struggle between good and evil; it obsessed over the question of humanity and its greater purpose; it scrutinized what it means to find true happiness. It was philosophy wrapped in the glory of a very human story. George Eliot knew that. Many modern writers do not. I know some who do, but they’re bound by the market and feel forced to write what sells. It’s time to repopularize excellent literature.

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…

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? Just do it! 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…

Beautiful perspective. 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…

Reflections on Harold Bloom’s interview with Charlie Rose on why should one read.