Reading. 16 notes.

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…

From Nonrequired Reading by Wisława Szymborska: 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…

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.

Latham Turner:

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.

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…

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…

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…

Amen. Amen a 100 times!

“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 deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” ― Franz Kafka

Hat tip to @kpxas.

Also see Maria Popova.

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