Then, in my late-teens and early-twenties, I stumbled upon Ryan Holiday’s idea of reading to lead and Nassim Taleb’s notion of self-education via an antifragile and insatiable curiosity. Naval Ravikant once said, “Read what you love, until you love to read.” That is what happened in my youth. He’d finish a book and then I’d read it-alongside things like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings, of course. The order in which I’ve listed the answers to the question above is significant it is how they came to me as I answered the question in my notebook, and it mirrors the evolution in my own reasons for reading so voraciously. The fourth was less intuitive and came as a bit of surprise to me. Those three answers to the question of, “Why read?”, are straightforward. Third, people use reading as means to collect a variety of lenses and perspectives-to see differently and in a more interesting manner. To accumulate insight and grow their expertise. In choosing what to read next, I was forced to examine a deeper question: Why do I read in the first place? In fact, why does anyone read? I came up with four answers.įirst, and most obviously, people read for entertainment. (For the interested, I decided to start six books: The King James version of The Bible, Minding Mind by Thomas Cleary, The Quest by Daniel Yergin, Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, and The Language Construction Kit by Mark Rosenfelder.) But this opportunity also provoked pause. It’s an understatement to say that I was unreasonably excited at the prospect. And this, in turn, granted me an unprecedented opportunity: I got to start multiple new books, all at the same time. I’m happy to say that, over the last weekend, I cleared the last of them. (I’ve got to have something to read…)īut the ordeal is over. Whilst that rule was in effect, I contented myself with a re-read of Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea Quartet and then a re-read of Stephen Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, both of which I was already familiar with and didn’t need to take notes on. After finishing Girard’s Things Hidden, I gave myself a rule: I can’t start another book until I’ve got through the backlog. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World by Rene Girard.īecause I couldn’t bear the thought of declaring book-bankruptcy and not taking notes on these texts, I got serious about the problem. The Courage to Be Disliked by Fumitake Kogaīeyond Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Gunaratana The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets by Benoit Mandelbrot The Telomere Effect by Elizabeth Blackburn The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de MesquitaĮnergy A Beginner’s Guide by Vaclav SmilĬonfessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins In The Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrentīeyond Economics and Ecology by Ivan Illich The Mediterranean in the Ancient World by Fernand Braudel Philosophical Remarks by Ludwig Wittgenstein The Architecture of Community by Leon Krier Hitler A Study in Tyranny by Alan Bullock Volume Three of The Complete Works of Primo Levi The full list, in order of consumption (because I don’t shine enough light on what I’m currently reading and enjoying): Between the 9th June and the 27th October of this year I read thirty-four books, and by the end of October I had taken notes on none of them. Normally, it stays within manageable bounds and I can clear the backlog relatively quickly. So I avoid it, usually with the result that I have a lot of books to review and capture notes on. The above process has friction deliberately built in, the biggest source of it being that it takes a long time to type up the passages I end up thinking are noteworthy. txt files that I type up when I review a book. Then it goes into a finished pile, to await incorporation into my commons, which is a digital archive of. When I finish the book, I note the date on the final page and record my immediate observations, impressions, and questions-a practice I picked up from Montaigne. As I go, I make infrequent marginalia, highlight interesting parts, and fold corners (top corner fold represents a notable passage or idea, bottom corner fold represents an idea or author to be researched in the future). Once I’ve selected a book-always of the dead-tree kind-I begin reading it, with pen in hand. When it comes to reading, I have a process.
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