This post was first sent to my newsletter on January 10th, 2023. You really ought to subscribe :) I took close to a year to finish two of the books from last years reading list. That’s because I was reading them, in tiny bits, in small chunks, a day at a time I was already reading a poem a day and then some time early last year I serendiptioustly ran into this Ryan Holiday post, which spoke to the virtues and pleasures of page-a-day books and daily wisdom....
This post was first sent to my newsletter on December 11th, 2022. You really ought to subscribe :) Hello, hello, it me! :) With all that is going on in my life, I don’t have the will or wherewithal to compile the annual reading list this year. So I’ll keep sending you folks, the lists that I come across and find compelling enough to share. I’ve always ended my annual books-to-read list with the Marginalian....
Alternate Subtitle: The Best Advice I Could Give You About Reading Lots of Books. via a Tom Gauld Book1 Ever so often, after one of my reading updates on social media, some of my young friends ask me how I get so much reading done. So, I decided to answer it here for posterity and then just point folk here. You are not me. a. I am a book worm....
Stolen from Tom Gauld’s Tumblr. click pic to embiggen …
GRRM in his latest not-a-blog-post, references this video on the two types of authors, he lumps writer-folk into. Just like him, I try to structure and outline what I write, I really do, and just like him, I can do it fairly ok, and still never really enjoy the process. I never quite understood why, until I realised I was a gardener. This also helped me understand, why the recent move to the Zettelkasten process is helping me write without the stress that I previously used to encounter when I attempted writing something even a teensy bit long or complex....
Just a little note to mark the beginning of my Zettelkasten journey. While I’ve always had a commonplace book of sorts, all my life, and I’ve always taken tons of notes on books I pay attention to, I’ve never really been able to come up with a way of writing what I think syntopically. Or I can, but its like pulling teeth. Writing what I learnt in Antifragile, took months, and a lot of cursing through gritted teeth....
Read and Be Merry, over on Tumblr, has this perfect list of books to read, before you die. It’s pretty short, so I’m cribbing it here in its entirety. Any book you want Don’t read books you don’t want to read That’s it Congratulations you did it! This shall be my advice to all folk interested in there next book, henceforth! P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list! Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!...
My idols have feet of clay, as usual. The book is one of those, do as I say, not as I do books. I learnt about his abusive behaviour about a month after reading the book. While I absolutely loved reading it, I cannot in good conscience suggest you buy it anymore. Hopefully the clip I linked to, should be enough, because what he did share in the talk, is worth emulating, even if he himself, didn’t....
This was so much fun! If I had teachers or mentors like Kip Thorne in my youth, I’d have never had such a crippling fear of mathematics or the hard sciences. I’d have never plagued by doubt and fear, that I was not smart enough or good enough. I have just one note to share. This is Kip as he closes the book … Every time I watch Interstellar and browse back through this book, I’m amazed at the enormous variety of science they contain....
Just finished John McPhee’s, Draft No. 4. I could pithily summarise it as … Practice a lot of things. Work at finding your thing. Practice you thing (lots! deeply! a fuckton.) Work within established rules. Bend the rules to fit your thing. Break the rules once you know your thing deeply! McPhee writes about the craft of writing. But the advice could apply broadly to any creative endeavour. This series of essays and lessons and backstory was also hugely confirming to me....