Reading

From a Ryan Holiday post on journalling, “I don’t journal to “be productive.” I don’t do it to find great ideas, or to put down prose I can later publish. The pages aren’t intended for anyone but me. Morning pages are, as author Julia Cameron puts it, “spiritual windshield wipers.” It’s the most cost-effective therapy I’ve ever found. To quote her further…: ‘Once we get those muddy, maddening, confusing thoughts [nebulous worries, jitters, and preoccupations] on the page, we face our day with clearer eyes.’” ...

From What Does Immersing Yourself in a Book Do to Your Brain? … Reading allows us to try on, for a few moments, what it truly means to be another person, with all the similar and sometimes vastly different emotions and struggles that govern others’ lives. The reading circuitry is elaborated by such simulations; so also our daily lives, and so also the lives of those who would lead others. The novelist Jane Smiley worries that it is just this dimension in fiction that is most threatened by our culture: “My guess is that mere technology will not kill the novel. . . . But novels can be sidelined. . . . When that happens, our society will be brutalized and coarsened by people . . . who have no way of understanding us or each other.” It is a chilling reminder of how important the life of reading is for human beings if we are to form an ever more realized democratic society for everyone. ...

Riffing off last weeks mail on reading, Scott H Young has a really thorough, helpful post on how to take notes, while reading. Starting with the why, and then onto various strategies on how to take notes, the post is well worth your time. P.S. If you like my emails, forward it to your friends and ask them to subscribe too!

Busy with exams this month, so leaving you with this Austin Kleon post with tonnes of quotes on reading. Here’s a few of my favourite ones … “You can’t be a good writer without being a devoted reader.” —J.K. Rowling “Read, read, read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read!” —William Faulkner ...

Jeremy Andenberg, on the importance of Reading Plans: Creates room for mastery of a subject. This is perhaps my favorite part of having a reading plan. We’ve made the case multiple times here on Art of Manliness that everyone should strive to be “T-shaped”; that is, you should have a breadth of general knowledge, but also mastery in a single topic or subject or skill. Such mastery provides satisfaction and self-confidence in spades. ...

As a kid, I read a lot of books above my level of comprehension. More to show off and show folks my “smartness” and give off that snooty “I am a well read boy” air1 than from any sense of love or learning. I know better now (I hope, I do) :) But two books from those days will always stay with me. One was my father’s science textbook, which I no longer have or remember the title of. I used it for four years in high school to understand what I was learning. The book was my secret weapon :) The language in that old textbook was far more engaging and lively than the teachers in class. And it was beautiful with all those black and white line drawings, and anecdotes of the folks who made those amazing discoveries. (Faraday and Tesla and Watts and Madam Curie). It actually was a textbook from before science became “Science”; when it was Natural Philosophy Despite years of searching, I haven’t found it again. The closest textbook of that style I could point you to, would be Thompson’s Calculus. ...