Substrate

Let’s talk about the many shapes that reading (and readers) can take. I started this mini-essay by revisiting some old notes about strategies for dealing...

Over the past eight years, one thing that’s different is that I take longer breaks. I’ll sometimes go months without writing, which is not something I used to do. I used to write every day. I still take a lot of notes, but I think I allow myself more time to be receptive to the world, as opposed to always worrying about saying something. I think it’s very much a poet’s novel, which means it’s basically—a woman stands out in a field thinking about other times she stood out in a field. And I think a lot of my energy when living in the city was going towards the performance of being human. That idea of “Hello! Look, I got dressed today. Ta-da!”

Whether you met your reading goals or not, I’m sure you did your best.

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An idea for iOS and Android

A book is a flexible mirror of the mind. Its overall size and proportions, the color and texture of the paper, the sound it makes as the pages turn, and the smell of the paper, adhesive and ink, all blend with the size and form and placement of the type to reveal a little about the world in which it was made. If the book appears to be only a paper machine, produced at their own convenience by other machines, only machines will want to read it.

This might be mistaken for sentimentality, but this feeling has little to do with the hallucinogenic loveliness of print. It’s about ownership. It’s about remembering where you were, and perhaps who you were, when you read something.

(Did you know you could play video games in the morning before work? I certainly didn’t. But you can.) I still struggle with instinct, the motivation to do the most, the feeling that I’m not a good reader if I’m not cycling through new books every few days. I want to keep slowing down, and keep giving words the time they deserve.

Writer Ted Gioia on how important high-quality inputs are to mainting high-quality output.

And close reading is intimately tied to the kind of “close thinking” that math requires, especially the more advanced, theoretical kind of math. You need to be able to pass back and forth flexibly between the micro and the macro. You need to see both the big picture and the minutiae, both the forest and the trees.

This quarter’s experiment has helped me see that every class we attend, every word we write, every article we read is where we are going. We are already there. ​ I do not want that experience to feel like some unrelenting ultra-marathon. I want it to feel alive and loving, nourishing and compelling. I want to feel hungry and then full and then hungry again. ​ May reading, like all things we do, become an invitation to experience the miracle that we are alive — still, and in the first place. And may we use the very act of reading itself to challenge the idea that life is about collecting the most knowledge or arriving at some finish line or final page. ​ I felt a greater sense of agency because I got to decide what to read each time I read. Choosing intuitively meant I looked forward to making a choice about what to read. ​ This quarter’s experiment has taught me that I must do both to become the scholar I want to be — a person who can hold uncertainty as well as she can hold knowledge, who can be slow and discerning, and insatiably curious and eager at the same time.

relearning the pleasures of reading for myself, which was part of learning how to be in my own company. ​ To most readers the notes would be nothing more than an eyesore, but to put them in circulation would somehow manifest versions of myself that no longer felt familiar, and seemed to risk preceding me.

have to make a conscious effort to balance the tempo between your ability to absorb a page

but jet lag has a way of making even comfortable beds in comfortable neighborhoods seem foreign. There should be a term for this sort of chain reaction of literary progeny: you read a book that forces you to read a book that forces you to read a book, the textual equivalent of a wild night out. but I just want to fade the instinct a little bit, to train myself for more durable content.

we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access reassurance.

Even as I grew out of midday naps, I had to find creative ways to stay up reading past my bedtime. ​ As a young bookworm, almost nothing could stop me from reading when I was supposed to be doing anything else, sleeping included.

The reason I've found conversation more valuable than reading recently (inspired by my chats with @kevinakwok, to name one) is that reading is a uni-directional and often brittle bundle of information flow. Conversation adapts in real-time.— Eugene Wei (@eugenewei) April 17, 2018

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book. —George Steiner Photographer Bill Hayes wrote a nice essay about Oliver Sacks’ love of words, and he’s been posting images of Sacks’ hand-annotated

“But if you want to become a better developer, and you want to do it by reading books, and you ask me what books you should read, I am going to recommend that you read The Odyssey. And Ogilvy on Advertising. And The Fire Next Time. And The Elements of Color. And maybe some Murakami and Vonnegut, sure. And Claudia Rankine and Herman Melville and René Girard and Italo Calvino. And Plath and DuBois and McCullough and García Márquez.”

Any company that cares about their employees’ bodies enough to have a chef and a gym, should also offer something for the mind. Imagine how it changes the recruiting conversation to say “we have an onsite independent bookstore” as one of the amenities.

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