My Lifetime Reading Plan
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A long, long time ago, I did a degree in English literature. This was a bad name for it as a lot of it wasn't English. Or literature for that matter. But over the course of three years I must have read in the order of 300 seriously sized books / texts and a bunch of other secondary material.
Only a handful of memories stand out, out of a small swimming pool of ink. The Greek tragedies, some 20th century drama, and Chaucer.
What I really memorised though was what I _wrote_. My _essays_ are still easy to recall: parentheses in Thomas More; control of space in Ben Jonson; body integrity in Greek tragedy. I can still remember them 15 years on.
I didn't really like my English degree, and I probably shouldn't have done it, but I did gain a lot through the process of writing. I synthesised knowledge and developed my skill for spotting patterns. I forced myself to write original observations week in week out. I made myself start with an intimidating blank page and end with an artefact I could call my own.
(These things became part of my make-up as a software engineer, which is a job that rewards those willing to start from blank pages)
My advice is to match time spent reading with time spent writing. There's a reason why traditional pedagogy entails writing essays, not just sheer volume of reading. You are as smart as what you can write, not what books are on your shelf.
I shudder to think what AI is doing for today’s students. They don’t have to struggle thinking about _what_ to write anymore, and that struggle is where the growth and learning happen.
To second your path, the best software engineers are also good writers who can communicate their plans over writing. Your English degree probably helped you as much as any computer science degree.
Perhaps this is a limitation of my own brain physiology, or deficiencies in the approach I’ve taken to consuming the information, and others would have faired better in my place. But this experience has made me seriously doubt the effectiveness of such consumption if the goal is to learn, as the OP advocates.
Thankfully that wasn’t necessarily a goal for me personally, I was just satisfying my interest in the subject I care deeply about.
What’s the book?
I’ve never developed a good system for note-taking while I read, apart from marking up books and making marginal notes, which can be somewhat helpful. But I never developed the discipline of turning those into useful notes. My memory, which has never been good, has naturally gotten worse as I’ve gotten older and more sleep-deprived, so I now feel like most of my reading is retained for about twenty minutes after I’ve read something.
https://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Methods-Artificial-Intel...
I found my copy at Goodwill.
This part in particular is tricky, because debate is a specialized skill of its own, and most people who you might see publicly debate others on a given topic aren't (necessarily) experts in the topic, they're experts in debating it.
Story time: one example of how that forms is being a person with strongly held minority beliefs. I have had good friends who were the lone very conservative person among a university left-leaning crowd, or on the other side an avowed Maoist communist among again, just normal vaguely left-of-centre folks. Both of those people got into an argument every single day defending their basic outlooks on life; sometimes 10 arguments in a day. They built up a repertoire of points and phrases, heard the same objections and accusations over and over, and developed strategies over time to handle each of these.
In reality they each became experts at debating novices more than true debate experts, but you can see how their type of knowledge, and how it lived in their brains was totally different from reading a lot of books about the topics they knew about, and different from just developing expertise in those topics.
One thing that struck me in conversations with these people over time is that they sometimes came to not even really believe a fallback phrase they had developed and would use often, because they came to learn enough nuance to know how it was a flawed take, but they knew it would stop a drive-by-arguer in their tracks. It could make the driver-by realize they didn't know all the details and second-guess themselves, even when the actual details sometimes weren't so bad for them. But at that point, they've lost the debate, and the expert moves on.
A tangential point that comes to mind, is that I found that it takes quite a bit of knowledge in the first place to even discover and separate people to follow that bring informed thoughts and original conclusions on the subject from the artful bullshitters. And its frequently the latter that are more prominent at the first glance and it takes time to realize who you are dealing with.
If I look at my own life and career, as a college dropout who nevertheless attended for four years, both in my professional and my personal life most of what I know I either learned from books or from other people directly (or sometimes via YouTube). I don't see it as elitist for the OP to point out his prestigious education when making this point as some other commenters do, but rather intended to reinforce that even if you have the world's best college education it pales in comparison to what you can learn by simply giving yourself the space and time to think and reading through the source material upon which such an education would be based in some way, anyhow. To a large degree, what he's describing trying to attempt was the entire point of a classical liberal arts education, but our current institutions largely fail to actually provide such an education anymore.
What's so pretentious, ultimately, about sharing a methodology and the benefits of that methodology, when the source material is largely available to anyone for free or minimal cost via the Internet and their local library? I feel like it should be refreshing to know that there is still deep value in exploring the world through the written word without needing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on schooling. It's essentially the same thing that was said in the famous quote from Good Will Hunting: “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.”
So much of the writing about reading encourages people to use reading as a social activity, reading only what's new and popular, or to read quickly thinking that it's the volumes on your shelf that matter, this article is a somewhat refreshing take by making the very truthful point that you should take your time, read things that are old but important enough that people still remember them, and write about what you read and your observations.
For me, it's more the idea that reading is going to turn your life around somehow, or that just by reading the right classics you can make yourself a better person. That feels like a self-justification for pretention more than anything else - the literary equivalent of the "holds up spork" meme where you make something you're interested in into an entire character trait.
I think the idea of reading replacing an entire liberal arts education is also kind of laughable. I've done a lot of reading, and although my own formal education veered more towards engineering, I had friends who did the liberal arts properly. There's no real comparison between my casual reading of Dostoevsky ("a bit morose, wouldn't recommend") and someone who understands enough of his literary context that they can take his books apart and show you why everything is like it is. (That's not to say you can't learn these things as a lay person, just that there's a lot more to literary criticism and the wider liberal arts than just "go away and read".)
And here's an archive snapshot of the Conceptual Fiction (sci fi) one, which is now dead:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160305124258/http://conceptual...
The top comment here is about him giving the impression of being "massively up his own arse." Maybe -- but I think his attempts to create something useful for others, which I have found genuinely useful, outweighs that. What does it say that he's letting those attempts link-rot and writing on substack instead now?
I don't know. I just know he has good taste in literature.
The only way I've been able to sustain reading for more than a half hour without adverse postural effects is to lie on my side with an e-reader (+ pop-socket). In fact it's the primary reason I read mostly on Kindle - to assume this posture.
I've even gone as far as building a contraption which lets me lie flat underneath it, and read hand-free. The issue with both methods of lying down to read is of course that I fall asleep :) (so much so that I keep a book on my nightstand as a sleep aid).
Otherwise, reading feels worse than working at a computer. I'm hunched over, similar to using a phone. Or I'm holding the book up a little higher and hold that tension in my arms/shoulders/neck.
This makes even sitting at your computer for hours on end more bearable and you'll have less back/neck pain overall - nevermind all the other positive effects of working out
If you feel staying still doesn't help, moving around (or even walking around) should be fine.
I personally moved to audiobooks. It's slower, but made up for the fact that I can go for a walk, cook, clean the house, so it's much more time effective than sitting down to read for extended periods.
At some point I started listening to Youtube scary stories at night to wind down while cooking or running since it wasn't a big deal to miss out. And then I realized I could eventually maintain full concentration while multitasking and gave audiobooks another try successfully.
So maybe it's a muscle you have to exercise for some of us.
I tried a programme of taking notes every time I read a "serious" nonfiction book a few years ago and for me it sucked all the joy out of it.
Even when reading programming books I tend not to take notes – though I'll do practical exercises so that the skills stick.
Well I heard it said from Joyce experts that reading Finnegans Wake and Ulysses, which was intended to be read out loud, is an important part to unlock some of the meanings.
The example that brought it up was towards the end of the attempt to climb the Redhorn: "Soon they all stood once more on the flat shelf at the head of the steep slope where they had felt the first flakes of snow the night before." (The F in 'before' might not line up with the previous F's unless you've been reading out loud.)
Maybe I should just stop reading random books. Follow Oprah's book club or the commandant's reading list or something like that.
If you wanted to read it, surely someone else wants to as well. Then they can see for themselves that it's crap, without needing to have a new book produced for that.
> Maybe I should just stop reading random books
Sounds like a good idea if the trash can is your star rating for a significant fraction of them
Of course there are writers who write in any genre and produce really great stuff, but you're not likely to find them by picking books at random from Goodwill, by Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is crap) alone.
(though not a bad one either)
You'll never see all the places, or read all the books. But fortunately, not all are recommended.
To learn he's an American Jazz critic makes perfect sense, it's almost exactly who you would expect to be this pretentious.
Love it!
So worthless, yet he couldn't miss the opportunity to brag about his top-tier college education.
He's just saying that because any pleb can go to class, study, and get an A. Only snobby smartypants people can read an excessive number of books and reach "nirvana."
But yeah, reading a book about a subject doesn't get you anywhere near the ballpark of professors in that subject from any university at all.
Am I missing something here?
Our world leaders and billionaires have these conversations everyday. Many are well read.
If you're talking about having conversations in the same light as a Solvay Conference, sure. The context I got from the article is that they are talking about the former, not the latter.
You're not alone in your thinking!
Not to mention the fact that I have about zero fucks to spare for a critic who isn't a musician.
I mean, he's writing on Substack; I'm pretty sure that's a signup requirement for Substack.
But yeah. If you told me that this was, rather than someone's personal blog, a piece of first-person 'Frasier' fanfiction, I'd probably buy that.
One can argue that ±65% of blogging is first-person fan fiction.
TFA: "Most young people listen to new music and only become less interested in the current hits when they get older"
"I did the exact opposite. I learned the tradition and heritage first, and only then felt I had the proper perspective for the current day."
"I wasn’t quite as extreme in my music listening habits, but I still focused primarily on the tradition when I was learning how to be a pianist and critic. Today I’m much more focused on new music."
All this reading and it's right over his head his "most people x when it comes to music, i am not them" deeply contrasts proceeding to devote your life to "old people music." (sorry jazz fans)
It’s a great example of there being These Sorts Of People in all communities, classes, cultures, etc. it’s why I’ve gotta roll my eyes when someone implies that people that write software for a living are somehow impartial, infallible, logical, gods amongst men. We’ve got all this same shit going on in our professional community, just like everyone else. Remember Kenneth Reitz? How about the hoards of self-professed YouTube educators? Or those few greybeard hackers that rose to and maintain their notoriety pretty much entirely because they were in Berkeley in the ‘80s or whatever. We just fall for it when people dress down and wear glasses or whatever.
In technical books people often criticize recommendations of TAOCP or SCIP because "nobody really reads those", however this misses the point that books of this nature are perpetual projects for the reader. I have moved my eyes over every word in SCIP, done ~20% of the exercises, but would still say I haven't "read it" in the sense of completing it.
This is even more true for works of philosophy. I would be far more impressed with someone saying that had spent the last 3 years working through the first section of Spinoza's Ethics (a fairly lean volume) than someone who claims to have read Heidegger's Being and Time over a break.
I was talking to someone recently who remarked that it's embarrassing to see a bookshelf covered with bookmarks visibly only part way through the text, implying the reader has never "completed" the work. I found this view somewhat shocking as the older I get the more I realize you never finish a good book.
As someone who's not into jazz critique, i've only ever seen "I read books on topic X so I'm an expert now" levels of hubris from developers. Another thread on the frontpage right now has people discussing how they don't need a therapist because they can just read therapy textbooks!
Imagine the hubris.
lmao