Reading List

Alan Jacobs, in The Pleasures Of Reading In An Age Of Distraction makes a case against reading goals, speed-reading, and the rush to have read. I nodded reading all that but also thinking about my reading list and why I keep and post it publicly.

I keep a reading list in part because my memory is all too fallible. I've read books twice because seeing the book again I've found it terribly interesting I dig in, dogged by a feeling of familiarity, but not giving into it for a few hundred pages in. This doesn't happen often, but more than once is enough.

Often, I half recall some idea, character, scene, or some such and want to revisit it. This happened this summer when I remembered a cogent argument about unions but couldn't remember where it was from. Going over my list, I found Richard Russo's The Identity Thief and remembered him discussing summer work alongside his father. I found the book, reread that section, and felt all kinds of better.

Beyond memory, I like knowing how many books I've read in a year though I have no goal. The number simply pushes me toward a habit of mind, a habit of reading. I'm on my fifty-ninth book of the year, a number meaningless on any scale, but useful to me. It's not objective since two of those books were single essays packaged as books, two were graphic novels, and seven or eight were young-adult books. Someone else's fifty-nine books would be more or fewer pages and that couldn't matter less.

But why publish the list on the web?

As a kid I was hooked on end-of-the-year TV shows that rewound the news, songs, movies, and deaths of the year. I didn't care about the ball drop but I was all over the year in review. There aren't enough of those kinds of shows any more. There are, however, plenty of reading lists marking the turn of the calendar. Major news outlets and magazines come out with best-of-the-year lists, but I'm more into the blogs on which individuals list their favorite books, the ones they are still thinking about. I eat those lists up and so I wanted one of my own. I hope that it proves interesting to someone.

My list is nothing spectacular save for one thing: it is my reading list and a peak inside my brain. This is where I'm back to Alan Jacobs's "commitment to one dominant, overarching, nearly definitive principle for reading: Read at Whim" (Pleasures, 15). I read what interests me and one thing leads to another. There's a lot of nonfiction on my list because that's what I tend to favor. There is nocourse of study there because I don't read to elevate myself though I like to read things from which I will learn. Luckily, I can learn from just about any book.

I'm a better man when I'm reading and keeping a reading list. It's the act of reading that does it. Reading helps me reflect, consider others, and find solitude. I've been known to take the solitude too far, withdrawing from family and work in favor of some written world, but more often than not reading makes me a better person.

What have you been reading? Leave a comment below with your reading list, top five, or current book. Other than a book, I can't think of anything I would rather read.

Wanting Connection and Conversation

I just read an essay from Chris J. Wilson on his micro.blog (a platform which sounds interesting but not interesting enough). I wanted to have a conversation about the essay entitled I Still Love Paper. You can imagine why given all the thinking I do about good tools (paper is a damn good tool), fountain pens, writing, and so on. I wanted to write back that I find myself thinking in a near-parallel with him. We part ways on the calendar — his is in the cloud, mine is on the page — but agree that paper is a delight. I wonder what he might make of my thinking about good tools. I bet we could get somewhere mostly because we don't agree about everything.

What I want from conversation and connection boils down to this Aaron Sorkin quote from his great show Sports Night:

“If you’re dumb, surround yourself with smart people. If you’re smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you.”

Chris J. Wilson has no way to contact him on his micro.blog. I understand why, but what a pity to not be able to make that connection and have that conversation.

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Alan Jacobs in The Pleasures Of Reading In An Age Of Distraction adds this:

““I agree with every word you write” would be a gratifying thing to hear, I imagine — I wouldn’t know — but even more gratifying would be a reader who carries your idea a step further, who adds thoughts you never hat that enrich your understanding of your own project.”

Syracuse Women's Basketball

I've been asked why I like the SU Women's basketball games. A lot of it has to do with Dad, some of it is having two daughters, but mostly it's just that thye are so damn exciting to watch. Wait until the last seconds of overtime. It's worth it.

Dad would have loved this team.

Good Tools In Times Of Trouble

Part of my thinking about good tools is that something ought to work well and endure in times when so much is breaking down. Increasingly I demand my tools be designed to avoid obsolescence, free me from electronic connections, and help me do good work.

Last night we took my daughter's failing iPad back to the Apple store. A woman there reset the device, but I suspect we will be back in a month to exchange it. Most electronics are poorly made and we are patsies to believe that they are good tools.

Yet as I waited at the store I felt the desire for a tablet, a new phone, a fresh laptop to make me feel better. I wondered how I had gone so long without new electronics. These half-baked thoughts rose in the overheated oven of my brain. Fortunately, the reset done, we left before I could make any mistakes.

Later, in bed, these ideas forming, I wrote the bones of this with a felt-tip pen on post-its. I thought about my phone plugged in downstairs. Had it have been next to me I could have dictated the note without even sitting up. The ease! The convenience! But my post-it was strictly between me and myself. It was done in solitude without mediation. I was unplugged from the networks — actually, I was listening to Charlie Haden and Pat Metheny on my Google Home, but the writing was at least unplugged — and connected with myself and my ideas.

Compare pen and paper to phone in terms of Wendell Berry's nine rules for new tools. Pen and paper are (1) cheaper than the phone, (2) smaller in scale, (3) do the work better, (4) use less energy (though I dislike the pen being disposable), (5) are powered by me, (6) do not require repair, (7) can be purchased near my home, and (9) do not disrupt my thinking or connections to the world. The pen and paper fail only in that (8) they are not made locally.

Implicit in Berry's rules is the simplicity of good tools. Consider the tools a carpenter wears on her belt: hammer, tape measure, pencil, razor knife, and square. She goes to the truck for more complex tools (sawzall, air nailer, theodolite, and screw gun), but the essentials she keeps at hand. Those tools are likely old because they and endure. In any craft the essential tools are simple and enduring: a chef's knife, an artist's palette, a writer's pen, a tailor's needle and thread, a doctor's stethoscope, and a coach's stop watch.

There are always specialized instruments but these give way to the basics of the trade or art. Jazz guitarist Pat Metheny is a master of the guitar synthesizer but he returns to six strings and exquisitely crafted wood, a purer form that mesmerizes.

I don't need an iPad, new laptop, or "upgraded" phone. I need the constant and regular return to pen and paper, the unmediated experience of creation done with good and necessary tools that open me to my best work and lead me to more interesting places than stores which can't sell anything to fix what really ails me.

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The Wendell Berry essay from which I borrowed the rules for good tools can be found here.