📚 Finished reading: The Notebook by Roland Allen. It starts off strong, with an anecdote about the creation of the Moleskine brand, then goes in much depth about writing during renaissance and the enlightenment, topping it off with a few modern developments like BuJo. The chapters are self-contained and packed with information without being bogged down into too much detail — the Moleskine chapter is a good example of what to expect — at the expense of an overarching “story”. So, this is a collection of vignettes more than a systemic review and categorization of the types of notebooks through history, and that’s fine.

A few higlights:

• Michael of Rhodes, a 15th century member of the Venetian navy whose manuscript was the LinkedIn of the day: started of with personal interests, ended up full of useless (at best) and dangerously misleading information meant to impress future employers.
• Leonardo Da Vinci had no introspective passages in any of the thousands of pages he wrote down in his many notebooks. Janan Ganesh was right.
• The term commonplace arose from the commonplace book and used to mean a striking, exemplary passage in a book, play or speech one should write down and keep. Once commonplace books became popular and writers started including flowery passages with the express purpose of having them written down in the book the public got onto them and the adjective “commonplace” became derogatory. So it goes…
• The album amicorum or — and this may remind you of a certain online service — the friendship book made a similar turn, from an exclusive ritual of the educated few in 16th century Dutch universities to an 18th century fad among young women that was looked down upon by the patriarchy. What used to take two and a half centuries now happens in a few short years.
• The New York Times has always been evil; just read the chapter on Bob Graham’s notebooks to see why.

A more modest list for what I hope will be a more modest year:

1. Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer
2. Feline Philosophy by John Gray
3. Human Action by Ludwig von Mises
4. How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information by Jillian M. Hess
5. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
6. The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles
7. Defeat at Gallipoli by Nigel Steel & Peter Hart
8. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
9. A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor by John Berger
10. The Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis
11. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
12. For Blood and Money by Nathan Vardi
13. The Billion Dollar Molecule by Barry Werth
14. Broken Stars by Various
15. The Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer

Remember, it’s the books you don’t read that count. And here are last year’s wish lists: 2024 — 2023 — 2022.

I did not read as much as I hoped I would and the list I had set out for myself was wildly optimistic. And that’s fine. Books that were on my actual reading list for the year are marked with an asterisk. There aren’t many of them. Some of the entries have a sentence or two with my current feelings about the book, and the titles link to the fresh-off-the-reading thoughts.

1. Talent by Tyler Cowen was more useful than I thought it would be, though it mostly caters to the tech bro crowd.
2. Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis was a re-read, and I shall re-read it again.
3. I and Thou by Martin Buber: incomprehensible.
4. Too Like the Lightning* by Ada Palmer
5. Liberation Day* by George Saunders
6. Slow Productivity by Cal Newport can be summarized thusly: do fewer things, at a natural pace, obsessing over quality. You may now skip reading the book.
7. On Great Writing (On the Sublime) by Longinus was marvelous if for nothing else than as a reminder that things we now find commonplace used to be revolutionary — that is indeed why they are now ubiquitous — and I count the word “commonplace” among those things as well.
8. The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt managed to change the world, as more and more American schools are banning phones as they should have done in the first place.
9. Writing to Learn by William Zinsser was a bit of a waste of time.
10. Toxic Exposure* by Chadi Nabhan
11. Seven Surrenders by Ada Palmer
12. The Will to Battle by Ada Palmer, and with three of her books in 2024 this is the most I have read in a single year from any one writer. That is as strong of an endorsement as any.
13. Moonbound by Robin Sloan was too thin for my taste. If the foundation of your epic is pop culture you are building a castle on top of sand, so if it is to stay upright it can never be anything more than a sandcastle.
14. False Dawn* by John Gray ensured Gray would feature prominently in my 2025 reading list, now as to whether I will actually ready any more of his work is anyone’s guess.
15. The Friction Project by Robert I. Sutton, which was the only true clunker of the year. I fell for a good showing on a not very good podcast, so this should teach me.
16. Useful Not True by Derek Sivers is out now and you should get it.
17. A System for Writing by Bob Doto was like an expedition to a land in which people use notes to collect their thoughts rather than posting them on a blog like they should.
18. Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis was surprisingly poignant and Lewis too will be on the 2025 list.
19. Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman will turn out to be my book of the year, not because it change much of anything in how I operate but because it is the first book recommendation in my 12 years of marriage that my wife actually took and liked.
20. Order without Design* by Alain Bertaud

I try to wrap up any reading by December 31 so as not to have any book straddling the years but I am now in the middle of The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen and — spoiler alert for the first book I’ll finish in 2025 — it is right up my alley so it gets an honorable mention here. This is in fact where I learned about the origin of “commonplace” that I slipped in at number 7.

And here are the previous two years: 2023 — 2022. Brief book reviews go back to 2017 (here is the very first one); one day I may collect those into lists as well.

You wouldn’t be able to tell it from my recently published posts, but I am in a list-making mood. I have made an end-of-year list of podcasts since at least 2018 (possibly earlier) and more recently I have been making beginning-of-year lists of books I may read. Here is the one for this year and — spoiler alert — I did not follow the list. Regardless, it has been a useful practice and any book lists this time of year are more than welcome.

But anti-recommendations also work! Unlike straight up recommendations — a person you trust saying that something is good — anti-recommendations can get complex and to me more interesting. A still straightforward form is a trustworthy person saying that something is not worth your time. But how about someone you hold in low regard telling you about their favorite books?

Well, I hold one Eric Topol in low regard. Hints of why are here and here, and the short answer is that he is — much like Neal DeGrass Tyson — the stupid person’s idea of a smart person, and a doctor to boot. If a trend is a few years past its peak you can be certain that Topol is pitching his idea about it to a publisher, using third-order book digests about the idea as his source material.

So I was absolutely delighted when he published a list of his favorite books of 2024: flags don’t get much redder than that. Of course Yuval Harari’s new book was one the list — not a fan of his, either — and though I have never heard of the other books or authors, something dramatic will need to happen for me to change my perception of them as derivative dreck. Ars longa, vita brevis.

What makes this especially valuable is that these are mainstream books. An anti-recommendation is only valuable if it is a book you would at least consider and for better or worse these are the books in consideration. The flip side is also true: the most valuable recommendation is for an Amazon Kindle samizdat. For a fun mental exercise, please imagine what it would take for the likes of Topol to do this. Neither could I.

Here is another mental exercise: what if an unreliable person published a list of their least favorite books? Would those two minuses add up to a plus? Probably not: there are many ways in which a book can be bad and even if there was a weak signal for a book’s quality in that list it wouldn’t be enough to overcome the noise of thousands of books vying for attention.

Finally I should note that the delight of dunking on X made me miss the more important point: that any list of books published in 2024 is also a list of books to avoid in 2025, because there is no stronger signal of transiency of an idea than it getting oversized attention. The Lindy effect is real so unless you have a friend who is in the merciless writing business and needs a friendly reader, save your time and read old books.

📚 Finished reading: Order without Design by Alain Bertaud, which is more of a textbook for urban planners than something one would read in their spare time but still managed to grab my attention and change my mind on a few things. Bertaud makes the case for organic, bottom-up growth of cities in the style championed by Jane Jacobs while at the same time noting the costly second-order effects of NIMBY-ism, 15-minute-city projects, public-transport-for-its-own-sake movements and other causes taken up by modern-day Jane Jacobs wannabes. So yes, I am now more skeptical of both 15-minute cities and public transport. Caveat lector.

Quote of the day is from The Hinternet:

This, then, is the real transformation, of which Jones’s addiction diagnosis is merely a symptom: that absorption, which used to represent a secret inner life, has been sneakily transfigured into a siphon by which our native curiosity is sucked away and sold. Where once we were rapt, now we are gift-wrapped. The text is reading us.

Including this one, if you are reading it on anything other than an RSS client.

📚 Finished reading: Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman and I can’t say I’ve learned too much. The book was for the most part a validation of my approach to blogging which has in turn been my approach to life in general: do not be afraid of half-assing when the alternative is no ass at all.

I have been reading Oliver Burkeman’s “Meditations for Mortals”, which builds on many of the concepts first mentioned in “Four Thousand Weeks”. One of them is looking at various aspects of life not as a to-do list that needs completing but as a river you dip in and out of as needed.

One big to-do list that has followed me for more than a decade now has been my ever-growing Instapaper queue. However, the river metaphor didn’t quite work there: the constant flow of a river implies I’d be looking at the newest thing each time I dipped in. But that’s what social media and RSS are for! Dave Winer himself has used the term River of News to describe a type of an RSS aggregator. What, then, to make of Instapaper and what purpose does it serve?

So here is how I’ve been thinking about it: Instapaper (or any other read-it-later service) is where all the hot takes I encounter go to cool down. The Senate of my reading Congress, if you will. And most things I put there will, in fact, turn out to be pieces of misshapen plastic not worth my time. But now and then a masterpiece may come out of the fire that will be worth sharing years hence. So, I really don’t care about the great resignation in academia all that much any more. C.S. Lewis talking about cliques? Yes, please.

Looking at years-old essays and blog posts removes current-event noise from my interpretation. Usually I also can’t remember why I saved an item in the first place. So, the piece will have to stand on its own without the benefit of my knowing that Tyler Cowen, or Cory Doctorow, or whomever else’s link blog I follow had put in a good word about it. Is QAnon destroying the GOP from within? I won’t have to read Ben Sasse’s ten thousand words from 3 years go on it because the answer was clearly “Yes”, and the deed is now done. How does Zeynep Tufekci keep getting the big things right? I don’t have to read the 4-year-old article now since there is a whole book about it (and not the one you think). Etc, etc.

The emerging pattern is that big news pieces in publications like The New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic are the lowest yield, as they either become stale or discredited. Give me a thoughtful Substack newsletter any time! Better yet are items that were old when I saved them, like that C.S. Lewis speech from a few paragraphs up, or this brief remembrance of Paul Feyerabend that ends with a poignant paragraph:

Beneath Feyerabend’s rhetorical antics lurked a deadly serious theme: the human compulsion to find absolute truths, however noble it may be, often culminates in tyranny. Feyerabend attacked science not because he actually believed it was no more valid than astrology or religion. Quite the contrary. He attacked science because he recognized—and was horrified by—science’s vast superiority to other modes of knowledge. His objections to science were moral and political rather than epistemological. He feared that science, precisely because of its enormous power, could become a totalitarian force that crushes all its rivals.

It was written in 2016. Eight years later, we are in for some crushing.

I enjoyed how this essay about Tolkien was progressing, and then it touched on Taleb and the Incerto and I fell in love:

So how is goodness preserved for Tolkien? This brings us to Tolkien’s great prayer. We are familiar with the idea of a catastrophe. Or, to use more updated terminology, we might adopt Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s notion of a black swan. A black swan is a completely unforeseen and cataclysmic disaster, something that seems to unmake the world. But Tolkien also envisioned the opposite of such an event, in which the effect works in the other direction, in which “everything sad comes untrue,” as Samwise says near the end. This kind of event, which Tolkien called a “eucatastrophe”—the “hope unlooked for” when all seems lost—allows good to face evil even though history remains something of a long defeat.

“Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”

Yes, they’ve mangled their Talebisms a bit (catastrophe and eucatasrophe can both be black swan events) but that was a beautiful formulation of an antifragile way of life.

“What weather they shall have is not ours to rule” indeed. (↬John Brady)

📚 Finished reading: Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis, who was clearly a genius with words. The elevator pitch — a retelling of the Greek myth of Eros/Cupid and Psyche from the perspective of one of Psyche’s sisters — does not do it justice. It is, most of all, the clearest and the most visceral explanation of myth and myth-making I’ve encountered since Girard. Indeed, there is a clear connection between the two.

And I know I keep dunking on poor Joseph Campbell, but “Till We Have Faces” also showed how poor of an attempt Campbell’s was to explain myth by intellectualizing it, and turn every old tale into monomythical slop.