This page from Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World was common sense when it first came out almost 30 years ago. Today it reads like a revolutionary screed.

I don’t usually pick up books from the local little free library, but after the last summer I couldn’t miss out on this one about Smith Island. It’s time to maker another bookshelf.

Slow Productivity is a book that could easily have been a blog post but the three sub-heading of that hypothetical post are sound and worth adopting. They could also fit on a fortune cookie:

1. Do fewer things.
2. Work at a natural pace.
3. Obsess over quality.

These are as obvious as they are short. Of course, you don’t need a book to learn and understand them — it’s enough to see what people who do great things are doing themselves, like Nassim Taleb, or Stephen Wolfram, or any good writer who writes their own books. But if you are too busy to learn by example and dig into people’s work habits described peacemeal and without a big red arrow pointing to the things that everyone should do, well, then, this is the right book for you.

It is also a bit of a cuckoo’s egg, ready-made for wide distribution through book clubs and large corporate purchases, which it says right on the copyright page. But then if you are a large American corporation with a large American corporation’s goals and values, maybe having your employees all becoming part-time flaneurs may not be the best idea. The American number go up because of quantity not quality, and you get to quantity by grinding it out, not by taking long walks.

So, there may need to be an intermediate step there, another airport book for Newport to write for the executives and the board members about short-term goals not reigning supreme. Good luck with that.

📚 Finished reading: Liberation Day by George Saunders, who is the conscience of the Baby Boom generation. What have we allowed to happen to this world? is what most of his protagonists ask, as their brains are washed, heads are hung up on walls, bodies are pelleted by hail. This is similar to the Tenth of December, his last short story collection, only this time some of his characters do, eventually, with much hemming and hawing, grow what under a certain light could be interpreted as a spine. It was high time, George.

Glenn Fleishman has a new book project on Kickstarter, and it is the easiest backing decision I’ve made in years. I mean, just look at that sample chapter. It’s called How Comics Were Made: a Visual History of Printing Cartoons and here’s hoping it makes it.

“Maybe that’s why young people make success. They don’t know enough. Because when you know enough it’s obvious that every idea that you have is no good.”

This was Richard Feynman per the James Gleick biography, and he was correct! Biomedicine is now in this position, as I wrote yesterday.

Related to my previous post: 27 reading tips from Nassim Taleb. My favorites:

A good book gets better at the second reading. A great book at the third. Any book not worth rereading isn’t worth reading.

Books are not read by the majority because they read the Internet, which is like junk food for the mind.

The unread books on your shelf are like a universe of alternate possibilities waiting to be explored.

A novel you like resembles a friend. You read it and reread it, getting to know it better. Like a friend, you accept it the way it is; you do not judge it.

And here is his favorite.

I remember how many years later, in a bookstore in Georgetown, in Washington, I saw for the first time a person buying books by piling them in a cart the way one buys potatoes or bananas in a supermarket. That struck me as entirely disrespectful of writers. I would not like my books to be bought in such a way

This is from Branko Milanović’s most recent post. It looks like he doesn’t believe in the antilibrary.

Finished reading: Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer 📚 and it is like nothing I have read before. I wish that was only because of the premise: that a 25th century character would write for a 26th century audience in the style of the 18th century — quite convenient when the author’s day job is being a historian of the Enlightment. Or just because of the gratuitous and at times bizzare sex, more than in anything I’ve read before — which, fine, nothing new under the Sun (king). But there is also, splattered across the pages, more gore, dismemberment and canibalism than I have ever — please, please, please excuse the pun — digested, and I am all for expanding boundaries but really, Dr. Palmer? The interest in censorship suddenly comes under a different light.

Still, it is an important story well told and I will grudgingly read the second book in the series.

📚 Speaking of Ada Palmer, I am reading Too Like the Lightning and two-thirds through my feelings on the book and its protagonists are alternating between hooked and horrified. If I had to wager I would say that hooked will prevail, but then I’m not a gambler.