📚 Currently reading: Writing to Learn by William Zinsser and only a few pages in I have found the quote that speaks to me:

I don’t like to write, but I take great pleasure in having written.

Which goes along with what I’ve heard from colleagues about scientific writing: your manuscript isn’t ready to be published until you hate it.

Speaking of Sivers, his book on How to Live is my go-to gift for people who read. A step-up from that — and it is a yuuuge step — is Nassim Taleb’s Incerto, but I have to know someone really well because a five-book set is a bit of an obligation.

And speaking of Taleb, it looks like we were in the same building yesterday. Small world.

• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Joseph Campbell
• Catch-22

That’s it! I tend not to abandon books half-way through, but I just couldn’t swallow these three.

Should I revisit? Emerson had some good quotes, apparently, and Campbell (seems to have) inspired many good stories although his own did not persuade me.

But Catch-22, dear oh dear. You could not pay me to start reading that piece of work again.

The Beatles wanted to do a LotR movie, starring:

McCartney as Frodo, Starr as Sam, Lennon as Gollum and Harrison as Gandalf. The Beatles' choice of director? Stanley Kubrick, fresh from making 2001: A Space Odyssey.

But Tolkien didn’t like the idea of a pop group being associated with his books. I am not sure about that cast either, but just imagine Kubrick’s Lord of the Rings. In the style of Barry Lyndon, perhaps? (ᔥMarginal Revolution)

Some of the books I’ve added to the pile since January:

• The Infernal Machine by Steven Johnson
• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
• Writing to Learn by William Zinsser
• Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
• Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities by Bettany Hughes

And more! How many days in a year again?

📚 Finished reading: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt while trying to avoid confirmation bias since we are of the same mind on phones in schools and I was very much on his side during on of the most interesting and least civil Conversations with Tyler (Cowen).

The last third of the book — calls to action — was too much of a laundry list for my taste, but I was pleasantly surprised by Haidt’s take on spirituality with which he concluded the middle section.

Apparently, this book was supposed to be only the first chapter of Haidt’s next one, about the influence of smartphones and social media on everyone’s lives. I suspect that here, too, we will agree, though I had only written about the destruction wrought upon the older generations (present company included) in Serbian.

Steven Johnson is one of the rare writers whose Substack newsletters I follow, and his most recent post will give you a good idea why. It is nominally about “The Infernal Machine”, his new book out today, but it is also about how he writes, and why, and has room for a story and a poem which both pack a punch. Recommended.

“Unputdownable” is a real word, but it has been a while since I’ve read a book that would fit the definition. This year’s books all had me put them down quite often, some from sheer shock, others (like this one from Longinus) to pause and reflect.

📚 Finished reading: On Great Writing (On the Sublime) by Longinus, fragments of a 2,000-year-old book which are as relevant as ever:

One should realize, my friend, that, as in everyday life, nothing is noble which is noble to despise.

And also, bringing to mind Nassim Taleb’s stance on nitpickers):

Preciseness in every detail incurs the risk of pettiness, whereas with the very great, as with the very rich, something must inevitably be neglected.

And many more!

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.