📚 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.

R.F. Kuang, Neil Gaiman and many other great writers weren’t nominated for last year’s Hugo awards because the award administrators flagged their works as potentially “sensitive” to China.

As Ada Palmer wrote, most censorship has always been self-censorship, even in what we think of as the darkest days of the inquisition. Good thing her own Sci-Fi series was nominated one year earlier, in 2022.

Finished reading: I and Thou by Martin Buber 📚 and there is a message there, hidden under miles-deep layers of impenetrable German that no translator can bypass. Whether it is any more complicated than “don’t treat people like things” — I couldn’t say.

To Buber’s credit, he himself said that the book was untranslatable. Without knowing what the original was like, I tend to agree.

I don’t care much for self-help and productivity any more, but if Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity is anything like 4,000 weeks then of course I’ll get it. Pre-orders have started, and will get you some goodies if you follow these instructions before the March 5th release.