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.

Ada Palmer doesn’t blog much, but whenever she does it goes right to the top of my reading list. Today’s text was about censorship. The key point:

The majority of censorship is self-censorship, but the majority of self-censorship is intentionally cultivated by an outside power.

In particular:

If we believe that the purpose of the Inquisition trying Galileo was to silence Galileo, it absolutely failed, it made him much, much more famous, and they knew it would. If you want to silence Galileo in 1600 you don’t need a trial, you just hire an assassin and you kill him, this is Renaissance Italy, the Church does this all the time. The purpose of the Galileo trial was to scare Descartes into retracting his then-about-to-be-published synthesis, which—on hearing about the trial—he took back from the publisher and revised to be much more orthodox.

There are more recent examples as well, from the 1950s comic book scare to the modern-day school library controversies.

By the way, I have just started reading the first book of Too Like Lightning, her sci-fi trilogy, and two chapters in I am completely hooked.

📚 Finished reading: Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis, and reading something from 70-plus years ago that now seems prophetic never gets old. What if people’s appetite for food was as distorted as their current — 1950s, mind you — appetite for sex, he asks himself and answers:

There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips.

Well guess what, Mr. Lewis…

Always good to see a friend’s work out in the wild. This is Bump by Matt Wallace in the tweens section of Politics and Prose.

Amusingly, one year ago to the day I wrote about On Bullshit, a broad, timeless, Great book if there ever was one.

📚 Finished reading: Talent by Tyler Cowen, and I don’t yet have an answer to my question on its Straussian — Tylerspeak for hidden — meaning. The book is despicable in some places: are you sure you want to pick people committed to their families if that means they will choose to spend time with them over doing more work? — yes, this had struck a nerve — and admirable in others: how to help people who are far from the center of the action in their selected field to even imagine what they can achieve?

I would place it in the “narrow, temporary” quadrant of the breadth/timelessness 2-by-2. It is not for everyone, and it won’t last very long. To pick an example, Cowen and Gross suggest that employers should increase their profile — by blogging, writing books, doing podcasts, basically by doing what Tyler is doing — to increase their profile and the reach of their “soft” network and, ultimately, get more self-referrals from prospective talents who have heard about them. If everyone was to do this, would be it of net benefit to the whole system? I would argue not: the benefit would be to the most prolific and vocal talent-seekers at the expense of an immense amount of noise and all around confusion. And fifty years from now, will people have known about podcasts and blogs? Lindy says no. This doesn’t mean that the book is bad! It’s just not one of the “great” books.

Compare this to my gold standard of a broad/timeless — great — contemporary book: anything from Nassim Taleb’s Incerto, which is coincidentally what taught me about the Lindy effect. If everyone were to internalize its views and the dense network of mental models it brings to the extend they can, and act accordingly, the world would be a bit less of a madhouse. The concepts it talks about being about probability, it is also timeless.

So if your goal is to read only “great” books, well, first of all don’t read anything that came out in the last 5–10 years. But if you want to read “great” book candidates — which I am, let’s be clear, not trying to do this year but may try for 2025 — well, in that case, feel free to give Talent a pass.