I set a goal to read 20 books this year, and yesterday I finished my 20th book. So it seems like a good time to look back on those books that I’m still thinking about. This isn’t all that I read, or attempted, or that I’m still thinking about.
I read Scott Newstok’s How to think like Shakespeare (not an affiliate link, none of them are) over the summer, and it was an interesting read. I’m still thiking about the model of thinking as a craft. I’ve always thought of crafts as a ladder of skills, and a practice. Even after you’ve mastered a craft you still have to attend carefully to it because the materials are not all identical. They must be treated in the way that is right for their unique properties in order to make the very best out of them. Applying that model to thinking has been very helpful. It involves both the ideas you are thinking about, and the tools you use to work with them.
Earlier in the summer I read Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. There were lots of thought provoking things here, most of the whole book really resonated with me. In particular the idea of working in cycles, planning to do poorly at one thing for a while so you can have the attention or energy to do better at something else for a time. Then rotate to the next thing because you cannot do it all. There are lots of analogies, like managing a field for crops by rotating what is grown there, or letting it go fallow. This practical skill with managing wanting to do too much has helped. I made copious notes and I’m sure I would profit from re-reading them, and the book itself too.
The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker is, I’m pretty sure, the nerdiest book on this list. The bits about sentence structure, and neither asking your reader to hold in their minds too many things, nor to hold them for too long, has done the most to improve my diction. Last year I read The Grail and that guy has some very loong sentences that are somehow still readable I think precisely because of this. Pinker’s book is probably another one I could read a few more times.
I learned about the rider and elephant metaphor from The Happiness Hypothesis, and whether that is precisely correct or not is both irrelavent and unhelpful for my purposes at the moment. It’s been a helpful model for thinking about my thinking, for trying to understand my own habits and thought inertia. Why is it so hard to or easy to do certain things, and how to hack on that to do what I want to do.
The book I just finished was Petrocelli’s The life-changing science of detecting bullshit. This book was, in some sense, a back to basics topic for me because of my background in science. Still, it was nice to revisit these topics, and to see them applied in more everyday areas in a systematic way, with practical and concrete advice. It’s a little early still to know which thing in particular I’ll be still thinking about in six months, but I have a couple of guesses. The first is about asking better questions, maybe even the first question you should ask. The better question is “how do I know this is true” instead of “why do I believe this”. The distinction between how and why is important: asking a how questions is more naturally going to point to evidence, whereas why is often a setup for opinions, arguments, or assumptions. Evidence is the superior reason to believe something and those other things are less good reasons. This leads me to the other idea I think I’ll be thinking about for a while: treat ideas like ideas. It seems to be a bit of a mantra or mnemonic for the rest of the rationalist skills; an entry point. The rest of it is “not like facts” but adding that is too long.
In a very different direction, but still non-fiction, I’m still thinking about something that I read in Salt Fat Acid Heat. You might think it’s odd that I would read a cookbook, but it’s not really a cookbook in the way that you might be used to. The first 2/3rds of the book are all prose instruction, guidelines. The thing that I think about still is that it’s actually pretty easy to work backwards from the end result dish and figure out how to make the dish, once you know most of the basics. I happen to know most of the basics, so this is a nice discovery for me. Somehow working backward makes food much more intelligible than working forward from the recipe. There is a kind of engineering language present in the final dish that I’d never really noticed before.
I did read some fiction too. Although the ones that I am still thinking about in particular were the nerdiest ones.
Peter Watts’ Blindsight (that’s the text, on the author’s website) has quite a few novel ideas. And, it’s in the genre of hard science fiction, and the ebook that I read had a pretty big appendix with discussion by the author of where he got them and how justifiable they are. That’s not to say that everything in there was true current state of science, just not necessarily eliminated by what we know today. But, I must add a warning: it’s not the usual science fiction, there is a large component of horror. That’s not my typical cup of tea, but it was well balanced by the novel’s other aspects. I’m looking for a copy of the second book, even though it’s not a direct sequel.
I also read, synoptically, The Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the Shadow, which I found to be quite mind boggling in the amount of effort put into it. I’m looking forward to reading the next installment. So helpful to see the writing process too!
Here’s to 20 (or more) good books next year!