How to read a book

~ Mark

I think people who want to read more but don’t, or people who don’t like to read, are sometimes just putting too much pressure on themselves. And perhaps not being smart or creative enough about it. Here are ways around reading a book that are still kinda reading a book:

  • Don’t read the book, read the author’s flurry of blog posts and essays on sites everywhere that appeared around the time of the book’s launch.
  • Don’t read the book, read a bunch of smart book reviews.
  • Read the introduction and/or conclusion. I used to skip intros all the time when I was in high school because I was cool, but when I started Histories, I realized that smart context can be among the best parts. And the intros are also good for selling you the ideas in the rest of the book…
  • Read the index and look for entries with lots of sub-entries. No seriously, read like every line. It’s just a way to get yourself oriented, and more importantly, maybe you’ll catch a name or phrase that gets you curious, which leads me to…
  • Start wherever you feel like it. Page 53 is fine if it’s interesting. This is another good way to sell yourself the book. All you need is a foothold. Pages 1-52 will always be there later.
  • Skim it. For things that interest you. Gloss over numbers or the anecdotes if they bore you. When I read The Information and The Signal and the Noise recently I semi-skimmed, with dramatic impatient sighs, the sections about medicine, health, environment. These have long been areas of maximal boredom for me and I’m happy to acknowledge that and move on to something cooler.
  • Take notes, which is to say, use the book as a way to make your own writing.
  • Read your notes.
  • Reread your older notes.
  • Stop reading. As in, no sentences at all from anywhere. You’ll be back. Mark my words.

And as I finish this brain dump I remember that Ryan Holiday has said many of the same things already.

~ Mark

Gibson-Faulkner space = “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” × “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Robin Sloan.

The Ikea Effect – The New Inquiry

~ Mark

The self-care of beauty work is part of how we physically enact our self-assigned value. There’s a reason one sign of depression and some other mental illnesses is neglected grooming: When your brain decides that you’re not as valuable as you once believed, you’re less likely to keep doing the labor that represents that value.

The Ikea Effect – The New Inquiry

Warrior

~ Mark

Warrior. I’ve raved about this movie before. A few things I appreciate on third viewing… 1. The efficiency of the startup. A few bits of dialogue, usually barbs hinting at old wounds. Some are too vague to be effective (“That shit you pulled”), but some are so wincingly perfect for character and delivery (“Must be tough to find a girl who could take a punch nowadays.”) 2. Shot, reverse-shot. Sports movies have to deliver on dialogue when you’re not at the relevant events. This is why you care about Rocky or Rudy. Style-wise, these shots reminds me of Michael Mann, peering over the shoulder. 3. Obstructing the shots. I’m thinking of the husband-wife conversation in the bathroom and the father-son scene in the hotel room. Doorways and bodies block the view, so you instinctively want to tilt your head a bit. It also works in the fight scenes cage, where you’re trying to peek through the fence to get closer to the action. In a way, those shots feel more like you’re “there” in the arena than when you get the clean close-ups. 4. This movie is now 3-for-3.

The Net Is a Waste of Time – New York Times

~ Mark

I stay in. Hooked. Is this leisure – this browsing, randomly linking my way through these small patches of virtual real-estate – or do I somehow imagine that I am performing some more dynamic function? The content of the Web aspires to absolute variety. One might find anything there. It is like rummaging in the forefront of the collective global mind. Somewhere, surely, there is a site that contains … everything we have lost?

Oldie but a goodie. William Gibson in 1996.

Today, in its clumsy, larval, curiously innocent way, it offers us the opportunity to waste time, to wander aimlessly, to daydream about the countless other lives, the other people, on the far sides of however many monitors in that postgeographical meta-country we increasingly call home. It will probably evolve into something considerably less random, and less fun — we seem to have a knack for that — but in the meantime, in its gloriously unsorted Global Ham Television Postcard Universes phase, surfing the Web is a procrastinator’s dream. And people who see you doing it might even imagine you’re working.

The Net Is a Waste of Time – New York Times

Looper

~ Mark

Looper. Solid scifi. Just take a nugget of a concept and let it spool out around a handful of people. It makes movie sense in the moment even if it doesn’t later. I love this vision of a possible future. Dystopic, but not totally dire. Just worn out. Good job with the makeup, and especially how Gordon-Levitt takes on some Willis mannerisms. I love Jeff Daniels’ character. There is some violence that a certain demographics won’t take to very well, but I appreciate that he did it anyway, it fit the story, and that it wasn’t over-the-top exploitative. It was sad. I also liked some of the audio editing and they he played with the sound stage. There’s too much leeenns flaaare. But good movie! Rian Johnson knows his craft. Makes me want to watch Brick again.

The Master

~ Mark

The Master. Phoenix was robbed, right? Where DDL takes an amazing script written for a national hero we love to love and embodies it just like we imagined, Phoenix plays a dummy the likes of which we’ve never seen. Maybe the awards don’t capital-m Matter, but man, I can see how it would sting. But the movie: I liked it, but I didn’t really feel it. I felt the same with There Will Be Blood. Like, I didn’t want to blink for 3 hours but I haven’t wanted to see it again, either. Impressed, hell yes. But maybe this is exactly the kind of movie I should be re-watching though. Who knows. Greenwood’s score is fantastic. Hoffman is good at smug and speeches and he does the smile-with-closed-lips-audibly-breathing-out-of-the-nose thing. And his group is like a peripatetic band of gypsies, eking by at the fringe. They get an introduction to NYC high society, but that goes sour. They later run the business out of a patron’s house in Philadelphia. Their big annual conference is rather sad, and I don’t think that’s just my post-TED/Apple keynote perspective talking. Why did the whole gang pick up and leave SF, in the first place? And why is Dodd totally okay with a self-destructive stowaway? Take what you can get, I suppose.

Waiting for Pappy: one man’s search of Nashville for America’s hottest bourbon | Nashville City Paper

~ Mark

This is partly our fault. We, the bourbon drinking collective, have been doing it for years now — haughtily referencing some tiny boutique bourbon we’ve recently tried. They snobbed up the beer and we said nothing. They snobbed up pub food and we said nothing. This was inevitable, and we ushered it in.

10 years ago: “Oh you like Jim Beam? You should try Maker’s Mark.”

Five years ago: “Maker’s, huh? Check out Bulleit next time.”

Two years ago: “Bulleit’s a solid starter bourbon, but next time try for a Jefferson’s Reserve. I had it at a tasting recently. You’ll hear about it soon.”

And so on. Before I knew the impact of my own pretentiousness, I’d contributed to the mania.

Waiting for Pappy: one man’s search of Nashville for America’s hottest bourbon | Nashville City Paper