thejdizzler
4d ago
Great will try this out!
thejdizzler
4d ago
Any suggestions on how to get started? I looked into Zettlekasten a little and it seems to be pretty impossible without some kind of digital note taking system which I don't want to do
thejdizzler
4d ago
What chapter books are you reading your kids? If I ever find a woman who will tolerant my weirdness, I'm planning on reading Harry Potter, the Hobbit, the Wizard of Earthsea and probably some others from my childhood.
thejdizzler
4d ago
About 75% of my books come from the university libary unfortunately, so no marking up for me there. Sounds like I need to get cracking on that other 25% though.
thejdizzler
4d ago
Couldn't have put it better myself. I once dated a philosophy PhD student, and while she had a very deep understanding of the nitty gritty in her specific subfield, her understanding of other (very important mind you) philosophers was very much a paragraph level hot take. Pissed me off to no end.
thejdizzler
4d ago
The first three books are going to be very hard. I took some highschool Spanish and basically took a break for ~7 years before starting to get serious about the language in 2020. The first thing I read was Harry Potter and it was decidely not fun until book 3. If you're interested, I keep a pretty detailed log of my spanish learning here. Here is the first post in the series, which may be the most useful to you.
thejdizzler
4d ago
In strong agreement with all of these. You can find some really good translations of Ancients from the turn of the last century that aren't too tedious. My translation of The Histories and The Republic were both done by some guy in 1898.
I'm slowly building up my reread all the time list. There are at least four in fiction: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, The Magicians by Lev Grossman, The Lord of the Rings, and A Song of Ice and Fire (also Harry Potter but this is for language learning, not deep philosophical content). In non-fiction, the only book I have consistently reread is Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson: this is usually an annual thing. I would like to reread some of the philosophy I've read this year; Fear and Trembling, Master & His Emissary, and The Tragic Sense of Life come to mind. I'm especially excited for the second one: as I read more philosophy, learn more languages and study more history and art, McGilchrists ideas will hopefully become more and more understandable and sollid.
In terms of marginalia, I try to journal for 5 minutes after every reading session. I'm slowly unlearning my fear of "defacing" books, so with the stuff I buy, especially for philosophy book club, the books are slowly filling up with notes.
thejdizzler
4d ago
The teleology of the technology is completely different. Books (and inernet blogs) shape us to follow logical, thought out arguments. The teology of video games is different. Video games put you in the drivers seat, which can be extremely valuable (for example I don't think you could recreate the same thematic coherence of Dark Souls in a book). However, video games cannot put you in the head of someone else the way a novel can. The Medium is the Message.
I think those books certainly count, and I harbor a certain amount of jealousy that you have kids to share that with. I do not envy the lack of leisure time however! Grass is greener I suppose.
Edit: Thank you for that substack recommendation! Sounds perfect for me!
thejdizzler
4d ago
Thanks for the detailed comment. It is very easy to Goodhart yourself. For the first week of 2025, I had my goodreads goal set to 100 books. I quickly noticed how this was influencing my reading decisions. I was going for shorter books, and planning my reading in a way that didn't leave much room for what whim or interest. I quickly decided to change this back to the usual 52.
I like to think of reading as an alternative to scrolling and as a workout for my mind. In the same way that it's probably good to do some kind of cardio three times a week, I think it's good to sit for ~1-2 hours at least a couple times a week and read (I like to do every day). More reading than that is either for an assignment (these days philosophy book club or Spanish), or as an alternative to scrolling (although I am realizing that there are numerous house and life chores that probably should take precedence over that). This year I would like to dedicate one complete evening or afternoon to reading a week to see if it helps me focus or get into a book more (3-4 hours) but otherwise keep my amount of overall reading unchanged. Like you say, all things in moderation, and too much reading means neglect of other duties.
thejdizzler
4d ago
I haven't actually read Twilight: we tried on a roadtrip when I was in middle school, but my mom turned it off after about an hour. Sounds like I need to check it out now though. I stand by my hatred of Fourth Wing and ACOTAR.
thejdizzler
4d ago
Congrats on the running! I also too run around 7 hours a week (although I would like to run closer to 10-11, injury prevention is holding me back). I agree it's very hard to balance more than a few hobbies. I'm struggling with this as I try to learn Italian on top of my English and Spanish, and also with fitting in biking and swimming during triathlon season (swimming is the real problem because I have a stationary bike in my bedroom).
thejdizzler
4d ago
So I had a similar experience with spanish where my reading (and percieved language level actually) went down as my language ability went up. You notice a lot more detail and words that you just skimmed over before you now have the ability to try and parse out because you understand the surrouding context. Luckily at least for me this effect seems to be temporary, my reading speed has rebounded and continues to get slightly faster (although when I'm tired Spanish still is very hard to read). For context I've read ~86 books in Spanish all the way through. I would imagine this would all take a lot longer for Japanese, which is a langauge much further away from English.
thejdizzler
5d ago
I tend to avoid popular non-fiction for this exact reason
thejdizzler
5d ago
Wow! Those numbers put me to shame!
thejdizzler
5d ago
Glad I could help. The 2-3 paragraph reviews (and longer content on substack) are absolutely essential for retaining what I read.
thejdizzler
5d ago
The literary establishment is totally off the rails. Out of the NYT's List of Best books of 2024, I think I knew of someone who read 1, and seen maybe 4 or 5 of the books in an actual book store (and I am a frequent bookstore visitor). What the literrati want the proles to like I think is less relevant than ever.
That said, it does disturb me that the most popular books these days seem to be some variety of the same fantasy smut tropes. Basically porn for women. Think fourth wing, A Court of Thorns and Roses, Twilight if you want a throwback. This is dissapointing and sad to because books can and should be so much more than a vessel for you to act out your own fantasies. For me, reading is about experiencing the other, or in other words culture shock. If all you want to read is basically self-insert porngraphy, I think there's something wrong.
Congrats on the 35-40 books. That's a really good amount, especially if they are long ones!
thejdizzler
5d ago
I think there's also an advantage to being exposed to a given idea for a longer period of time and books give the author more time to demonstrate the flaws in his or her argument. It's very much easier to write a snappy article with few rhetorical weak points than it is a book on the same topic.
thejdizzler
5d ago
Audiobooks count as reading for sure. I think it's hard to consume certain books in this format (dense history or philosophy come to mind), but for fiction? No problem! It's certainly way better than podcasts, and a nice change from music.
thejdizzler
5d ago
I disagree so strongly with Hananina. Maybe that works for "slop" nonfiction: something like Atomic Habits or a Cal Newport book (maybe slop isn't the right word because I enjoy these books, but they can easily be distilled into a blog post), but for more complicated works of nonfiction like serious philosophy or historical analysis where mountains of evidence and argumentation need to be presented to convince the reader, a few page blog post will not suffice. And fiction is just not easily able to be replaced by the short form. The short story is fundamentally different from the novel (although not worse), and TV is not a substitute for the kind of inner insight into another person's mind we get from the written word.
I would also argue that reading changes the way we think about the world. Neil Postman argues this at length in Amusing Ourselves to Death, but a culture based on the written word is going to care much more about the logic and consistency than a culture trained in the deceptive, apperance based world of television. Rob Henderson, Bryan Hobart, and Ted Gioia are all reading stans for reasons similar to this, although it worries me that the first two authors mainly seem to consume popular nonfiction: very little serious scholarship or works of fiction.
Mad respect to you man! I don't have any Japanese advice, but I know with Spanish, as I kept reading my speed increased quite a lot (I was reading around 10 pages an hour when I first started out). So I would imagine the more you read in Japanese, the easier it might get. Something I've been trying with learning Italian is using the audiobook alongside the print book. You can set it to 0.75 or 0.8 speed and read much faster than by yourself. This might help a lot with Japanese, where I imagine a lot of the difficulty is with the association of Kana/Kanji with the sound of the word and thus the meaning.
thejdizzler
5d ago
I agree with you about travel, but I have to disagree with you about books vs. TV. The teleology of the technology is completely different. Books (and inernet blogs) shape us to follow logical, thought out arguments. TV shapes us to care primarily about appearances. The Medium is the Message.
thejdizzler
5d ago
I'm definitely very lucky to have a lot of leisure time right now. 15 minute walk commute, no kids, no aged parents to take care of
thejdizzler
5d ago
So I read 89 books last year (details can be found in the wellness Wednesday thread). Many people here and more so in real life seem to pretty surprised, and impressed. I'm not sure if this is me being a time (or hobby) snob, but I'm a little dissapointed in this kind of reaction. In the real world this makes some sense: TV and scrolling are much more appealing than a book after a long day at work, but I was hoping to see more serious readers in a place that's as text and argument heavy as the motte.
Reading a lot of books isn't as hard as it seems. The average american spends something like 4+ hours on the internet+TV. If you take 1 of those hours and convert them into reading every day you get 365 hours a year. At 50 pages/hour, that's 15k pages a year, or about 50 300-page books. I read slightly faster and slightly more, but also a significant amount in Spanish, which is slower. So probably 2 hrs/day at an average of 50 pages/hour. That's about 30k pages. If I look at my goodreads, I read 33,885 pages total. I keep more detailed stats for Spanish. Looks like I read for a total of 227 hours for a total of 11k pages, which is about 45 pages/hour. Of course these numbers vary from person to person, and book to book. All very do-able for the average Mottzian. It just means largely giving up other forms of entertaininment, like video games or TV, and perhaps more importantly, not being a workaholic.
So are my expectations for this place off? Am I overestimating the importance of books to the average Mottzian (and in self-cultivation in general)? Underestimating people's daily time commitments?
Just finished In the Land of Israel by Amos Oz I found this in a Free Little Library in Baltimore where I live and picked it up because I lived in Israel in 2019 and heard good things about the author, Amos Oz who is a famous fiction writer in Israel. This isn't your usual Amos Oz book, or even a work of fiction. Rather, it is a group of roughly transcribed interviews of Jews and Arabs across the territory of Israel, including the occupied West Bank, in the aftermath of the 1982 Lebanon War, and the phalangist massacre of Palestinian refugees in Beirut (for more on this war I would recommend the Israeli film Waltz with Bashir: I have never seen an animation style like it, and it also follows a similar interview format to this book).
These interviews serve to highlight the diversity of opinion and culture among the Jews and Arabs of Israel and the occupied territories. The book opens with a description of the ultra-orthodox demographic takeover of the old city of Jerusalem, follows a winding route through the newly occupied West Bank (where Jewish settlements have already sprung up), the Galilee, and endsin the city of Ashdod on the Medditerranean Sea. Oz is an anti-nationalist former Labour Party member who favors a two (and eventually one) state solution, but he honors the opinions of all the people he interviews (even the crazy, unnamed Z who advocates for explicit genocide against all Arabs, not just the ones in Palestine) by transcribing their words truthfully, and not distorting their arguments with his own judgements. Everyone, including the afformentioned Z, came off as rational under the strokes of Oz’s pen, and at least somewhat sympathetic.
This book should shatter your conceptions of the entirety of Israel or the Jewish people as some kind of elite mastermind class controlling global events or a people who want to take over the entire Middle East. There are certainly some Jews who advocate for that: the citizens of the newly minted Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, as well as Z, certainly do so. Others, like the Ultra-Orthdox in Jerusalem have no interest in such worldly things, or frankly anything other than studying Torah. Kibbutzniks, like Oz and the “Cosmic Jew” he interviews in the last chapter of the book, are more distraught about the influence of American money and weapons on destroying the original agrarian character of the Zionist movement, while still others, many who live in Tel Aviv, basically just want to party and be secular Westerners.
In the 40 years since this book was written, many things have changed. There is now a wall between Israel and the West Bank, settlements have sprung up all over Judea and Samaria, and slowly but surely all the people of Gaza are all being killed. Yet the same divisions exist in Israeli society (or did in 2019 when I was there), and none of these fundamental problems are any closer to being solved. This, I think would sadden Oz. It certainly saddens me: Israel is a beautiful country, and its seems like the biggest threat to its continued existence is not Hamas or other Arab countries, but civil war.
Now I'm reading Solaris (or really listening to it) by Stanislaw Lem. One of the most genuinly creepy science fictions stories I've read. It's about a research station on a sentient planet where the planet communicates with the researchers by reflecting their worst memories back at them in a manner that's impossible to avoid. In Spanish I'm reading Las Palabras Rotas by Luis Garcia Montero. It's a mixture of poetry and prose that's reflecting on how certain words have become corrupted by our politics and needed to be reclaimed personally, if not on a societal level.
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