Am still plowing through Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, more slowly than I have ever read a book in my life. I phant’sy his habit of embedding coy historical references in every paragraph is kind of bogging down the narrative somewhat — “Look there, it’s old Mrs Goose from across the way, and she’s telling the children her nonsensical stories about tableware and lunar trajectories again… ”

Unfortunately for my long-suffering eyeballs, most of what I read is online these days. And mostly it’s blogs blogs blogs, or other frequently updated pages. Although I don’t read nearly as many as some people, I am pretty happy with the ones I subscribe to [about a third of which are listed publicly on my blogroll ]

Perhaps because he doesn’t blog per se, Paul Graham is someone I keep forgetting exists, but he does at least have an RSS feed to notify of new essays, so I’ve added it to my subscriptions. Paul writes fantastic essays about programming, politics, work, society, etc, all in a very approachable style.

It seems to be a constant throughout history: In every period, people believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you would have gotten in terrible trouble for saying otherwise.

Is our time any different? To anyone who has read any amount of history, the answer is almost certainly no. It would be a remarkable coincidence if ours were the first era to get everything just right.

- Hackers and Painters: What you Can’t Say, by Paul Graham

Another entity whose style I have been enjoying lately is he who comprises Outer Life.

At any time, you can choose to read any one of a million or so books. How many of those million books would you enjoy? I’m guessing very few. If instead I chose your next book, would your chances of enjoying your next book increase or decrease? Even if I had superior taste and discernment, and was familiar with your reading preferences, I’ll bet you’d be happier, on average, with the books you selected yourself.

- The Gift of Reading

Since I’ve always phant’sied myself as a producer rather than just a consumer, consideration of reading inevitably leads me to contemplation of writing. It seems that every time I read a good book, I am left with the desire to write a good book. The same can also be true for bad books, although in this case the mechanism is substantially different. When I read a good book, I think: Wow, I wish I had the ability to create such a compelling story, and to express it so well! I gotta improve my skills! When I read Dan Brown, I think: Holy shit, I didn’t think stuff like this was even publishable! I gotta get in on the action!

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 16th, 2004 at 11:32 am and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.