I never read non-fiction. After all, I thought, I lived in real life, why would I need to read more about it? Real life can be a bit much, sometimes, after all. A view I am embarrassed to tell you about now, but I genuinely preferred to escape into the world of fiction whenever I was to pick up a book.
Then I rediscovered a childhood love: public libraries.
Public libraries are amazing. They are treasures that showcase why we live together in states and not in individual disparate tribes. Just by existing, they rebuke the otherwise predominant neoliberal character of much of the modern (western) world. They remind us we should expect the state to provide us with quality services, at little to no direct cost. It seems inconceivable to imagine public libraries being created in today’s world, so we should be delighted that they do, in fact, exist.
Rediscovering public libraries and the wonderful public library closest to me fuelled an explosion in non-fiction reading for me. Reading non-fiction in physical form activates the learning part of my brain in a way that words on screens do not. As a result, I much prefer reading non-fiction in book form and fiction in ebook form.
And so discovering my public library’s excellent collection, coupled with the wonders of both the interlibrary loan AND you can just request they buy a book for you, I got into non-fiction.
In fact, with the fervour of the recently converted non-fiction devoured my reading life. Even now, almost a year later, I read more non-fiction (somewhere between two to five a week) than I do fiction (about one every three weeks.) This is due to how I structure my reading time: I read non-fiction library books during the day (book books) and only read fiction right before bed on my wonderful Kobo.1I do have eyes on the BOOX Palma device though, thanks to reading about it in pieces like this and this…
Aside from rediscovering the bless’d paradise that is the public library, another thing has been key in this change in behaviour: a wonderful iOS app Highlighted. This app lets me short circuit my anxiety about my sometimes poor memory. I can capture the essence of a book and save it for future me.
This app uses the in-built OCR features of recent iPhones to allow you to capture quotes from physical books.2To be clear, you don’t need this app – you can point your phone’s camera at some text and then copy and paste the result in Notes app. It is delightfully designed, very easy to use, and sparks joy. You simply point the app at a page, take a photo, select the text on the photo you want, and it extracts it (and records the page number, too!) and saves the quote. It is such a distinct pleasure, an app that does one thing and one thing exceedingly well. Plus, the developer, Damir Stuhec, is a lovely person.
In preparation for writing this essay, I looked through every book in Highlight (almost 70). I captured the key information about the books in a spreadsheet, a copy of which is below at the end of the post.3Your suspicions are right, a spreadsheet is indeed my idea of a good time.
Turns out I had read quite a lot, and made quite a lot of highlights:
I had a look at the number of highlights per 100 pages. The results were not surprising: for books I liked, I had over three times the amount of highlights per 100 pages as compared with books I didn’t like. I also was more positive about books: disliking only 7% of books I read (11 books).
The books I took the most highlights on were interesting, and as I looked at the order they appeared in the highlighted app, most of these were books I’ve read recently. This suggests I’m becoming much more eager with my highlighting as time goes on.
I was also interested to see the relationship between the number of pages and the number of highlights made. There appeared to be a sweet spot: around 300 pages and around 25 highlights. There was a weak negative correlation between the number of pages and highlights per 100 pages, which suggests I might make fewer highlights the longer the book is.
Looking at these numbers makes me wonder about why I highlight a particular phrase. Sometimes, I’m highlighting because it’s a line I want to quote or reference in something else. In others cases it’s a thought that resonates with me, or with something else I’ve read. And I think in other cases, I liked the turn of phrase or how the writer has expressed something.
There is a tension, though, when you’re reading a book and making highlights or notes as you go. It can take you out of reading to have a continuous underlying filter of “is this worth highlighting?” It is also too easy to fall into the first-year student trap of making too many notes.4My hunch is that the average highlight per 100 pages is increasing with time, but I neglected to extract the month-read data from StoryGraph, so we shall never know for sure. A question of balance, like everything else in life. And I delight in having this wonderful, personal store of interesting bits from the books I’ve read.
The table below shares a indicative quote from each of the books I’ve read. The full version of the spreadsheet, available here, gives even more detail, should you have a strange yearning that only data about another’s reading can satisfy. No judgement.
| Year Read | Book | Author | Indicative Quote | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 42 Reasons to Hate the Universe | Wade David Fairclough, Chris Ferrie, Chris Ferrie, Byrne LaGinestra | N/A – nothing worth sharing. | 🙅 |
| 2024 | A City on Mars | Zach Weinersmith, Kelly Weinersmith | “And if you could leave and build a new civilization, do you know what you’d do first? You’d start re-creating Earth as we know it. Not just our biosphere, but social institutions we’ve had to wrench away from the darker side of our nature-things like the rule of law, human rights, and norms of behavior between societies.” | 🙆 |
| 2023 | Atlas of the Heart | Brene Brown | “I know we all have deeply passionate political and cultural beliefs, but shame and humiliation will never be effective social justice tools. They are tools of oppression. I remember reading this quote from Elie Wiesel years ago and it’s become a practice for me-even when I’m enraged or afraid: ‘Never allow anyone to be humiliated in your presence.’” | 🙅 |
| 2024 | Authoritarian Century | Azeen Ibrahim | “However, this promise of gains across a particular electoral cycle needs to be treated with extreme caution. None of Albanese (Australia), Macron (France), Biden or Starmer have gone beyond presenting themselves as a step back to the old, comfortable (for them) status quo. Either due to their own attitudes, or constraints from their own parties, none even start to consider why populism took a hold in the first case, never mind the sort of changes now needed if we are to avoid the return of genuinely mass poverty in rich societies or take the steps needed to ensure climate change does not destroy the stable basis on which our societies are based.” | 🙆 |
| 2023 | Awe | Dacher Keltner | “Our default mind blinds us to this fundamental truth, that our social, natural, physical, and cultural worlds are made up of interlocking systems. Experiences of awe open our minds to this big idea. Awe shifts us to a systems view of life.” | 🤷 |
| 2023 | Being True | Cassandra Goodman | “This means that many of us have two jobs. We have our regular job, which is hard. And then we have our second job, which is even harder. It’s the job of pretending ‘there’s nothing to see here, when inside it’s a very different story. The demands of this second job include suppressing, disowning, fighting, denying, hiding, numbing and ignoring the parts of ourselves we feel afraid to reveal at work.” | 🙅 |
| 2024 | Bulletproof Problem Solving | Charles Conn, Robert McLean | N/A – Read for work | 🤷 |
| 2024 | Cobalt Red | Siddharth Kara | “As of 2022, there is no such thing as a clean supply chain of cobalt from the Congo. All cobalt sourced from the DRC is tainted by various degrees of abuse, including slavery, child labor, forced labor, debt bondage, human trafficking, hazardous and toxic working conditions, pathetic wages, injury and death, and incalculable environmental harm. Although there are bad actors at every link in the chain, the chain would not exist were it not for the substantial demand for cobalt created by the companies at the top. It is there, and only there, where solutions must begin. Those solutions will only have meaning if the fictions promulgated by corporate stakeholders about the conditions under which cobalt is mined in the Congo are replaced by the realities experienced by the miners themselves.” | 🙆 |
| 2024 | Cracked It! | Bernard Garrette, Corey Phelps, Olivier Sibony | N/A – Read for work | 🙆 |
| 2024 | Creative First Aid | Lizzie Rose, Caitlin Marshall | N/A – nothing worth sharing. | 🙅 |
| 2024 | Designing Your New Work Life | Bill Burnett, Dave Evans | N/A – Read for work | 🤷 |
| 2024 | Digital Minimalism | Cal Newport | “Solitude Deprivation: A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.” | 🤷 |
| 2024 | Dirty Work | Eyal Press | “But economic inequality mirrors and reinforces something else: moral inequality. Just as the rich and the poor have come to inhabit starkly different worlds, an equally stark gap separates the people who perform the most thankless, ethically troubling jobs in America and those who are exempt from these activities. Like so much else in a society that has grown more and more unequal, the burden of dirtying one’s hands—and the benefit of having a clean conscience-are increasingly functions of privilege: of the capacity to distance oneself from the isolated places where dirty work is performed while leaving the sordid details to others.” | 🤷 |
| 2023 | Disconnect | Jordan Guiao | N/A – nothing worth sharing. | 🙅 |
| 2024 | Emperor of Rome | Mary Beard | “One grandee, who was a contemporary of Julius Caesar, is said to have had a series of graded dining rooms, each with its own name (the one we know about was called ‘Apollo, the others perhaps, equally, pretentiously, called after other deities). He had to tell his staff only in which room he would eat, and they would instantly know the quality of, and the budget for, the food to be provided.” | 🙆 |
| 2024 | Four Thousand Weeks | Oliver Burkeman | “But I sometimes think of my journey through adulthood to date as one of incrementally discovering the truth that there is no institution, no walk of life, in which everyone isn’t just winging it, all the time.” | 🙆 |
| 2023 | Free and Equal | Daniel Chandler | “Throughout history, utopian dreams of a better society have been a vital force for progress. Many of the things we take for granted today – freedom from slavery, universal suffrage, the existence of the welfare state – were once nothing more than figments of the imagination of idealistic social reformers. While we cannot change the world with dreams alone, moral ideas about justice, freedom and equality, backed up by practical ideas about how we can change our institutions, can and have been a source of inspiration, guidance and courage, helping to bring people together to change their societies for the better.” | 🙆 |
| 2024 | Futureproof | Kevin Roose | “All over the world, faulty and untested Al and automated systems are being entrusted with incredibly important decisions. And while some of the governments, companies, and organizations implementing these systems may be going about it the right way—thoughtfully and rigorously evaluating new algorithms, doing threat modeling and scenario planning to figure out what could go wrong, putting plenty of human supervision in place—many aren’t. They’re just throwing open the doors, letting the chimp army in, and praying for the best.” | 🙆 |
| 2023 | Hanging Out | Sheila Liming | “Take time. This is the most important one because it’s where it all starts. Hanging out cannot happen without time that is, without the strategic confiscation of it. We must wrest time away from the places where it has been sequestered and kept from us against our will. We must work to seize and redistribute the wealth that is time and, when we have done that, we must commit to the work of giving it all back to each other. This means taking the time to listen. It means letting others talk. It means taking the time, even, to notice when there is nothing to listen to or talk about, to discover the companionable qualities of stillness and silence. And, perhaps most significantly, it means taking the time to let things pass from good to bad to good again, to see the whole thing through beyond the point of discomfort, which is often a part of hanging out but usually temporary anyway.” | 🤷 |
| 2023 | How to be an Antiracist | Ibram X Kendi | “What if instead of a feelings advocacy we had an outcome advocacy that put equitable outcomes before our guilt and anguish? What if we focused our human and fiscal resources on changing power and policy to actually make society, not just our feelings, better?” | 🙆 |
| 2023 | How to be You | Skye Cleary | “To assume our actions will have no impact is inauthentic. Defeatism is a type of clairvoyance that decides in advance the meaning and outcome of our actions. Beauvoir wrote, ‘What-ever the given situation, it never necessarily implies one future or another since man’s reaction to his situation is free. How can he decide in advance that peace, war, revolution, justice, happiness, defeat, or victory are impossible?’ Resignation is a choice, a choice that shapes and reinforces narratives that pull the future away from success. If we surrender before we’ve even tried, we kill options before possibilities have a chance to germinate.” | 🙆 |
| 2024 | How to Cook a Wolf | M.F.K Fisher | “Most cats and many dogs appreciate dainty tidbits, and I always share my scraps with my current feline companion. She and I nibble at the same food, from different dishes and physical levels, and feel companionable. It is another good argument for the spiritual value of leftovers, with their accumulated savor.” | 🙆 |
| 2024 | I May Be Wrong | Björn Natthiko Lindeblad, Navid Modiri, Caroline Bankler | “Because what happens when we stop taking life for granted? What happens when we genuinely, with our entire being, understand that we don’t have each other forever? We no longer have time for half-measures. One day, we’re going to have to say goodbye to every single person who means something to us. That we don’t have each other forever is the only thing we know for sure. Everything else is a maybe. And when we bear that in mind, we realise there’s only one way to approach other people and life itself: gently.” | 🙆 |
| 2024 | I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki | Baek Se-hee | “Sometimes, this directive to cheer up and buck up is like poison that rots one’s soul. Note that the bestselling self-help books and essay collections of the past ten years aren’t about whipping yourself, they’re about healing and consolation. Being imperfect is all right and being awkward is okay. You don’t have to cheer up. I can do well today, or not. It’ll be an experience either way. And that’s fine.” | 🤷 |
| 2024 | In Praise of Shadows | Jun’ichirō Tanizaki | “One need only compare American, French, and German films to see how greatly nuances of shading and coloration can vary in motion pictures. In the photographic image itself, to say nothing of the acting and the script, there somehow emerges differences in national character. If this is true even when identical equipment, chemicals, and film are used, how much better our own photographic technology might have suited our complexion, our facial features, our climate, our land. And had we invented the phonograph and the radio, how much more faithfully they would reproduce the special character of our voices and our music. Japanese music is above all a music of reticence, of atmosphere. When recorded, or amplified by a loudspeaker, the greater part of its charm is lost. In conversation, too, we prefer the soft voice, the understatement. Most important of all are the pauses. Yet the phonograph and radio render these moments of silence utterly lifeless. And so we distort the arts themselves to curry favor for them with the machines. These machines are the inventions of Westerners, and are, as we might expect, well suited to the Western arts. But precisely on this account they put our own arts at a great disadvantage.” | 🙆 |
| 2024 | In Praise of Slow | Carl Honore | “In the absence of accurate clocks, life was dictated by what sociologists call Natural Time. People did things when it felt right, not when a wristwatch told them to. They ate when hungry, and slept when drowsy. Nevertheless, from early on, telling time went hand in hand with telling people what to do. ” | 🤷 |
| 2024 | Invisible Women | Caroline Criado Pérez | “Like so many of the decisions to exclude women in the interests of simplicity, from architecture to medical research, this conclusion could only be reached in a culture that conceives of men as the default human and women as a niche aberration. To distort a reality you are supposedly trying to measure makes sense only if you don’t see women as essential. It makes sense only if you see women as an added extra, a complicating factor. It doesn’t make sense if you’re talking about half of the human race. It doesn’t make sense if you care about accurate data.” | 🙆 |
| 2023 | It’s OK to be Angry About Capitalism | Bernie Sanders | “The only way to get it is by breaking the shackles of the old thinking that says there is no alternative to unfettered capitalism. We’ve got to upend the lie we’ve been told for decades, the one that says: This is how the system works. This is how globalization works. This is how capitalism works. This is how employers and employees will always relate to each other. There’s nothing you can do about it. So just shut up and get back to work.” | 🤷 |
| 2024 | Life Skills for a Broken World | Ahona Guha | “I like to regularly remind myself that each year, an anniversary slips by unnoticed and unknown — the anniversary of the day I will die. This is not macabre and does not cause me fear or anxiety, but rather helps me reorient and check if l am living a life I like, and one that has meaning. I hope that when I do approach the end of my life, this orientation will help me die with peace, in the knowledge that I have contributed to making the world a better place, and have lived fully instead of merely stopping by.” | 🙆 |
| 2024 | Literary Theory for Robots | Dennis Yi Tenen | “Here we reach the paradox of the functional idea: Exceptional performance cannot become universal, by definition. A “smart” device is merely smarter than the previous generation. Once adopted widely, it passes into the average.” | 🤷 |
| 2024 | Man’s Search for Meaning | Victor Frankl | “You may of course ask whether we really need to refer to ‘saints’. Wouldn’t it suffice just to refer to decent people? It is true that they form a minority. More than that, they always will remain a minority. And yet I see therein the very challenge to join the minority. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.” | 🙆 |
| 2024 | More. Numbers. Every. Day | Helge Thorbjørnsen, Micael Dahlén | “The number of likes of course takes away all the untidy and subjective stuff that makes our experiences unique. When someone else describes their experience in words, we can rather easily consider that as just that person’s experience, an experience. But when the person instead uses a number, we suddenly see that as the truth, as the experience.” | 🙆 |
| 2023 | Nothing | Roy Sorenson | “Recognition of impotence need not be frustrating. For when facts cannot be changed to fit our desires, there remains the option of fitting our desires to the facts. Mental action is preferable to physical action because it takes less energy. If one must experiment, try a thought experiment. If one must write, then let the listener read between the lines. Put your philosophy in poetry rather than prose.” | 🤷 |
| 2024 | On the Great Housing Divide | Alan Kohler | “The high cost of home ownership is socially corrosive in other ways. Young families saving for a deposit often have to live with parents and/or in-laws for much longer than they, or the parents, would like, and it is probably contributing to the decline in the fertility rate from 3.4 births per woman in 1958 to 1.5 now, not to mention the sheer tension of living with in-laws and the decline in living standards from being crammed in.” | 🙆 |
| 2023 | Power and Progress | Daron Acemoğlu, Simon Johnson | “When interpreting both recent and distant history, there is often a deterministic fallacy: what happened had to happen. Often, this is not accurate. There are many possible paths along which history could have evolved. The same is true for technology. The current approach that dominates the third wave of AI based on massive data harvesting and ceaseless automation is a choice. It is in fact a costly choice, not just because it is following the bias of elites toward automation and surveillance, and damaging the economic livelihood of workers. It is also diverting energy and research away from other, socially more beneficial directions for general-purpose digital technologies.” | 🙆 |
| 2024 | Quietly Confident | Kate James | “Most people agree that any decision is better than no decision, So if you find yourself feling stuck or scared, remember that doing nothing constitutes a decision in itself, and the consequences of inaction can be equally as bad as (if not worse than) doing the wrong thing…If this doesn’t encourage you to be more decisive, think about who you are when you are being the best version of yourself. Do you pause before acting because you’re cautious about doing the wrong thing? Or, do you make the best decision you can based on the information available and take action? Both of these best selves are making a decision, but only one is displaying courage.” | 🙅 |
| 2023 | Saving Time | Jenny Odell | “One day during the pandemic, simply standing in a socially distanced line to get into a grocery store prompted me to see the street from an unfamiliar angle, revealing details I had never noticed: the new leaves appearing on the trees, the stucco on the wall next to me, the quality of light at that particular time of day. The people in front of me in line were not obstacles between me and the store but fellow travelers in a surreal historical moment. In short, I forgot about clock time and, for a moment before I went in, felt Piper’s ‘inability to understand’ and his ‘recognition of the mysterious nature of the universe.'” | 🙆 |
| 2023 | So you Want to Talk About Race | Ijeoma Oluo | “You are racist because you were born and bred in a racist, white supremacist society. White Supremacy is, as I’ve said earlier, insidious by design. The racism required to uphold White Supremacy is woven into every area of our lives. There is no way you can inherit white privilege from birth, learn racist white supremacist history in schools, consume racist and white supremacist movies and films, work in a racist and white supremacist workforce, and vote for racist and white supremacist governments and not be racist.” | 🙆 |
| 2023 | Spin Dictators | Daniel Treisman, Sergei Guriev | “This new model is based on a brilliant insight. The central goal remains the same: to monopolize political power. But today’s strongmen realize that in current conditions violence is not always necessary or even helpful. Instead of terrorizing citizens, a skillful ruler can control them by reshaping their beliefs about the world. He can fool people into compliance and even enthusiastic approval. In place of harsh repression, the new dictators manipulate information. Like spin doctors in a democracy, they spin the news to engineer support. They are spin dictators.” | 🤷 |
| 2024 | Stoic at Work | Annie Lawson | N/A – I made zero highlights | 🙅 |
| 2024 | The Art of Reading | Damon Young | “Reading requires some quantum of autonomy: no-one compels me to envisage their words. They are, at best, an invitation. Sartre phrases this as an ‘appeal’, and the idea makes sense of how little necessity is at play. Reading is always a meeting of two liberties: the artist’s and the audience’s.” | 🤷 |
| 2024 | The Basic Principles of Effective Consulting | Linda K. Stroh | N/A – Read for work | 🙅 |
| 2023 | The Big Con | Rosie Collington, Mariana Mazzucato | “In practical terms, recognizing the state as a value creator – and a risk taker – requires policymakers and the media to evolve the narratives they use when describing the role of the government in the economy. They will be key to creating a new consensus in society that understands the public sector as a critical actor in our economies. Governments are producers, too, and to be innovative requires that they take risks – as every successful entrepreneur would also say about innovative companies in the private sector.” | 🙆 |
| 2024 | The Book | Alan Watts | “As it is, we are merely bolting our lives-gulping down undigested experiences as fast as we can stuff them in-because awareness of our own existence is so superficial and so narrow that nothing seems to us more boring than simple being. If I ask you what you did, saw, heard, smelled, touched, and tasted yesterday, I am likely to get nothing more than the thin, sketchy outline of the few things that you noticed, and of those only what you thought worth remembering. Is it surprising that an existence so experienced seems so empty and bare that its hunger for an infinite future is insatiable?” | 🙆 |
| 2024 | The Buddhist and the Ethicist | Shih Chao-Hwei, Peter Singer | “I will never walk behind the male monks because that has a symbolic meaning, and I will not allow subordination of myself to the male monks in public. As a spiritual practitioner, it is a virtue of humility to walk behind one’s companion. But as a Buddhist feminist activist, I must protest this kind of unreasonable gender order arrangement. On the other hand, I cannot always be a warrior; I cannot always take a fighting stance. I must find a balance. I will not shy away from such occasions, yet I also will not take the initiative to go to all the ceremonies where I could make public objections to what is happening to women. I do not consider myself the savior of women. Men alone did not create the situation of sexual discrimination that confronts women today; the cause is both males and females. It is fine for me to stage some sort of shocking educational experience, but beyond that it is up to other women to help themselves.” | 🙅 |
| 2023 | The Cashless Revolution | Martin Chorzempa | “This is the fascinating paradox at the center of China’s way of managing the economy: the government cannot control everything.” | 🤷 |
| 2023 | The Comfort Book | Matt Haig | “You don’t need to be busy. You don’t need to justify your existence in terms of productivity. Rest is an essential part of survival. An essential part of us. An essential part of being the animals we are. When a dog lies in the sun I imagine it does it without guilt, because as far as I can tell dogs seem more in tune with their own needs. As I grow older, I think that resting might actually be the main point of life. To sit down passively, inside or outside, and merely absorb things – the tick of a clock, a cloud passing by, the distant hum of traffic, a bird singing – can feel like an end in itself. It can actually feel and be more meaningful than a lot of the stuff we are conditioned to see as productive. Just as we need pauses between notes for music to sound good, and just as we need punctuation in a sentence for it to be coherent, we should see rest and reflection and passivity and even sitting on the sofa – as an intrinsic and essential part of life that is needed for the whole to make sense.” | 🤷 |
| 2024 | The Creative Act | Rick Rubin | “If you feel unable to hit a note or faithfully paint an image, it’s helpful to remember that the challenge is not that you can’t do it, but that you haven’t done it yet. Avoid thinking in impossibilities. If there’s a skill or piece of knowledge you need for a particular project, you can do the homework and work toward it over time. You can train for anything.” | 🙆 |
| 2024 | The End of Reality | Jonathan Taplin | “At both the elite and the mass levels, American society has devolved into a sort of permanent adolescence, characterized by rage, relentless social media self-promotion, a lack of impulse control, and delusional fantasies about how the world actually works.” | 🙆 |
| 2024 | The Good-Enough Life | Avram Alpert | “These trends are exposed by crises, not created by them. The economic system that we live within is predicated on the idea that some kinds of activities (like high finance) are more valuable than others (like delivering food and caring for the sick and elderly). In countries with long-standing histories of racism, it is not an accident that the more highly valued activities have been the province of primarily able-bodied White men or other powerful racial or ethnic groups. The system came into being with racial, gendered, and ableist assumptions baked in.” | 🤷 |
| 2024 | The Great Housing Hijack | Cameron K. Murray | “If a natural economic force of competition or innovation could be unleashed to combat the property monopoly, I would want it unleashed. Unfortunately, it is not possible. This is not unusual. Many other sectors of the economy produce market outcomes that fail to meet our expectations. We can learn from them. Elsewhere in our economy, whether it is roads, education, healthcare or retirement, there have been similarly hijacked policy debates and political conflicts among interest groups, but also effective system changes that improved on market equilibrium outcomes. Better outcomes have been achieved by sidestepping the monopoly and creating non-market alternative systems. These examples reveal the true scope for system change when there is a political will.” | 🤷 |
| 2023 | The Imagination Muscle | Albert Read | “How do we sustain a beginner’s mindset through our later lives? By having the courage to, quite literally, be a beginner: by taking up a musical instrument; by reading widely from different and difficult fields; by receiving and absorbing criticism; by being attentive to the voices of youth and feeling unthreatened in doing so; by travelling and studying different cultures; by being unafraid to question for oneself and by making the conscious effort to remain alert to the world around us.” | 🤷 |
| 2024 | The McKinsey Edge | Shu Hattori | N/A – Read for work | 🙆 |
| 2023 | The New Rulebook | Chris Cheers | “Self-care becomes dysfunctional when it distracts you from your needs and demanding better from society.” | 🤷 |
| 2024 | The Patriarchs | Angela Saini | “Yet, whether it’s ancient Greece and Rome or India and North America, we look to the past as though it contains a magic formula for how we should live. In truth, the past was neither better nor worse than what ve have now, it was just more varied. As far back as we can see, humans have landed on rainbows of different ways of organising themselves, always negotiating the rules around gender and its meaning. Nothing has ever been static. Over millennia, we’ve been pushed gradually into believing that there are just a few ways in which we can live. Our societies have homogenised through colonisation and the spread of a narrow subset of laws and faiths coalescing into what are now our ‘traditions. Our institutions of government have ossified to the point where they feel immovable. Even relatively small changes to legislation can take gargantuan effort over many years. We resign ourselves to the systems we have, even when we know they’re not working. It’s no surprise, given this inertia, that we feel the social patterns we follow must be natural or divine, rather than manmade.” | 🙅 |
| 2024 | The Pattern Seekers | Simon Baron-Cohren | “We surveyed four hundred autistic adults like Jonah who had attended our clinic in Cambridge, and tragically we found that two-thirds of them had felt suicidal and one-third of them had actually attempted suicide. What more of a wake-up call does society need that autistic people are struggling and desperately vulnerable? Jonah’s life illustrates how huge is the waste of talent among these autistic hyper-systemizers, and how unemployment adds to their suffering from exclusion.” | 🙅 |
| 2024 | The Power of Fun | Catherine Price | “Speaking of playfulness it, too, doesn’t require you to pretend to be something (or someone) you’re not. Instead, playfulness refers to the ability to let down your guard, shed formality, not care too much about outcomes, and open yourself to indeed, proactively seek out opportunities for humor and lighthearted connection.” | 🙆 |
| 2023 | The Secret Life of You | Kerri Sackville | “Our use of devices is also depriving us of casual moments of connection. We all have numerous opportunities to chat to the peripheral people in our lives, and these interactions can be deeply rewarding. We can talk to the person driving us home, the cashier bundling up our groceries, the barista making our coffice, or the fellow dog walker in the park. These conversations can make us feel connected to the communities in which we live and to other people and experiences. When we deprive ourselves of these small moments of intimacy by being constantly focused on our phones, we increase our disconnection and loneliness.” | 🤷 |
| 2024 | The So What Strategy | Gerard Castles, Davina Stanley | N/A – Read for work | 🙆 |
| 2024 | The Things We Live With | Gemma Nisbet | N/A – Of the grand total of two highlights, nothing felt special enough to share. | 🤷 |
| 2024 | The Wandering Mind | Jamie Kreiner | “For Christian monks, meditation involved a distinctive mix of what scholars today would call directive techniques and thematic structures: their meditations were purposeful and concentrative and worked like their memories did, by association. To meditate on a concept, to think about what something was or meant, a monk searched her memory for something related to it. Then she’d build on that association, and the next, and the next. The goal was a gradual agglomeration of memories that evolved into something much more revealing than any single-sided view could be. It was an exploratory, probing way of thinking. It was a form of prayer but also an act of discovery and creation. It was a means to stretch closer to God, because to think more deeply about the world was to decode the communications that he was constantly sending. It was also a tactic to set the mind in motion without letting it wander aimlessly.” | 🤷 |
| 2023 | The Will to Change | bell hooks | “Contemporary feminist movement created a socially sanctioned space where girls can create a sense of self that is distinct from sexist definitions; the same freedom has not been extended to boys. No wonder then that boys in patriarchal culture continue the tradition of creating a false self, of being split. That split in boys and men is often characterized by the capacity to compartmentalize. It is this division in the psyches and souls of males, fundamentally wounding, that is the breeding ground for mental illness. When males are required to wear the mask of a false self, their capacity to live fully and freely is severely diminished. They cannot experience joy and they can never truly love.” | 🙆 |
| 2024 | These Precious Days | Ann Patchett | “The trouble with good fortune is that we tend to equate it with personal goodness, so that if things are going well for us and less well for others, it’s assumed they must have done something to have brought that misfortune on themselves while we must have worked harder to avoid it. We speak of ourselves as being blessed, but what can that mean except that others are not blessed, and that God has picked out a few of us to love more? It is our responsibility to care for one another, to create fairness in the face of unfairness and find equality where none may have existed in the past.” | 🙆 |
| 2024 | Until the End of Time | Brain Greene | “In more recent times, however, the deeper researchers have probed, the more they’ve realized that grasping the crossovers between disciplines is essential. The sciences are not separate. And when focus shifts from life to intelligent life, yet other overlapping disciplines language, literature, philosophy, history, art, myth, religion, psychology, and so on —become central to the chronicle.” | 🤷 |
| 2023 | What if this were enough? | Heather Havrilesky | “Even as an adult, even as an emancipated, free, independent breadwinner, the enforced cheer of American life is never far away. It’s the boss who wants you to be more polite in your email messages, and not point out the obvious sloppy work and bizarre groupthink and passive-aggressiveness and corner-cutting madness that unfold every day without comment. It’s the intolerably pushy acquaintance at the party, urging you: drink more, don’t worry be happy, don’t overthink it, it’s all good, stop bumming everyone out. It’s the mom at school who wonders aloud why you would choose to “get so heavy” about the news instead of just focusing on “positive things.” It’s the neighbor who smiles a strained smile and says nothing when you mention that your roof is leaking but you can’t afford to fix it yet so you’ve got a tarp on there until you can. It’s always better not to mention the truth, his pained smile tells you.” | 🤷 |
| 2024 | Why? | Philip Goff | “There are similar psychological difficulties engaging with the rights of non-human animals, and of plants and trees. Sometimes I wonder whether a mass encounter with the living presence in all things, brought about through widespread safe and legal use of psilocybin, might be the only way to combat the ongoing commodification of nature which is launching us headlong into climate catastrophe. Here again, spiritual advancement and political progress could go hand in hand.” | 🙆 |
| 2024 | Writing for Busy Readers | Jessica Lasky-Fink, Todd Rogers | “Ultimately, writers must balance their desire to communicate everything relevant with the understanding that the more they add, the less readers will read.” | 🙆 |
Notes
- 1
- 2To be clear, you don’t need this app – you can point your phone’s camera at some text and then copy and paste the result in Notes app.
- 3Your suspicions are right, a spreadsheet is indeed my idea of a good time.
- 4My hunch is that the average highlight per 100 pages is increasing with time, but I neglected to extract the month-read data from StoryGraph, so we shall never know for sure.