finance is ultimately just a mirror for human behavior and sociology anyway. It’s worth paying attention to. Also, more fiction!!! I will die on this hill. The more widely you read across fiction, the better you actually understand culture, history, and people.
I guess some might argue that reading would have the benefit of expanding my mind, but I already have so many creative and administrative projects I'm excited about that I can hardly keep up with my own ideas. That's my unapologetic justification for not reading.
1w ago
The multitude of men agree in this: that they equate thinking with reading, and spare themselves the trouble of thinking, because they are able to read. They thus very much resemble those who to escape from want have sold their heritage, and now hope to live by their wages from those who have acquired it.
2w ago
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. Yet we congratulate ourselves on our literacy as though the alphabet were a virtue rather than a tool.
Paging through nearly three thousand library books, I saw her talk back to them, disagree with them, question and antagonize and struggle with them. In one, she penciled the word succotash —the nineteenth-century equivalent of nonsense ; on the fly of another, inscribed to her lover William Morton Fullerton, she composed a four-stanza poem that does not exist anywhere else in her own hand.
1mo ago
The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works. But this is hardly ever the case; he usually also has a job, a family, and other amusements. This is obviously a sign of insufficient seriousness.
1mo ago
We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author.
1mo ago
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
It would be great if all the important books also looked the best, but like dogs or bartenders this is usually not the case. In our matrix, there is a category lurking in the lower right: long-term keeper books that are under-designed and sometimes a bit embarrassing to display, yet personally very important. The best are as ugly as they are essential.
The unexpected gift of it: when you come back to a book a year (or two, or three) later, the old marks show you who you were the last time you read it. It's like a record of how your thinking has moved.
"The man read and read, moving his lips; now and then his whole body started moving and then the words entered him like spirits, and began to work their mischief."
2mo ago
The moment one learns English, complications set in. As soon as we have learned to read, we begin, almost inevitably, to read the kind of thing we had already decided to enjoy. The reading of newspapers and popular novels—anything, in short, which has an immediate appeal—goes on at such a pace, and fills the hours so completely, that we have no leisure to feel bored.
For RPS, I'm really reading everything. Local papers in Montecito and Palm Beach and Nantucket, British tabloids, big papers like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Financial Times. Glossies like Vanity Fair. Newsletters, Substacks, all of it, including Air Mail, The Love List, The Stanza, Feed Me, Trademarked, and whatever else is floating around.
It will satisfy you more than the slop that is, supposedly, more entertaining and fun to consume. It will draw you closer to other people, closer to the world. It will disturb your pre-established understanding of the world and offer a subtler, richer, deeper experience of reality.
These older books have a sense of integrity. This project was just an opportunity for me to go back to some of my favorite books and look at the ways that's true.
There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement.
I decided at age 13 that I would read books to attain wisdom—and I've kept it up ever since. I got all those other benefits—job skills, entertainment, etc.—along the way. Even more interesting, I gained a powerful but intangible benefit from these tens of thousands of hours devoted to good books.
I decided at age 13 that I would read books to attain wisdom—and I've kept it up ever since. Maybe that sounds absurd when mentioned so baldly. But here's the strange thing: I got all those other benefits—job skills, entertainment, etc.—along the way.
I decided at age 13 that I would read books to attain wisdom—and I've kept it up ever since. But here's the strange thing. I got all those other benefits—job skills, entertainment, etc.—along the way.
I decided at age 13 that I would read books to attain wisdom—and I've kept it up ever since. Maybe that sounds absurd when mentioned so baldly. So go ahead and laugh if you want. But here's the strange thing. I got all those other benefits—job skills, entertainment, etc.—along the way.
5mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
