longreads.com

The End of Books

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.

whyisthisinteresting

The Ugly, Essential Books Edition

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.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Mufaro Mutowembwa

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.

theparisreview.org

Paris Review - Writers, Quotes, Biography, Interviews, Artists

"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."

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Carson Griffith

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.

personalcanon.com

everything i read in february & march 2026

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.

honest-broker.com

How to Read the Great Books in 52 Weeks

These books force you to think critically about your own time and the future we're building together.

honest-broker.com

Why Read the Classic Books?

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.

themarginalian.org

Doris Lessing on How to Read a Book and How to Read the World

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.

themarginalian.org

Doris Lessing on How to Read a Book and How to Read the World

Read your way from one sympathy to another… Follow your own intuitive feeling about what you need.

honest-broker.com

My 24 Rules for Reading

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.

honest-broker.com

My 24 Rules for Reading

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.