On Books, Lists, and Their Reading (or: 2023 Get Brain PUMPED for READING bro let’s get RICH)

For Lex Fridman’s Haters: A List of 61 Hard Books

Jan 04, 2023

It’s a New Year, for the first year that has felt like a New Year for a good while. I am inviting catastrophe here, but what if we somehow manage to squeeze out A Normal One this time around?

Personally, I’ve felt creatively stuck by the pandemic and its spiritual aftermath for years, even while in the midst of an incredible run in some areas of my life. I’ve been digging my way out of it for nearly a year now, and I’m ready to make some big, energetic moves this year. I wish you nothing less.

It was while swaddled in this warm spirit of optimism that I was recently waylaid by Book List Discourse on Twitter. I hate to even wade into the substance of this particular self-induced psychodrama. But it has nagged at the edges of my perception for days now, because it concerns me rather directly.

I am what might be described as an Apex Reader.

Why I Read the Way that I Read

I was tackling Aristotle and Plato and Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and Faulkner and McCarthy and Burroughs while I was still in high school. I did an English undergrad with a side of philosophy and read novels about depraved Czekh cocaine addicts and gender-swapping nobility. I got a PhD more or less in French poststructuralist philosophy and believe me, I did the reading.

(If you’d rather just to cut to the chase – there’s a book list at the end of all this – Ed.)

I loved every second of it, every word of every page, the sweet dive into another world that rolls over your mind like a theatre scrim, no less than the pure aeries of thought, threads of history and lattices of social relation that simply can’t be laid out usefully, coherently, and precisely in any other format.

To this day (and with renewed vigor since a bout of intellectual laziness about four years ago) I am a greedy devourer of books about urban planning, Civil War history, the politics of Israel-Palestine, the use of cyberweapons in international war (I’m looking at the shelf next to my desk at home.)

I know I’m not alone in this (I shudder at the Twilight Zone thought). But it can feel like people barely read books anymore. The reading of books is an ill fit for the frenzy of discourse most literate people have seemingly been baited into.

I’m sitting here writing this post at one go, I’ll spend maybe two hours on it – so very little from the span of a human life. And yet it feels like I’m writing a letter to my seafaring cousin in longhand circa 1747. Even a blog post of any substance is out of step with the rhythm of modern communication.

Lex Fridman Did Nothing Wrong

My take on the Lex Fridman situation is that he set people off not because his list was bad, though that’s what most of the chuckle hut yelled as they struggled to justify their instinctual animus.

What was more deeply infuriating about Lex’s list was its framing in a certain business grindset, RPG minmaxing approach to life that seems antithetical to the nuance and depth you get from actually engaging with a good book (or for that matter, with an educational experience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

It was easy to be reminded obliquely of Tai Lopez’s infamous claims to read a book a day – and frankly, some of Lex’s one-week timelines weren’t much more generous. (I spent one week on Karamozov on the beach recently and made it about a third of the way through reading four hours a day. It’s a real motherfucker, that one.)

Either way, this all seemed like a bit of a lose-lose to me. I can’t condone Lex’s contribution to turning Twitter into LinkedIn 2.0, but at the same time you have to grant that he and his cadre are mere symptoms of the way our entire society works: art and experience have been entirely instrumentalized, commercialized, commodified, rationalized, etc.

It is a long-term adult project to carve out a precious island from that madness in which to actually appreciate a good book. I’m starting to get to the age where I feel a little responsible for the state of things, and I’m not about to yell at the kids down the shit-pipe from me that they should be doing more serious, advanced reading.

But You Should Really Be Doing More, Harder Reading

Advanced book reading is a kind of superpower, increasingly valuable because increasingly rare. It is an access code to the highest things in civilization and culture, a window into their deepest workings, and a lever for those who would reshape them.

Books are viral, as persistent and mutable as mental DNA, because they invite us into their entire worldviews. They are the records of minds, and while we read we occupy those minds. We learn their tracks, and we feel our own minds pull against those tracks where they don’t line up. Books are a gym where we build strength through repetitive resistance.

These things are all true. But it’s also worth remembering as we enter the new year that, at least at the margins, we can change the frequency of the world we inhabit through sheer willpower. You can leave the Twitter stream and return to the Deep Stream, the Book Stream – the intellectual root chakra, grounding everything above it – everything that is more fragile and ephemeral.

How to Read

This will be boring advice.

Have a comfortable, well-lit place to sit. Make it a place you’d want to sit even without a book. Make tea.
Pick books that interest you even vaguely, and get in the habit of buying them about four at a time. You don’t want to be stuck with just one book when you get to a part that’s not engaging you.
Turn your phone off. (Longer term, if this impractical, learn how to effectively turn off all but emergency notifications.)
Try to get in the habit of reading paperbacks before experimenting with eBooks. I personally believe physical books enhance retention, and some studies support this idea.
In some contexts audiobooks are totally effective ways of reading. Great for history and “fun fiction” books, while cleaning, painting, driving, other repetitive tasks.
Have snacks if that feels helpful. Low blood sugar can hinder focus.
I don’t recommend alcohol as a companion for deep reading, but drugs are a matter of personal modulation.
Keep a paper notebook and pen or pencil close by. Ideas of your own are a nearly unavoidable side-effect of reading. You’ll want to write them down.
Read until you’re bored, then do something else for a few minutes, then read some more.

A Note on the Art of Misunderstanding

All speech and all reading are acts of misunderstanding. Whether it is the meaning of a word, a phrase, a paragraph, or an entire chapter that elude you, be assured you are not alone - all any of us can do is strive to reduce the severity of our misreading.

In practical terms, this means: don’t get hung up on any moment in a book you don’t understand. Ignore it. Don’t sit there looking something up in a dictionary or trying to diagram a sentence. Just keep going. The meaning could very well come to you later, while you’re reading another book.

What you’re doing is building a web of connections, inference, connotation. The answer to not understanding something you read is to read more.

The Reading List: A Weird 61

Criteria for this list:

List is assembled from looking at my physical bookshelves and Kindle library
I’ve read these (with a few exceptions marked ‘to read’) and I consider them “classics” of one sort or another.
Novels are mostly very grim, gory, weird, edgy, etc. So, warning.
These are general audience, non-academic books, with a few exceptions marked “specialist” that will be worth the slog for enough people to justify inclusion.
I’m limiting each author to one or two books.
This is a personal list of favorites, not an attempt at an authoritative “Top” anything.
Some are marked as particularly “EZ Reads.” This is not a book that is simple or dumbed-down. It is a book that is well-written and engaging.

Finally: The finance and crypto reading list is at the end, specifically to shame those who came here looking for it.