Books

An AI reading companion

A simple app to read eBooks with an AI reading companion by the side.

Build something you care about and benefits others

Everyone seems to want “scale” and “impact” and seems to think that means having a massive operation. But doing something right on a small scale breeds imitators—it is like a seed. Great Books institutions were always small, but they have been enormously influential. There’s nothing more “scalable” than wheat or bread, but no one owns all the wheat nor the bread-making recipes. It doesn’t take much thinking to see that this…

Can books teach you anything?

This is perhaps tangential, but I think the "books can't teach you anything" argument comes from the accurate observation that most modern novels honestly can't teach you anything. Classic literature was consumed with the struggle between good and evil; it obsessed over the question of humanity and its greater purpose; it scrutinized what it means to find true happiness. It was philosophy wrapped in the glory of a very human…

AI and the compression of everything

This reflection was sparked by this tweet from Peter Steinberger, whom you should absolutely follow on Twitter and read on his blog. I came across his account recently and started reading his writing. For an amateur web coder, his blog is surprisingly rich with practical, thoughtful tips. I've also been poking around…

LLMs as your reading partner

One area where I've found large language models to be remarkably useful is while reading, especially when I'm reading difficult, dense, or intellectually demanding books. Take Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, for example. It's an extraordinarily rich book, but also incredibly dense and abstruse. This was well…

How to read more

I read somewhere that authors are voracious readers. I would imagine so. When I read, I also feel the urge to create something of my own. Likewise, I don’t think I’ve ever come across a writer who doesn’t read. Come to think of it, reading and writing are one and the same. Off the top of my head, I can already think of three similarities. First, unlike TV or video games, you don’t get instant gratification. That’s why you…

C.S. Lewis on reading old books

None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done…

Why read?

Rose: So what's happened to us that gives us that kind of society in which people of the best young minds have not read? Harold Bloom: Well, the screen. The screen, the screen. Television screen, movie screen, the television screen, the movie screen, and now overwhelmingly, computer screen, and yes, in particular, the great gray ocean of the Internet, which frightens me deeply because if young people go into, or onto,…