I do try to round up the books I finish reading each month, but there are some books that I read over months/years. Some are the type of books that need to be read one page at a time, poetry springs to mind. Others are dense with short chapters that I pick up for a short read during the day. My current books on the go are:
- Devotions by Mary Oliver. Usually I pick this up in the morning when I’m tidying my bedroom. It’s always just one poem a day, and not necessarily everyday. I’ve been reading this for a couple of years now.
- The Quiet Path by Andrew Rudd. I picked this up in St Hywyn’s Church while we were away. It is a collection of short reflections (no more than a page) and poems on walking, noticing and writing. I’m read this over breakfast.
- The Ascent to Truth by Thomas Merton. A book on contemplative spirituality. The chapters are short. I usually read one after The Quiet Path.
- Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. This is a tome, 1416 pages to be exact with very small type. This was my souvenir from Paris. I pick this up during the day and read a few chapters.
And here are so of the articles I’ve read recently that I enjoyed or found interesting:
Articles:
- The “Most Days” Theory – “Most days” you’ve shown up, and that is enough.”
- You may have noticed that I like an em dash, but I assure you that I do not use AI to write. For other fans of the em dash out there: The Em Dash Responds to the AI Allegations.
- No, age isn’t just a number. “That’s what it means to me to grow up, rather than just growing older. And if we can keep doing that, then we have a chance at building a better life until our very end.”
- Kill Your Epistemic Arrogance by José Marichal. This is a really interesting article that covers a lot of ground. The way social media encourages us to forget that “all data is an abstraction from the real” and the danger of confusing our ground truth with actual truth. The combination of AI in which ground truth equals reality with a pre-emptive framework contains obvious dangers. I highlighted a number of sections in this.
- Also in the article above Marichal writes that “Social media is for building solidarity through venting, and there is so much to vent about.” I’ve quit Instagram and deactivated my Facebook account but I get a kick out of reading Lyz’s Dingus of the Week … and watching Ronny Chieng on the daily show.
- Although maybe I need to stop indulging is this guilty pleasure that encourages us-them thinking. “Habituation to us-versus-them thinking makes populations susceptible to manipulation by genuinely shitty people—the ruthless, sociopathic individuals who so often rise to power within non-transparent systems.” from Charles Eisenstein’s essay arguing we need to change our habitual us-them thinking if we hope to truly say never again to genocide: Never Again? Or Again, and Again, and Again?
- Why the More Who Die, The Less We Care: Un-numbing our capacity to face atrocity at scale – Anya Kamenetz
- Ansel Adams, AI, and the Essence of Creation in You Are Not Your Own Substack. An article about human creativity and AI output. With AI created output “the embodied experience of being in the world and engaging with it with intentionality to create something meaningful is exchanged for the need to produce.”
- The LLMentalist Effect. “LLMs look less like an information technology and more like a modern mechanisation of the psychic hotline.”
Do you have books that you dip in and out of over a period of months or years? Also feel free to share a link to something you’ve read and enjoyed recently in the comments.
Comments
10 responses to “List #29: some things I’ve Been Reading”
Oh, Devotions is my favourite poetry collection and I dip in and out of it all the time! It’s SO beautiful. Sometimes I read the one about the redbird babies not knowing they can fly, sometimes I read about the iron thing that her parents carried that she will not carry – IT DEPENDS ON MY MOOD (note the em dash there too).
You know, I have Les Mis and I don’t know that I have ever gotten through it.
I am going to bookmark this to look at those articles a bit later when I have more time. They look very interesting.
I don’t know if I ever told you, probably not since I didn’t put it publicly, but when I wrote the first draft of my novel I was so proud, and a friend’s husband asked me if I used CHAT GPT TO WRITE IT. He was asking because he thought it would “tighten up ” my writing. This is the same person who told me he never reads novels, only non-fiction, because he likes to LEARN. What a wad. Anyway, I have such an aversion to AI that whenever I google anything and the AI thing comes up first, I scroll past it with my eyes closed.
I love an Em dash, but I need to try to keep myself under control. I think it gives the perfect sense of the way I think. OMG, using Chat-GPT for a novel! Fine, I guess if you want a final product that’s banal and generic. The perfect use of Chat-GPT is in press releases and corporate websites, places where bureaucratic-speak with lots of words signifying nothing is the norm. I want my books to be human-produced. I use DuckDuckGo as my search engine, and you have to explicitly request an AI summary if you want it, which I never do.
I do love Mary Oliver. She’s probably my favourite poet – very accessible.
Les Mis…um, wow. That is a big commitment. I’m excited to see what you think.
Thanks for sharing those links; I really enjoyed the “Most Days” concept. How liberating!
I’m enjoying Hugo’s cutting commentary on everyone and everything in the novel. He’s quite funny. Yes, most days is certainly my mantra, which is why I count 80% completion on running plans, habits as good enough. Streaks just aren’t my thing—too inflexible and most days gets you the bulk of the gains anyway.
I don’t have books that I dip in and out of here and there, but it sounds like a great practice. You’ve got some really interesting reading going on here. I’m unaware of the em dash thing, or whatever, but I would not be a fan of anyone suspecting me of utilizing AI. I don’t spend much time with social media, but interesting to think of it as a place to vent. I guess that’s what people do and then there’s also those who feel compelled to share every detail of their life. Who has time for that? I really only use FB to connect with potential daycare parents or to shop for used items on marketplace, and I’m not on Instagram. Most of my reading time is spent on the chapters my fellow writing group members submit for review or on whatever book I’m reading.
Agree completely regarding AI and social media.
I should get that Devotions book! I would like something I can dip in and out of. Most years I do a slow read of a classic. This year’s book was Don Quixote and I just could not read it. It was such an awful chore so I gave up.
I have literally never used AI. I know I need to embrace it in some cases but I have a very negative perception of it. And I love an em dash!!
The Devotions book is wonderful. I also have a Wendell Berry collection that I will break open once I’ve finished Devotions.
I have used AI a few times to work out the formulas for Excel (I could have worked it out myself, but it is so much quicker to use AI), and I have used it to help debug some SQL. That kind of thing, I do not feel bad about because I think it is a good use case.
I was not aware that Le Miserables was such a tome. Obviously I haven’t read it. Probably a classic I could put on the TBR.
I have a huge encyclopedia of plants I keep picking up now and then. The goal is to read it cover to cover but it will be years to do so.
An encyclopedic book is just the thing to dip in and out of. Les Mis is an undertaking if you do decide to read it. The first part was reasonably quick reading for me, the plot moves fastish but as the book goes on there seem to be more and more of what I can only call asides (chapters on a rambling garden etc)