Books, Reading, and Narrative Craft

The library's reading life — why reading survives the attention economy, the memoir and fiction shelves, and the craft of making a reader care.

This is the reading room of the collection — the catch-all shelf where one-off novels, memoirs, and recommendation lists come to rest. Across dozens of highlights a single conviction repeats: reading is not information-uploading but a slow, active, identity-shaping practice worth defending against everything that eats attention. What follows organizes that shelf into why the user reads, what he reads, and what he has absorbed about the craft of writing the things worth reading.

Reading as befriending the eminent dead

The moral case for reading here comes from the "GOATs," Buffett and Munger. Charlie Munger saw reading as "a conversation with history's greatest minds" — his philosophy to "befriend the eminent dead," whose wisdom lives on through words on the page, so that "a single volume can compress decades of insight and experience into hours of reading."¹ The user's own margin note makes this concrete: he felt it "first hand" after reading Matthew McConaughey's Greenlights and David Goggins's Can't Hurt Me — "it does feel like having a conversation although it is a one-way street."¹ The synthesis he flags: "Reading opens a door to the distilled wisdom of others — unbound by time, place, or status," an activity that is at once egalitarian and a "self-growth superpower."¹

But the highlights insist reading is not withdrawal. Munger's own accounting of Buffett — "about half of his waking time is spent reading," the other big chunk "talking one-on-one... with highly-gifted people whom he trusts" — anchors the note that "reading should not come at the expense of relationships."¹ Montaigne pushes the identification further: building his library as a refuge for the soul, he declared "I have no more made my book than my book has made me; a book consubstantial" with its author.²

The pleasures of reading, against reading to have read

Alan Jacobs supplies the manifesto for how to read. His enemy is instrumental reading: "most people read quickly because they want not to read but to have read... Because, I think, they conceive of reading simply as a means of uploading information to their brains."³ Against that he prescribes Whim — "It should be normal for us to read what we want to read, to read what we truly enjoy reading" — and rereading, "a clearing in the forest: a level, clean, well-lighted place where you set down your burdens and set up your home, your identity, your concerns."³ The point of the whole enterprise, borrowing David Foster Wallace, is attentiveness: learning to think "really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think," or you "will be totally hosed."³ And the pencil is mandatory — Jacobs cannot read without one, "to get close to the words, underline well-turned sentences... and write short or elaborate comments in the margins."³

Defending reading from the attention monsters

A large cluster of highlights treats deep reading as an endangered species. Craig Mod's framing is the sharpest: "The main adversary of books and book publishing is: Anything that eats attention" — attention monsters — and the printed book's counter-weapon is its immutability, from which it derives its "dead-simple 'contract.'"⁴ Apps are the opposite: dopaminergic, engineered so "the more you scroll, the more money they make." Mod's response is a personal system — "I want it to be as easy to reach for a book as it is to reach for my phone" — because "true behavior change is identity change," and the way to win is to "preemptively engineer systems to reduce friction for positive habits, and increase friction for negative ones."⁴ Crucially, he reframes the fatigue of a long book as a feature: "deep reading is an active exhaustion, the result of burned calories, not the passive exhaustion of an underused body and mind."⁴

Others report the damage from the inside. Blackbird Spyplane read Swann's Way before dawn precisely because "phones have trained my brain to work in a way I don't like" — reading to "rebuild my capacity for sustained attention like a muscle," doing "a set of Proust reps to failure."⁵ The stakes: "your attention is, on a foundational level, all you have... it feels worse than bad to waste it. It feels annihilating."⁵ Ben Wajdi collects the same worry from the novelists — Roth's insistence that "there is no surrogate for books... This intimacy provided by reading is irreplaceable," and Solnit's diagnosed "restlessness... a sense that we should be doing something else, no matter what we are doing."⁶

mindmap
  root((The reading<br/>room))
    Why read
      befriend the eminent dead
      a book consubstantial with you
      read for Whim, not to have read
    Under threat
      attention monsters eat attention
      Proust reps to failure
      immutability is the book's superpower
    Memoir shelf
      Murakami running
      Rushdie Knife
      Abramovic
      McConaughey
    Fiction shelf
      Marquez
      Vuong
      Kawakami
    Craft
      first, make me care
      turn every page
      cut 350,000 words

The memoir shelf

Memoir is the collection's densest fiction-adjacent genre, and the highlights favor artists explaining their discipline. Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is the keystone, treating running as a metaphor for writing: "Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional," and "In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be."⁷ He runs "in order to acquire a void," and insists most runners run "not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest."⁷ Marina Abramović's Walk Through Walls offers the performance-artist's version of the same ethic — "I give every single gram of energy, and then things either happen or they don't" (everything, "and then 10 percent more") — plus a defense of failure: "By definition, experimenting means going to territory where you've never been, where failure is very possible."⁸

The shelf ranges wide in tone. Matthew McConaughey's Greenlights is folksy self-authorship — "I never wrote things down to remember; I always wrote things down so I could forget" — arriving at "simplify, focus, conserve to liberate" and "we don't live longer when we try not to die, we live longer when we're too busy livin'."⁹ Salman Rushdie's Knife is its grave opposite, a meditation after his attempted murder: humans "contain within ourselves both the possibility of murdering an old stranger for almost no reason... and we also contain the antidote," and "Language, too, was a knife... the knife I could use to fight back." Rushdie's coda is a credo for the whole shelf: "Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity... And in the end, it outlasts those who oppress it."¹⁰ Patricia Lockwood's Priestdaddy supplies the comic register — her father who "despises cats" and "believes them to be Democrats... covered all over with feminist legfur."¹¹ John Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed threads attention through it all: "PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO. That's pretty much all the info u need," and the resolve to "fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open."¹² Anthony Bourdain's A Cook's Tour rounds it out with a traveler's creed — no one ever names a four-star tasting menu as their best meal ever — and a preference for "use everything" peasant resourcefulness.¹³

Craig Mod's Things Become Other Things sits at the intersection of memoir and the walking practice: a book addressed to a dead childhood friend in which "the only true walk is the re-walk. You cannot know a place without returning," and solo walks "became tools, platforms for thinking, for drawing the wider world in closer and making the inner world visible."¹⁴

The fiction shelf

The novels the user flags are quiet and lyrical, weighted toward loneliness and belonging. García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude yields the collection's most-quoted line on rootedness: "A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground."¹⁵ Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is distilled to a single blade of a sentence — "freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey."¹⁶ Mieko Kawakami's All the Lovers in the Night is all atmosphere and exclusion, its narrator "counting all the players of this game that I would never play" as she moves through Tokyo at night.¹⁷ That Japanese-literature thread recurs in a saved recommendation list of "beginner-friendly" translated Japanese fiction under 300 pages, from an author who writes "as though they created literature."¹⁸

The craft of narrative: care, then turn every page

The most instructive highlights are about writing itself. Gwern's rule for openings is the whole game in three words — "First, Make Me Care" — hooking a reader with curiosity rather than dry background: Venice as a marshy lagoon-city that somehow "come[s] to control all these colonies for so long, with the small crude ships they had?"¹⁹ Robert Caro's Working supplies the research ethic, his mentor's charge burned into the collection: "Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamned page," alongside Caro's own summary that "figuring things out and trying to explain them was always a part of it."²⁰ The companion piece on the 50-year Caro–Gottlieb partnership shows the editorial cost of that thoroughness: they cut "more than 350,000 words" from The Power Broker — "none of it was cut because we didn't like it... We could not bind a book that was any longer."²¹

Craft has an emotional underside too. Rebecca Kuang's Yellowface names the writer's private terror: "jealousy, to writers, feels more like fear... that I am not, and never will be, enough."²² And in his members' "board meeting," Craig Mod rattles off the working writer's reading diet — Tony Tulathimutte's Rejection, Percival Everett's James, Larry Brown, Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It, Patricia Lockwood — noting he mainly keeps Obsidian around "with the readwise plug-in... such a great Archive of highlights and notes."²³ His bookmaking philosophy elsewhere folds food into culture: "Food encodes culture. And by eating and paying close attention, you can debug or decompile strands of culture."²⁴

The recommendation engine

A recurring highlight-type is simply the curated list — the raw material that keeps this shelf growing.

Scott Young's list also doubles as a reminder that reading is the substrate under every other shelf in this wiki — its lessons run from exercise being "the single best thing you can do for your health" to the compounding case that "start saving young" explains most of Buffett's wealth.²⁷ The library, in other words, is not a genre but a method.

Related

• Reading, Analog, and the Physical World
• Writing and Note-Taking as Thinking
• Creativity, Craft, and Deliberate Practice
• The Attention Economy and Dopamine Culture
• History, Religion, and Human Culture
• Mortality, Impermanence, and Meaning
• Haruki Murakami
• Kurt Vonnegut
• Craig Mod
• Overview