We’re told by college professors that students can’t read entire books any more, that gen Z parents don’t like reading to their kids, that smartphones ruined our ability to focus on anything longer than 30 seconds, that AI slop will take over publishing. Don’t be a chump. Read everywhere, and read often.
I walk through Central Park every day and see lots of young people reading books. I’m always peeking at covers. I don’t think this is performative. The pure joy of reading seems very much alive and well.
McInerney’s great American novel: flawed characters grappling with timeless themes, set in what is arguably the greatest city on earth. I loved it. ★★★★★
Finished: Nightmares and Dreamscapes by Stephen King 💙📚
★★★★☆ Not King’s best short story collection. I think that award goes to You Like It Darker from last year. But any collection of stories by this generation’s master storyteller is still pretty great.
★★★★☆ Another brilliant volume in the wonderful Slow Horses saga. Jackson Lamb is as disgusting and brilliant as ever, with his Slow Horses saving the day yet again from ineptitude of the intelligence service bosses. These are comfort books to savor.
★★★★☆ A genre-bending novella with a mix of fantasy, horror and magical realism that pushes the ‘library as heaven’ story by Borges to its logical conclusion.
★★★☆☆ Stephen King must have felt he needed a challenge when he started this one. How about a horror novel with just one character handcuffed to a bed with the only way to move the story along is through inner dialogue. Oh, and let that character be a woman, and let that woman be sexually abused by her father as a child. Yep, that would be a challenge.
One of the easiest ways to get more out of the books you read is to keep a journal. When you take notes, you’re not just passively reading; you’re reshaping the material in your own words, deepening your comprehension and the connections in your brain. These notes become a record you can revisit to refresh your memory and make recall easier.
I’ve used Day One as my journal for years, but I only recently discovered how well it works to keep my notes and favorite passages from my reading.
Day One is a leading journaling app for the Mac, iPad, iPhone, Android, and most recently for Windows. Journals are protected from prying eyes using secure end-to-end encryption. Prompts and suggestions help remove writer’s block about what to share. The app makes it simple to create an entry from a photo, from your Apple Watch, from a location you visited, and many other ways that remove the friction from keeping a journal. I liked Day One so much that I transcribed a dozen old paper journals to have a complete digital record of my life in the app.
Day One requires an annual subscription for its premium-level service, but a free version is available that works for many users.
In this post, I’ll share the benefits of keeping a book journal and a link to an Apple Shortcut that automates a big part of tracking your reading in Day One.
Why a Reading Journal
The practice of keeping a reading journal dates back centuries. Known as commonplace books, scholars filled notebooks with anecdotes, favorite passages, and bits of wisdom from their reading and study. Napoleon and Thomas Jefferson kept one. Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations as a quasi-commonplace book. Ralph Waldo Emerson filled over 180 notebooks with his reading notes and reflections.
For modern-day bookworms, Day One is the perfect tool for this, especially if you already use it for personal journaling.
The journal timeline of your reading history serves as a visual reminder of the books you’ve read and makes it simple to scroll through the list and review your notes and favorite quotes.
Intertwining your reading and personal journal provides a unique opportunity to revisit and remember the past. Seeing a book you read three years ago in the “On This Day” view of Day One will remind you not only of the book but also what else you were doing or thinking when you read it. Likewise, a journal is the ideal place to meditate on what you’ve learned and how you might apply it to your life. Reading and journaling are natural bedfellows.
Elements of the Book Journal
The book journal in Day One creates a separate entry for each book using the date you finished the book as the journal entry date.
For each book, it records the title and author, your rating on a five-star scale, the genre and reading format, and whether you owned or borrowed the book from the library. This information is presented as a summary line at the top of the entry that is easy to scan from the sidebar timeline.
I chose not to record the publisher, page count, year written, or other book data points. Instead, I insert a Goodreads link to the book, which has all that information just a click away.
There is space to record your thoughts and a section for highlights you marked in the book. Finally, the entry includes an image of the book cover that shows up nicely in the sidebar.
Here’s a view of this journal in Day One on my iPad:
Day One Reading Journal on iPad
… and examples of book entries on my iPhone:
Book Journal Entries on iPhone
... and two views from Day One on the Mac, showing the journal calendar and media to provide an idea of how book covers are used to remind you of your reading visually:
Book Journal Calendar and Media Views on Mac
A Private Alternative to Goodreads
Many avid readers use Goodreads to track the books they read. Consider this book journal as a private alternative or addition to Goodreads. One that you don’t have to worry about privacy, or how followers or others might react to your reading notes.
Goodreads is Amazon-owned, and while you can export basic reading data, it’s harder to get detailed notes or highlights out in a structured way. In contrast, Day One entries can easily be exported elsewhere. The Bear app has a built-in Day One importer; Bear can also export to many formats, including plain text. This Obsidian plug-in converts Day One entries into Markdown text that Obsidian can read or any app that supports plain text. This portability gives me peace of mind that the contents of my journal in Day One are truly future-proof.
Using free online services always brings a risk of continuity and profit motives. I still use Goodreads, but I like having a place where I can write with complete privacy about what I’m reading.
The Book Journal Shortcut
When I understood how great it would be to have my book journal in Day One, I wrote a program with Keyboard Maestro to copy over the 400 book notes I kept in Bear. It took a couple of hours to write the macro and copy the book notes, but when I finished, I had eight years of reading history in Day One.
Keyboard Maestro isn’t available on the iPad, where I do most of my writing, so if I wanted to create new Book Journal entries on the iPad, I would have to figure out how to do it in Apple Shortcuts, the only automation tool that works on all Apple devices.
It took much more time to accomplish this in Shortcuts, partly because I have less experience with it and also because it’s not nearly as powerful. The trickiest part was pinging the Google Books database for book covers, but I eventually figured it out.
Here’s the link to the Book Journal Apple Shortcut:
Clicking the link will prompt you to download and install the shortcut on your system. You should only need to do this once, so long as your devices are all on the same iCloud account.
In the shortcut setup, you’ll need to specify which journal in Day One you want to use for your book entries. It defaults to Journal, but I recommend you create a new journal for your books and update the shortcut to save your entries there.
When you run the shortcut the first time, you’ll be prompted for permission to access Google’s API service, Google Books, and to save entries to Day One.
You’ll be asked for the book’s title and author for each book. Enter these carefully, as whatever you type will be used to search Google and Goodreads and will become the basis for your book note. Next, you’ll click through standardized prompts for book genre, reading format, ownership, rating, and a calendar to select the date you finished the book. Finally, you’ll be presented with a selection of book covers from the Google Books API service. From there, the shortcut finalizes the book note and creates it in Day One.
You’ll need to revise the genre categories to fit your reading preferences. You won’t need any shortcut programming knowledge to edit these. Right-click the shortcut on Mac or tap the three dots in the upper right corner of the shortcut on your iPhone or iPad, and look for this list:
Editing Book Genres in the Shortcut
The Shortcut applies a reading and rating tag to each book in Day One. This lets you quickly filter your entries to books you loved (or hated). You can change or eliminate this tagging system by editing the final action in the shortcut.
Shortcut Limitations
There are a few limitations with the shortcut. First, Goodreads discontinued its API access to their books database, so the link takes you to a search page where your book should be near the top of the list. It’s a two-click process to access the Goodreads page for your book note entry. You can edit the Goodreads link with the actual website URL after the fact if desired.
I did not include links to StoryGraph or Readwise as these are less common reading applications. If you use these or others, you can follow the logic in the shortcut to add these services.
Covers aren’t available for every book using the Google Books API. If the shortcut doesn’t provide the correct cover, you can add it manually by dragging it into Day One from Goodreads. Further, Day One doesn’t support image resizing, so the book cover can’t be reduced to the typical thumbnail size you’d expect. I’ve inserted the book cover at the end of the note to avoid overwhelming the entry. This approach yields a nice thumbnail view in the timeline and media views.
This shortcut creates a book journal in Day One. If you use a different journaling or notes app that supports Apple Shortcuts (like Apple Notes or Bear), you could replace the last action in the shortcut with the destination app of your choice.
Feel free to customize the shortcut as needed. If something isn’t working as you expected, leave me a note in the comment section, and I’ll have a look.
Final Thoughts
I’ve been a reader all my life, but it’s only been the last eight years that I’ve taken the time to track the books I’ve read. This started as a simple list in a notebook to track my reading against a goal. Eventually, it grew to a full-on reading system in Bear, which involves linking and back-linking my notes and quotes to central themes and other related books.
Taking these extra steps to process what I’ve read has dramatically impacted my reading retention. The books I read before this feel shadowy, almost non-existent; the books since feel alive and connected. Could simply writing stuff down make such a difference? Oh yes.
I wish I could go back in time and tell my 20-something self to take those 20 minutes after finishing a book to capture my thoughts. Fancy note-taking technology didn’t exist then, but it wouldn’t have mattered. I’ve always kept a journal, and it would have been a simple thing to write a paragraph or two about each book.
When I look critically at how elaborate my reading system has become, I know I’m overdoing things. There’s Readwise for highlights, Obsidian to download those highlights, Bear for my linked and tagged reading notes, and Day One for my reading journal. I spend a fair amount of time keeping these systems in check.
If I were to pare this down to the barest of essentials, I would use just Day One. If I could add just one more complication, it would be Readwise. A reading journal in Day One and a commonplace book in Readwise represent the two main pillars of scholarly reading that has spanned many centuries, albeit with recent technological improvements.
One example is the ability to “chat” with your highlights in Readwise using AI. These interactions have revealed connections and insights I had never considered, drawn instantly from the thousands of collected highlights in my system. The results are astonishingly personal and … brilliant.
Chatting with Your Highlights in Readwise
This technology feels much closer to the “second brain” promises of connected notes apps. Why spend so much effort linking notes in Bear when Readwise reveals connections I wouldn’t have made on my own, all without any extra effort?
While I can’t go back in time to urge my younger self to keep a reading journal, I can pass this advice on to you. Track the books you read in a journal. Use Day One and this shortcut. Save passages in books that speak to you. Revisit and review these reading notes and quotes. Let this wisdom grow like interest on an investment. Your future self will thank you.
★★★★☆ Another great Malcolm Gladwell read. I think I’ve read all his books now and even took his Masterclass on writing. I listened to the audiobook, which was the perfect format for this one. Gladwell has an engaging reading voice and employed his podcast artistry by including recordings of his interviewees in the audiobook. I love how we weaves together diverse topics into a central theme.
★★★★★ Rereading a book you haven’t read in 40 years is an interesting experience. I remembered only the bleakness but little of the story itself. I enjoyed most of the book, though all the decades of Hemingway parodies and copycats stole some of its luster. Still, it is a timeless classic that reinvented the novel. Makes me want to go back and read all those books I read when I was young. If this one is any guide, it will be like reading them again for the first time.
If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.
Finished: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner 💙📚
★★★★★ What a beautiful and poignant book. Hopeful and joyous at the possibilities of life, but bookended by the realities of disappointment and loss.
You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.
Finished: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain 💙📚
★★★★☆ Fascinating deep dive into the world of introversion and extroversion. Some meaningful parts of our temperament are genetic and passed down from our parents. If you’re a fussy, highly sensitive baby at four months, there’s a good chance you’ll grow up to be introverted. There seems to be a biological connection between high physical sensitivity and introversion.
This has been an eye-opening book for the ways that extroverts and introverts differ. Bloggers, who Cain suggests are almost all introverts, will share personal details with an online multitude they would never disclose at a cocktail party. This hits close to home!
This month, I finished a multi-year reading of Will and Ariel Durant's The Story of Civilization, an eleven-volume opus considered one of the finest narratives of world history ever written.
Durant published the first volume in 1935 when he had just turned 50. The tenth volume, Rousseau and Revolution, won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 1968. Will and Ariel, his spouse and co-author, published the final volume in 1975, a culmination of forty years of writing and scholarship. No author’s body of work has even come close to the scope and duration of this epic history set. Excluding reference notes, the text spans ten thousand pages, covering human civilization from the earliest recorded history through Napoleon’s meteoric rise and fall.
I’ve wanted to read these books since I inherited them from my Grandmother more than twenty-five years ago. I made a few attempts but never got past the first hundred pages. I was too busy or preoccupied with other things to devote the time and focus.
This time was different. First, as a recent retiree, I have the energy to dedicate to a project like this. Second, I approached the reading like a real project. I mapped out the volumes and page counts and calculated that if I read just thirty pages a night, I could read the entire series in a little over a year. I stuck with it, and the little bit of reading every night soon became a habit.
I didn’t finish the books in a year like I planned. The reading stretched out to almost two years. On average, I read just under fifteen pages a day. Yet, it’s striking to see how a little bit of reading each day can add up.
In terms of consistent effort, I’d place the reading of these books on par with the work I put in to earn my MBA degree twenty-five years ago. That two-year program helped me professionally and monetarily; these Durant books changed me in perhaps an even more profound way.
Last year, I wrote about the personal reasons I wanted to read these books. In this post, I’m sharing some reflections on the benefits I’ve taken away from this monumental reading assignment.
Before we get to that, I have some quibbles. While Durant is a masterful storyteller and sometimes poet, the writing feels necessarily dated at times. The focus is too heavily weighted towards Western civilization and Europe. Durant’s interest in the sexual proclivities of historical figures surprised me at first, given the time this was written, but later became tedious. The extended descriptions of famous art and architecture were well-written, but there are easier and better ways to study those now. I found myself skimming a lot of those sections.
Criticisms aside, the Story of Civilization is truly a masterpiece of history. After thinking back on this multi-year reading journey, I'll group the value I've received in three areas:
1. The Past Explained
Before Durant, my knowledge of world history stemmed from high school classes and isolated deep dives into specific events and people. My internal timeline of when and where things happened over the eons was a mixed-up jumble.
The Story of Civilization corrected all that. It starts at the very beginning with a patient professor chatting beside you the entire way. It’s the same wise voice describing the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt as the Goths invading Rome, the dark ages of inquisitions and crusades, a spark then roaring fire of the Renaissance, the return to science and reason, before ending with Napoleon stewing in exile in St. Helena. It’s one continuous story with no gaps or omissions.
These books exposed me to every notable event and person in our shared history. Not just the Kings and Queens, but the composers, the artists, and the philosophers; the writers and scientists and architects; the prophets, the saints, and the heretics. It is not just about major events or people but also insights into the economies, the everyday life of peasants and the middle classes, their religious beliefs, their customs and morals, and their ideas on family and community.
By reading these books in a relatively short time span and taking hundreds and hundreds of notes, I now have a well-calibrated compass of the when, what, and why of human history. I’m able to draw from this knowledge with most everything else I read. I can place the context of practically any historical figure or event in reading that my eyes might have glossed over before now. This has made my post-Durant reading life a much richer experience.
2. Perspective on Humanity
Taking in the entire written history of civilization definitely gives you a new perspective on human nature. It’s not good. Reading example after example of the corrupting effect of power held by the few over the many is depressing. Or how organized religions are both awful and necessary to the stability of civilization. Or how freedom and equality seem like natural feel-good bedfellows but are, in truth, mortal enemies. Or how the rich get richer and richer until the poor rise up. Or how democracy as a form of government rarely lasts.
A sorry spectacle of generals climbing over slain rivals to power, to be slain in their turn; of pomp and luxury, eye-gouging and nosecutting, incense and piety and treachery; of emperor and patriarch unscrupulously struggling to determine whether the empire should be ruled by might or myth, by sword or word.1
History provides a needed perspective to help us navigate turmoil and uncertainty. Study enough past civilizations, their rise and their fall, and you can’t help but see consistent patterns and inflection points in the world around us. No one can truly predict the future, but surely our shared history is a powerful guide, given how consistently the past repeats itself.
In so many ways, history shows what a privilege it is to be alive during this time of democracy and relative peace. Our past is riddled with countless atrocities, warfare and pointless bloodshed, inquisitions, dictatorships, and crazed emperors. Yet, witnessing so many civilizations fail over the millennia, we must acknowledge this current peace and tranquility will not, cannot last.
That said, there’s room for optimism. For every hundred tyrants, there’s a philosopher or scientist or artist whose gifts to humanity have pushed us forward as a society. Here's Durant:
Let us agree that in every generation of man’s history, and almost everywhere, we find superstition, hypocrisy, corruption, cruelty, crime, and war: in the balance against them we place the long roster of poets, composers, artists, scientists, philosophers, and saints. That same species upon which poor Swift revenged the frustrations of his flesh wrote the plays of Shakespeare, the music of Bach and Handel, the odes of Keats, the Republic of Plato, the Principia of Newton, and the Ethics of Spinoza; it built the Parthenon and painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; it conceived and cherished, even if it crucified, Christ. Man did all this; let him never despair. 2
3. The Meaning of Life
During the height of my working life and career, I dreamed of one day retiring to my little book-lined study to read and think through the mysteries of life. I'm not religious. I studied philosophy in college and maintained an avid interest in Stoic thinking, but I never had the proper time to bear down on the crux of the problem: why are we here? What is the meaning of all this?
I hoped one day to find the answers buried in the pages of my many books.
I didn’t realize when I started reading The Story of Civilization that Durant was a seeker of these same questions. With every spiritual movement, every religion, every saint, every philosopher, he was there by my side, poking and probing for the answers to questions that bothered us both.
Did Durant help me find what I was looking for? Did I discover the true meaning of life? Not exactly. Maybe the answers I seek can’t be found in a book. And yet, I did find comfort in the parallels between the we-are-all-one views of the ancient Upanishads, repeated and examined so logically by Lucretius and unearthed once more by the 18th-century free-thinking Deists.
You often hear that ancient philosophers conversed with one another over the centuries, adding to, refuting, and affirming each other like some modern-day Reddit thread. Durant’s moderation of these thinkers throughout the books made that conversation come alive in ways I would have surely missed had I studied this piecemeal. I came here for history but found insight in philosophy. I am wiser for Durant's company.
What does it matter by what road each man seeks the truth? By no one road can men come to the understanding of so great a mystery. — Symmachus 3
A Personal Legacy
My Grandfather gave my Grandmother the first six volumes of The Story of Civilization as a Christmas gift in 1959. He passed away five years later, the year before I was born, so I never got the chance to meet him. As a widow, my Grandmother read these books carefully, as proven by her many cryptic scribbles in the margins. I knew her as a devout Presbyterian, but her underlining and exclamation marks show that, like Durant, she also questioned her religion, faith, and life’s true purpose. She donated most of the books from her large family library when she downsized to a senior living apartment. She kept the Durant books and just a few others. She cherished these books.
I wish I had realized she didn’t own the complete set. I would have bought them for her. I ended up buying the remaining five books on eBay. Her marginalia ends after six volumes; mine continues.
Maybe in thirty or forty years, my daughter will pull one of these well-loved books down from her shelves and flip through the yellowed pages, scanning all the scribbles and vertical lines and exclamation points in the margins, stopping to puzzle over why a particular sentence or paragraph was marked. You can tell much about a person from what they write in books. Maybe that is legacy enough. Or, maybe, when the time is right, she will decide to embark on the same voyage as her father and great-grandmother, walking along amiably with Durant and two silent pilgrims.
Reading Advice
The physical books that make up The Story of Civilization are long out of print, but you can sometimes find a nice set collecting dust in a used bookstore. eBay usually has sets for sale in the $100-$200 range, which is considerably cheaper than the cost of an MBA.
You can buy the complete set on Kindle, but I don’t recommend it. The file size caused my Kindle to lock up, though the individual books work fine. When I traveled, I left the hefty physical books at home and read on Kindle instead. Amazon has periodic sales of various books within the series for as low as $2 each, and I ended up buying most of them that way.
You can buy or borrow audiobook versions on Libby. I listened to parts of the series on walks and drives but found them more challenging to follow than in print.
My advice is to buy the set in hardback. Put the books on your shelf. Let them marinate. Pick up a volume and thumb through it every once in a while. And when you’re ready, go easy. Read a little every day. Harvest the time you might have wasted on social media. Savor the writing and the story. Write notes in the margins. Reflect on what you’ve learned. You might be amazed at the distance you'll travel.
Have you read The Story of Civilization or have plans to read it? Let me know in the comment section below.
★★★★★ This short book oozes with wisdom with the help of Ken Liu’s wonderful translation and notes. Read this one slowly and set aside time for reflection. So much of the advice is contrary to conventional western views that it can seem non-sensical. But try, you must.
Can you open yourself to your senses—quieting the mind like water?
Death is good. Senescence is good. The beginning is good. The end is good. You are, like all things in the cosmos, swimming in the flux of Dao.
To solve the hard you must begin with the easy; To do something big you must start very small. All difficulties must be resolved through simple steps. All grand deeds must be performed through tiny details.
Finished: Creative Nonfiction: The Final Issue by Lee Gutkind 💙📚
★★★★☆ An interesting selection of essays from the print run of the Creative Nonfiction literary magazine. There were some essays that appeared to stretch the boundaries of truth, but that’s the creative part I guess.
★★★★☆ The eleventh and final volume of the Story of Civilization, covering the years from the beginning of the French Revolution through Waterloo. Napoleon’s rise, dictatorship, stunning victories and ultimate defeat were thrilling to read.
From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step. — Napoleon
★★★★★ Donald Sutherland did a wonderful job narrating this audiobook. It was nice to reacquaint myself with Hemingway’s short and simple sentences, yet so full of energy. Made me yearn for the ocean.
★★☆☆☆ I tried to like this book. It has all the elements of a book I would love: etymology, 19th century England, a diverse set of characters, magic, and an academic setting (Oxford, no less!). But I found it slow and repetitive, filled with one-dimensional, unlikable characters, and lecture after lecture on how the rich and powerful mistreat the poor, especially those who aren’t white and British, except for those that are poor and British. It took me almost two months to finish this, and it was a struggle.
I appreciate the idea behind the story, but not how it was told. Not every book is for every reader.
I love the idea of a read-it-later app. The premise is simple: Save articles and blog posts that arise throughout the day with a single tap and read them later when you have the time. This way, you stay focused and never worry about misplacing or forgetting an important article.
A good read-it-later app can transform almost any web article into a clean, ad-free format with a consistent layout and font. It organizes newsletter subscriptions without clogging email inboxes. The best ones allow highlighting and annotations that carry over to popular note-taking apps.
The biggest problem with read-it-later apps is that saving articles is too easy. All those well-intentioned essays and posts languish in your queue, unread. You feel guilty about not reading them, so you archive everything and start over, only to repeat the process. And, maybe even worse, you end up reading the wrong articles.
Readwise and Readwise Reader
I have long been a fan of Readwise, a reading app and service for organizing book highlights and notes. About three years ago, Readwise launched Reader, its own read-it-later app that integrates with its book service.
I’ve been using Reader for the past two years, and it's ... okay. It has been a long development effort for the Readwise team. There are updates to it almost weekly, and the app continues to improve and evolve. It can handle most of my read-it-later needs, but I’ve honestly never enjoyed using it.
The user interface is choked with features. There are too many ways of customizing views and gestures. I can never remember the difference between a short or long swipe or a left or right swipe. The article queue is cluttered with menus, yet I often struggle to find a function when needed.
I feel guilty for not loving Reader. It is “free” with my Readwise subscription—who doesn’t like free? But I prefer apps that prioritize minimalist design and style, even at the cost of fewer power features. Readwise Reader abounds in power but lacks the finesse I expect from a well-designed app.
Testing read-it-later Apps
After a frustrating search through multiple menus to send an article to my Kindle, I decided to look for an app that better suited my tastes. I spent an evening installing the leading read-it-later apps on my iPad, Mac, and iPhone.
(A quick disclaimer: I have no financial interest in any of the apps I’ve evaluated. No one is paying me for this blog post.)
I tested Pocket, Instapaper, Inoreader, Goodlinks, and Matter using a checklist of needs and wants. I made some quick decisions. Pocket lacked export capabilities and felt dated. Inoreader’s fixed reading layout was a turnoff. Goodlinks was fantastic but didn't integrate with Readwise.
Instapaper impressed me with its aesthetics and how it imported articles behind paywalls. Matter, the one I knew the least about, surprised me the most. It matched Instapaper’s immersive reading experience but offered a wealth of additional reading selections as part of the subscription.
I spent the last four weeks pitting Reader, Instapaper and Matter against each other in my daily online reading. The odds were stacked in favor of the incumbent. I did not relish the notion of paying for another app subscription.
After four weeks, the choice became obvious. Matter is my new read-it-later app.
Matter: “1% Smarter Every Day”
Matter is a subscription-based read-it-later app that has been around since 2021. At $80 per year, it costs more than Pocket, Goodreads or Instapaper, but less than Inoreader or Readwise Reader (though you get both Readwise and Reader for the same price).
What sets Matter apart beyond its well-designed reading app is its ability to follow favorite writers and its unique algorithm that suggests complementary articles. I didn’t expect to value this, but as you’ll read, I found these content offerings compelling.
Saving Articles
Matter makes it easy to add articles to its reading queue. Use the share function from an iPhone or iPad or tap a button in your browser’s toolbar. I tested Matter with Safari, Chrome, and Brave, and they all worked well. A double-tap on an article from Unread, my RSS reader, sends it to Matter automatically.
The Reading Queue
Matter’s uniqueness begins to show up in its reading queue. Its minimal design focuses on reading content, not menus or decoration. An iPad mini displays twelve articles in Matter without scrolling. Readwise Reader, with its extra fluff and clutter, shows just five. For each article, you see the estimated time to read, the percentage you’ve already read, and the number of annotations you’ve made. The queue can be sorted by the usual parameters: article length, date added, author, etc. But a flick of your finger launches an article to the top of the list, or for a bit of whimsy, a shake of your device shuffles the order. Archive any article with a simple swipe.
Immersive Reading
Reading an article in Matter is an understated pleasure. The font and screen layout can be adjusted to your liking. Swiping down from the top of the screen gives you an AI-generated article summary. After the title, you see an estimate of the article length in minutes.
Menus and buttons quietly disappear as you read, leaving you alone with the text. When you reach the end of the article, the buttons return and stay present as you continue to peruse what you’ve read, knowing you’ll need to take some action now that you’re done. This is very thoughtfully executed. Here’s a look at the same article on Reader and Matter.
I often read on my iPad at night. There are several dark mode reading choices, and none blinds you with the bright white text glare of less sophisticated apps (like Reader).
Matter provides a brilliant way to explore links within an article. In most read-it-later apps, following a link takes you out of the app into your browser, disrupting your concentration. Matter does something so much better. When you tap the link, a window appears with a scrollable view of the linked article and the option to save it in your queue for later. A single tap on the perimeter of the window brings you back to where you left off.
Reviewing links without leaving the app in Matter
I love this ability to follow an author’s train of thought and references without losing my own in the process. I seldom clicked on links in Reader because of the inherent disruption in flow. Now, I’m a link-clicking demon, and I feel like I’ve engaged a new level of learning and understanding from what I'm reading.
Capturing highlights is as simple as dragging your finger (or Apple Pencil) over the text. No pop-up menus or distractions. Just yellow highlighted text. Tap again to delete the highlight, add your own notes, copy the text, or create a beautiful image of the quote for sharing on social media. If you add a note, linking brackets and tag symbols hover above the keyboard for those who keep notes in apps like Bear or Obsidian — a subtle but helpful touch.
You have the option to listen to articles with a choice of high-quality AI narrators. As you listen, blue highlighting tracks along with the text. If you’re listening on a walk with your AirPods, a double-click of the stem highlights the sentence or paragraph you’ve just heard. I thought AI narrators were a gimmick until I started using Matter with AirPods. This works with YouTube videos and podcasts as well. I'd love this feature in audiobooks, but sadly, Matter doesn’t offer that.
When you reach the end of an article, you can archive it, share it as a link, or save it as a PDF.
A swipe up from the bottom of the screen provides a “more like this” selection of similar articles sorted by algorithmic match. The recommendations are startlingly good. I’ve been presented with my own blog posts as options a few times, so I know they’ve cast a wide net for the population of articles to include in the matching process.
A swipe from left to right on the screen returns you to the reading queue. I love apps that use universal gestures.
Readwise Integration
If you’re a Readwise subscriber, highlighting a passage in Matter, including notes, tags, and links, automatically flows through to Readwise and your notes app. This removes any mental overhead of having to think about where or how to save what you’re reading. It just works.
Obsidian Integration
I’ll briefly mention the Matter plug-in for Obsidian for readers who use that note-taking powerhouse. The Matter plug-in is fantastic, rivaling the Readwise plugin in options to customize how highlights and annotations are presented in your notes.
Reading PDFs
Matter did the best job among the three of importing PDFs. Instapaper doesn’t support PDFs at all. Reader accepts PDFs but doesn’t transform them. Here’s the same PDF in both Matter and Readwise Reader:
Kindle Integration
It takes two taps to send an article to your Kindle if you prefer to read longer articles that way. Matter automatically adds a “Sent to Kindle” tag, which shows up in the queue list so you don’t forget.
The article format in Kindle is the best I’ve seen. You can send a group of articles in bulk, and they show up on Kindle as a digest with an interactive table of contents for easy navigation. Unlike Instapaper or Readwise, article metadata is preserved when highlights are imported to Readwise and your notes app. Limitations by the Kindle prevent wireless syncing, but Readwise parses and saves all highlights and annotations perfectly via side-loading or emailing the Kindle Clippings.txt file.
Reading Better
When you subscribe to Matter, you get a terrific read-it-later app, as I’ve described. But there’s another part to Matter that delivers even more value, so much so that the $80 annual subscription cost might be a bargain.
Your Personal Daily Digest
In addition to your saved reading queue, Matter offers a changing selection of articles as part of a daily digest. Some are curated staff picks, but most are articles that Matter thinks you will like based on previous reading. The articles presented aren’t always new. Some of the most interesting articles I’ve read from the digest were written three or four years ago, yet are still timely based on my current interests.
If you find an interesting article from the digest, you can read it on the spot or add it to your queue. If you swipe up from the bottom of one of these articles, you can find even more related articles, and so on.
Following Favorite Writers
Matter allows you to follow your favorite writers no matter where they publish. For example, essays from Paul Krugman from both The New York Times and his Substack Krugman Wonks Out can be found on his Matter author page. The depth of writer selection is astonishing, with many available articles only accessible via paywalled subscription sites, and then, only with distracting ads sprinkled through the text. I already subscribe a few of these publications but prefer to read them in Matter because of the comfortable reading experience and power reading tools.
Once I understood the scope of the published writing available in Matter, I took a different stance on its subscription cost. It’s a reading app, yes, but it’s also a potential replacement for many of my magazine and newspaper subscriptions.
Finding Your People
A few weeks ago, I wrote an essay about why blogs matter. In it, I described the long-pull value of connecting with others through writing and sharing one’s particular interests. If you write it, they will come, goes the theory. Eventually.
Matter’s “more like this” tool provides a much faster way to find and connect with like-minded people.
Here’s an example: I sent my blog post to Matter to test the article import process. On a whim, I swiped up from the bottom of my essay to see if others had written something similar. And, of course, they had.
A few taps later, I read this passage from Henrik Karlsson:
It is crazy-beautiful to have a stranger arrive in your inbox, and they are excited by exactly the same things as you! You start dropping the most obscure references, and they’re like, yeah, read that, love it. The first handful of times it happened, Johanna asked me what was wrong. I was crying in the kitchen.
I had never heard of Mr. Karlsson, but here in a blog post from 2022, surfaced for me in Matter, I found a kindred spirit. His post led me to a half-dozen others. I would never have found any of these through a conventional Google search. For anyone with interests that border on the fringe or unusual or mildly obsessive, a “more like this” journey with Matter can be fascinating.
Making Reading Fun
The final benefit I’ll mention deals with that awful, soul-sucking dread that comes with opening your read-it-later app, knowing you’ve accumulated far too many articles to read on a Sunday afternoon. For read-it-later veterans, you know the feeling. You’ve got 30 minutes to read six hours of articles. Your good intentions turn to despair as you survey your reading list.
Matter offers several innovative solutions to prevent reading queue angst. First, the audio narration and AirPods integration I mentioned earlier can help you read more during otherwise dead times in your schedule.
But the surest way is to read a little every day. Matter encourages this through goals and streaks. You set a daily reading goal, and Matter rewards you with a fun recognition when you finish. Later, it reminds you to keep your reading streak going.
Many apps do this, and I’m sure it’s annoying for some (it’s optional), but it definitely motivates me. These little recognitions likely explain why I’ve conducted 1,500 straight Readwise reviews and 4,500 consecutive Day One journal entries.
Wish List
There are a few things I would love to see added to Matter in the future.
Improvements to Article Parsing. There are some niggling problems with the way Matter imports certain articles. Photo captions are sometimes jumbled with text. Markdown-style tables don’t carry across. Footnotes within articles are often missing.
Kobo/Android support. If I finally give up on Kindle, reading articles on Kobo devices or Android e-ink devices would be helpful.
Multi-word dictionary lookups. Matter allows you to look up single words in its onboard dictionary, but there’s no easy way to look up a person or place on Wikipedia. I’ve often been reading an article when I had to exit the app to look something up. Instapaper and Reader both do a better job at this.
The last item on my wish list doesn’t count as software improvement. I wish Matter provided potential customers with a more feature-laden free tier or a more robust trial to understand the app’s capabilities better. Matter offers a seven-day trial of its premium app, but users still can’t explore RSS feeds or its excellent writer feeds, which represents a good chunk of the value of the subscription, in my view. I suspect the high annual cost turns off many would-be customers without understanding what they’re really getting. At a minimum, Matter should explain the limitations of the free trial.
Is Matter Worth It?
Matter and Readwise have a lot in common. Both apps target readers who want to be more thoughtful about how and what they read. They both require eye-watering subscriptions to pull this off. One reason for the high cost is the tiny size of the population that values such a service.
In Matter’s case, the potential market is even smaller, as it exclusively targets the Mac/iPad/iOS ecosystem. If you have an Android device, you’re out of luck.
There are many less expensive (or free) read-it-later alternatives. Safari’s built-in “Reading List” function is free. Goodlinks is a terrific read-it-later app with a $10 yearly subscription fee. And, of course, Readwise subscribers get its Reader app for no additional cost.
And yet, for its intended market, the value is extraordinary. Matter gives you an immersive environment that helps you focus on what you’re reading, even when you roam outside the bounds of the article by following links. It suggests additional reading to help you learn even more. It provides a central access point to a vast library of world-class writers and thinkers, many whose works are accessible only through paywalled subscription services. It does all of this in one aesthetically pleasing and thoughtfully designed app.
I came looking for a read-it-later app, but after using Matter daily for the past four weeks, I am staying because of the depth and serendipity of its content.
If you use a Mac, an iPad, or an iPhone and want to get more out of your online reading, you owe it to yourself to try Matter. If you’re on the fence, subscribe for a month and see what happens. If you’re anything like me, you’ll be happy you did, and wiser for it.
Questions about Matter or any of the read-it-later apps I’ve mentioned? Let me know in the comment section below. Learning about Matter’s full capabilities can be difficult without first committing to a subscription, so I’m happy to assist.
An entertaining book filled with practical advice on how to improve your storytelling, whether in front of a live audience, on a date, or in a written essay. Dicks shares examples of his own stories, then breaks down why they work. ★★★★☆
<img src=“https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/125484/2025/dd54e41e-b5b4-42ca-bc9a-83d3b708188c.png" width=“600” height=“337” alt=“Quote from Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks: “Storytellers end their stories in the most advantageous place possible. They omit the endings that offer neat little bows and happily-ever-afters. The best stories are a little messy at the end. They offer small steps, marginal progress, questionable results."">
In 208 eloquent pages, Durant shares his views on death, religion, education, war, politics, spirituality, and, through it all, the meaning of life. Truly a gift to humanity from a scholar who devoted his long life to the study of history. ★★★★★
On a quest to read the few Stephen King books I missed along the way. I forgot how great of a short story writer King is. Probably some of his novels should have been short stories! Gingerbread Girl and N were my favorites in this collection.
Willa. A ghost story about people who died in a train wreck, but didn’t know it. Wistful. Sad.
The Gingerbread Girl. Woman in a marriage break up turns to running as outlet. Soon needs to use it to fun for her life. “Sooner or later even the fastest runners have to stand and fight.” Terrific suspense. Personal transformation. Good story.
Harvey’s Dream. Straight-laced Harvey has a dream that his daughter is killed.
Rest Stop. Author/professor uses alter-ego in confrontation late at night at a highway rest stop/
Stationary Bike. Fun story about the cardiac workers inside the protagonist’s body getting laid off after he decides to get fit.
The Things They Left Behind. 9-11 story.
Graduation Afternoon. New York is bombed.
N. Creepy epistolary story about a thin place where demons almost get through.
The Cat from Hell. Noir story about an evil cat. Least favorite.
The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates. Another story about life after death.
Mute. Guy’s wife embezzles from her school, runs away with another man, loses the money on lottery tickets. Tells the story to a dumb mute he picks up hitchhiking, who then kills the wife and her lover.
Ayana. Regular people work miracles for those on their deathbeds. No reason. Just because.
A Very Tight Place. Gruesome story about a guy locked in a portapotty. Yuck.
I read the book during a recent visit to New York City and watched the movie on the plane ride home, which made for an immersive experience. The movie stayed very true to the book, though some big sections were left out. I loved reading the backstory of how young Vito Corleone eventually became the Don. Yes, some of it is dated, and yes, there were a few choppy parts that felt in need of editing, but I was pleasantly surprised by how really good this book was. If you loved the movie, you’ll enjoy the book.
Highlights
The word “reason” sounded so much better in Italian, ragione, to rejoin. The art of this was to ignore all insults, all threats; to turn the other cheek.
a friend should always underestimate your virtues and an enemy overestimate your faults.
What a delightful book. The first chapter reeled me in with the story of how the Moleskin notebook exploded in popularity in the 1990s. The author clearly has been bitten by the same notebook fetish bug. He cites brand names of notebooks that are all too familiar to me. He decided to write a history of the notebook about ten years ago and proceeded to fill four or five notebooks with scribbles and quotes and references that ultimately became this book.
Allen used effective storytelling techniques to share dozens of examples of notebook usage over the past six hundred years from accounting ledgers in the 1400s, artist sketchbooks in the 1500s, Darwin’s field notes, to modern day journaling. Definitely a niche book, but great for any lover of notebooks and journals.
I read 53 books last year, split about evenly between physical and e-books, and listened to just one audiobook. I usually listen to 10 -15 audiobooks a year, but in 2024, I decided to leave the AirPods behind on long walks to be more present. This felt like a fair exchange.
Favorites
The best non-fiction book I read last year was An Immense World by Ed Yong. The book shares how other animals sense the world in ways humans cannot. The book covers dozens of species, from an elephant’s incredible sense of smell to how spiders sense and surf on electric charges in the Earth's atmosphere. You can’t read these amazing stories without shifting uncomfortably in your chair. We think we understand reality but are too limited by our senses. We are not seeing the whole picture. This is a mind-expanding book.
2024 Favorite Books
My favorite novels spanned three centuries:
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan is a short, spare novella written in 2021 and set in 1980s Ireland. In just 109 pages, Keegan puts you squarely in the mind and body of its protagonist, Furlong. You feel the pangs of long-ago childhood angst, the chill of an Irish cold spell, the ugliness of small-town bigotry, the warmth of a coal stove, the despair over human cruelty. The Irish dialogue rings out like music or birdsong, making me wish American English wasn’t so flat and ordinary. I felt sad to leave Furlong’s side after so short a visit and longed to know what happened next, but the tale and ending were told in just the right way, with just the right words. Keegan is a poet masquerading as a novelist.
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf had been on my to-read pile for years. I was leery of the stream-of-consciousness writing style, and its Goodreads reviews were concerning. Yet I loved it. Perhaps it wouldn’t have clicked with me if I had read this book ten years ago. Sometimes, a book finds you when you’re most ready for it. I was ready. No spoilers, but prepare to be gutted in the second half. You can judge the impact of a book on how long you think about it after you've read it. Eight months later, and I am still thinking about this one.
Finally, I adored David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I read this as homework for the highly touted Demon Copperfield by Barbara Kingsolver, a modern retelling of this classic. Stepping into a Dickens novel requires a certain faith that the vocabulary and style and flood of characters will eventually make sense. My head spun with each new character, some appearing for such a short visit that I complained to myself that Dickens was being indulgent. I should have known better. By the end, no matter how minor, every character returned, and I understood their part in the story. Sure, this involved unlikely coincidences for our protagonist, but I loved the resulting tapestry of those many loose threads woven together. After spending almost 900 pages with these characters, some incredibly kind, some evil, I felt reluctant to part with them. Reading the book right ahead of Demon Copperfield made it feel like Kingsolver wrote high quality fan fiction. Dickens was indeed a true master.
The Story of Civilization — A Marathon, Not a Sprint
In 2024, I continued my multi-year reading of Will and Ariel Durant’s epic eleven-volume Story of Civilization. I read six more books, taking me from Renaissance Italy to the eve of the French Revolution in late 18th-century Europe. I should complete this journey in early 2025 with final volume, The Age of Napoleon. I’ll write a follow-up review of my takeaways from the complete series when I finish volume XI, but for now, let me say that the experience has been incredibly rewarding.
The 11-volume set of The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant
Stephen King — Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel
I have read more Stephen King novels than any other author, dead or alive. Last year, I vowed to tackle the ones I missed to read all 75 of this amazing storyteller’s works. I read three more from his backlog in 2024, none of which hit the mark. I have another twelve more books to complete this quest, but my enthusiasm has waned. I guess there was a reason I didn’t read these last books: even the greatest writers have their duds. However, his latest book of short stories, You Like It Darker, was fantastic. Some writers truly do get better with age.
My Reading System
I use the Bear note-taking and writing app to keep my reading notes and links to my personal note system. I switched over from Craft at the beginning of 2024, and I have been pleased with the added capabilities and aesthetic sensibilities of Bear.
I use Readwise to collect and review notes and highlights from my reading. Last year, I added over 700 new highlights to the system for a total of 2,400 collected passages.
I started using tags in Readwise about midway through 2024. I’m not sure why it took me so long. During a morning review of random highlights, adding one or more tags to a passage is simple. Tagged quotes accumulate into a digital commonplace book within Readwise, almost replicating what I have in Bear. Sharing a beautifully formatted quote from Readwise is easier and better than anything I could do from Bear:
A shared Readwise quote example
The Readwise app hasn’t received any new features in years, as the team has focused almost exclusively on its read-it-later app, Reader. However, a recent Reddit comment from a member of the Readwise team shared that significant improvements are coming in 2025. I’m heartened to know they haven’t forgotten the humble book in their quest to dominate online reading.
In addition to Bear, I store my book notes in a Day One reading journal. I love how easy it is to review the books I’ve read in the timeline view or see the book covers of all the books in the media view. I’ve imported seven years worth of book notes, so the “on this day” review in Day One shows the books I read alongside my journal entries. It’s another great way to reflect on my reading.
Book Journal in Day One
The Great TBR Reset of 2025
Over the holidays, I reviewed my ever-growing To-Be-Read list of books. All serious readers have a TBR, and mine had grown so large that I realized I would never get to all of them. I decided it was time for a purge.
Out of a list of 400 books, I marked each with my current interest level: low, medium, high. When I finished, I had narrowed the list to just 50 books, each of which I’m genuinely excited to read. I could work through the entire list in a year, though I know I won’t. It’s impossible to resist that perfect book that comes out of nowhere. Still, looking at my TBR list with more excitement than dread feels much better. If your TBR list has gotten out of hand, the new year is a great time to consider a reset.
The tenth volume of the Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant. This one provides an immensely readable history of Europe leading up to the French Revolution. This series has been such an education. ★★★★★
