In the spring of last year, I started reading The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant. This is no quick undertaking. Spanning eleven volumes and 10,000 pages, it will take me the rest of this year to finish.
The first volume was published in 1935 when Durant had just turned 50. He published the final volume forty years later. Midway through these decades of writing, Will's wife Ariel became a co-author and active collaborator in this epic undertaking. Together, they read an average of five hundred books as research for each published volume.
The Story of Civilization is regarded as one of the most compelling narratives of world history ever written. The tenth volume, Rousseau and Revolution, won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 1968. Goodreads currently gives these books a 4.4 out of 5. Such a high rating is rare, which indicates how readers truly admire the series. Essayist Jamie Todd Rubin chose these as the sole books to take along to his proverbial desert island, which was all the prompting I needed to start this adventure.
While the books were best-sellers during their time, I do wonder how many people got around to reading them. Who has the time to read this much history? After all, this set collected dust on my bookshelves for twenty-five years before I picked up the first volume.
But the intrepid reader who perseveres is in for a telling of history unlike any other. Durant’s writing is clear, colorful, engaging, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. He's good at digging into the philosophical and religious beliefs of these ancient civilizations to parse out what elements contribute to our present-day ideas and also what, if any, stand up to his skeptical intellect. He pokes fun at the war-mongering gods of Egypt and Persia but shows genuine reverence for the ancient Hindu Upanishads with their belief in impersonal immortality and the oneness we share with the universe. In Ancient Rome, we learn about Julius Caesar and Nero, yes, but also about thinkers like Cicero and Seneca, about the everyday lives of both emperors and peasants, how they cooked, celebrated, and prayed. I feel like I'm on a journey through time with Professor Durant, and he's motioning for me to sit nearer to him while we take all this in together.
I have a personal reason for reading these books. I inherited the first six volumes from my grandmother, which were a Christmas gift to her from my grandfather in 1959. He died a few years later, before the seventh volume was published and before I had a chance to meet him. My grandmother became a widow at 57, two years younger than I am today. She was always a voracious reader, and I know I inherited my love of learning and books from her.
I have the benefit of my grandmother's notes in the margins as she read these books some forty years ago. I recognize her cursive handwriting, her exclamation marks, her underlining. I am adding my notes to hers. It's like we're reading this grand history together. Maybe one day, my daughter will join us in this shared experience across time and generations.
I am nearing the end of the fifth volume, The Renaissance, which covers the history of Italy from the 14th to mid-16th centuries. My progress is slow but steady. I read an average of 30 pages a night in my little library, hot tea by my side, pen in hand. I've come to cherish this time with Professor Durant. There have been more than a few times when my jaw dropped open in sheer disbelief at what I've read. I am shocked both by the crazy shit that has happened during the darker periods of our history and that it took so many years for me to learn all of this.
I've reached a point in life where I have the time to dedicate to personal projects. Early retirement has its thrills and challenges. Without direction or structure, I could see how I could squander these precious years. But this is something I’ve dreamed of doing since college. I always loved literature and philosophy, but I was too practical to consider a career in academia. Instead, I compromised. I majored in accounting with a personal vow to resume a scholar's life as soon as financially possible. In hindsight, that is exactly what I have done.
I read a lot, but my knowledge of history is uneven. I’ve read many biographies and a few accounts of specific eras. I have a good grasp of the history of the British Navy during the Age of Sail, early American history, and World War II. I know a little about Ancient Greece and Rome from my readings of philosophy and Stoicism. But these pockets of knowledge feel like tiny stabs of light in an immense underground cavern. Reading Durant, I am slowly illuminating the darkness. I am renewing my education, my scholarship.
Rounding out my knowledge of history complements my other reading as well. How many books have you read that referenced a historical event or leader that you glossed over? If you’re like me, a lot. Having a broad sense of history has deepened my understanding of practically every book I’ve read since I started this adventure. I feel extra synapses firing when I understand a historical reference that would have flown over my head before this newfound knowledge. And with bi-directional links in Craft, my reading notes have exploded in value with the addition of this history overlay. I feel nearer to wisdom the more I read these books.
In the Dark Ages, owning a copy of the Bible was strongly discouraged by the Roman Catholic Church. It was believed that only the clergy could properly interpret the Scriptures. A driving force behind the Italian Renaissance was a loosening of these religious laws to permit a greater pursuit of knowledge, which in turn led to a rediscovery of the philosophy and wisdom of the ancient Greeks and Romans.
Today, we face a different obstacle. Our attention spans have shortened from the constant dopamine drip of social media and TikTok videos, the binge-worthy Netflix dramas, and the pressure to keep up with present events that wash over us like a river. We divide ourselves into polarizing groups, yet read the same books, the same news feeds, and the same websites, and thus end up thinking the same way. Our horizons are laughably short. Modern wisdom can sometimes feel like an oxymoron.
Perhaps, then, a study of history is the antidote we all need to make sense of this distracted and confusing world. Maybe the context of prior ages could help us better understand our current struggles. As they say, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
It’s been a couple years since I finished In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. I read all six volumes with an amazing Twitter book group over the course of a year. I struggled with the serpentine sentences and French society references at the time, but passages like these stuck with me. 📚
I read 75 books in 2023, my high water mark for the most reading in a year. Books have always been like a warm blanket, and I needed that comfort during a most challenging year.
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. — James Baldwin
I took on some ambitious books during the year. I read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, which has long been on my to-be-read pile. I read a new translation of The Odyssey after having last followed the plight of heroic Odysseus some thirty years ago. I am tackling a multi-year reading of Will and Ariel Durant’s epic eleven-volume Story of Civilization. I inherited these books from my Grandmother twenty-five years ago, and I have finally found the time to read them. Discovering her careful handwriting in the margins of these books has revealed a new and somewhat startling side to my prim and proper Grandmother. What you mark and highlight says a lot about your thoughts and beliefs. It’s like a second history is being told in these pages. I’ve decided to leave my own trail of marginalia for my daughter, should she find the patience and fortitude to complete this generational journey herself one day.
A Slow Read of The Story of Civilization
Favorites of the Year
My favorite novel in 2023 was Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane. It’s a bleak book, but protagonist Mary Pat Fennessy is one of the most compelling characters I’ve encountered in a long, long while. She made the bleakness of this book and its theme of parental grief worth it. I will reread this one if only to spend more time with Mary Pat.
I love essays and usually read a half dozen essay compilations during any given year. My favorite this year was These Precious Days by Ann Patchett, who also narrated the audiobook. I recall precise moments on my walks through our neighborhood here in Verrado as I stopped to soak in the wisdom and honesty of this brilliant author speaking to me through my AirPods.
My favorite non-fiction book was The Art of Living by Thich Nhat Hanh. Sometimes, the universe sends you exactly the book you most need to read. What a clear-eyed and compelling manifesto of living your best life right now.
Stephen King Challenge
In May, I discovered I had read more Stephen King novels than any other author, living or otherwise. Out of his 74 published works of fiction (excluding collaborations), I had read an astonishing 47 of them. It shouldn’t surprise me that I’ve read so much of this author. I love a good yarn, and Mr. King is almost certainly our generation’s most preeminent storyteller. I count Misery, The Dark Tower series, The Stand, and The Shining as some of my all-time favorite reads.
So, I decided to go back and read the 28 books I had missed along the way. In 2023, I read 14 of those, including his most recent novel, Holly. My favorite from the year was Night Shift, his first collection of short stories published in 1977.
I look forward to tackling the remaining 14 unread gems in 2024 before the prolific Mr. King publishes his next book.
More Physical Books in 2023
For the past few years, I’ve borrowed most of the books I read from the library on my Kindle using the Libby app. This year, two-thirds of the books I read were physical copies I own. There was a reason for this change.
We moved from Washington state to Arizona late last year, which afforded the possibility of a larger home library. In my old library, I had to donate a book to make room for every new one I purchased. After nearly twenty years of scanning the crammed shelves for the next sacrifice, choosing what book to cull became excruciating. Borrowing books on Libby seemed the more humane choice.
The new library was indeed more spacious. Once all sixty boxes of books from the move were properly shelved, I marveled at the many gaps between books. This was all the invitation I needed. With joyful abandon, I bought dozens of books during the year to fill those unsightly gaps. I joined two book clubs. I experienced once again that long-forgotten thrill of leaving a used bookstore with a bagful of books. The gaps slowly narrowed and finally evaporated. I struggled in vain to find an open spot for Wednesday’s Child by Yiyun Li, the last book I finished this year.
In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long… Ultimately the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted. — Alberto Manguel
The coming year will see another series of book sacrifices and likely a return to library borrowing. I enjoyed this book buying spree while it lasted.
My Reading System
I use the Craft app to house all my reading notes and links to my personal note system. I passed the three-year mark of using Craft and have now written and linked over 250 literature notes in this quasi-Zettelkasten system. The connections between books and ideas inside Craft have produced more than a few epiphanies and have indeed taken on a life of its own as a knowledge system.
I continue to be an avid fan of the ReadWise service to collect and review notes and highlights from my reading. I added 234 new highlights to the system this year, bringing me to 1,600 total passages in ReadWise. My daily review of five random selected highlights always makes me smile … and ponder.
Craft and ReadWise form a system that helps me retain and leverage more of what I read. For as much time and money as I spend with my nose in a book, these tools ensure I get the best return for that investment. If you’re curious about either of these apps, please see my earlier post, Read Better with Craft and ReadWise.
The Year Ahead
At my steady pace of 30 pages per evening, I expect to finish The Story of Civilization sometime late in 2024. Beyond that, I’ve been toying with the idea of reading only books I already own, reading only books written in the last year, books written more than a hundred years ago, or reading books I’ve already read. But I know myself. I won’t do any of these things. Books are a comfort to me, and the right book at the right time is the best comfort of all. I’ll know it when I read it.
My 75th book of 2023, which is a new personal record for the most books I’ve read in a single year. Many of the stories in this collection touch on the hard to articulate grief of losing a child, which hit home for me. ★★★★☆
Book-wrapt — that beneficient feeling of being wholly imbooked, beshelved, inlibriated, circumvolumed, peribibliated … it implies the traditional library wrapped in shelves of books, and the condition of rapt attention to a particular volume, and the rapture of of being transported to the wood beyond the world.
… and
Entering our library should feel like easing into a hot tub, strolling into a magic store, emerging into the orchestra pit, or entering a chamber of curiosities, the club, the circus, our cabin on an outbound yacht, the house of an old friend. It is a setting forth, and it is a coming back to center. Borges, of course, thought it was entering Paradise.
Sometimes a book feels like it was written just for you. May we all find ourselves Book-wrapt this holiday season. ★★★★★
Another compelling argument for being present in our lives, and paying close attention to the marvels that surround us.
How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god?
Continuing my quest to read the Stephen King books I missed along the way. With these two, I’ve now read thirteen King books this year. The 700-page Christine book flew by on my Kindle. Lots of supernatural fun mixed in with nostalgia for my late 1970s youth. I’m tempted now to watch the movie, which I somehow also missed.
I listened to the audiobook version of Blaze on long walks through the Arizona desert. I enjoyed the story with just a hint of the otherworldly, feeling sorry for the misunderstood and troubled Blaze.
Right now, I have just fifteen more books to go, until this prolific author publishes his next one. It feels a little like walking up the down escalator. But what a great problem to have.
I finished this fourth installment of Will Durant’s Story of Civilization after three months of slow, careful reading. The Age of Faith begins with the fall of Rome and carries through the end of the Middle Ages. The writing is clear, colorful, engaging, often horrifying, and occasionally laugh-out-loud hilarious. Along the way, I encountered kings and popes, treachery and atrocities, saints and philosophers, economic systems, the building of cathedrals and castles, and primers on the great works of literature and philosophy across a thousand years of recorded time.
I’ve come to cherish these nighttime hours I spend with Professor Durant. I am pacing myself to read just twenty or thirty pages per night. I keep an iPad nearby for searches on historical figures or glimpses of the landmarks and architecture he paints with his words. A favorite moment during the book was playing an album of Ambrosian Chants (Apple Music Link) that, according to Durant, mesmerized the faithful within the already awe-inspiring gothic cathedrals of the 13th century. Between Durant’s descriptions and the music, I felt utterly transported.
There have been more than a few times when my jaw dropped open in sheer disbelief at what I’ve read; shocked not only by the crazy shit that took place during these dark times of our history, but that it took so many years for me to learn all of this. To quote Durant: “Education is the progressive discovery of our ignorance.” I am getting quite the education.
I’m moving on to the next volume on the Italian Renaissance as part of a slow but steady read through all eleven volumes of this incredible body of work. What a journey this has become.
Finished reading: Your Brain on Art by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross 📚
Your Brain on Art is the latest selection from the Next Big Idea Club. The authors did a nice job of gathering scientific evidence of how art making and appreciation physically changes your brain. I loved the part where a scientist discovered that different sound waves can alter the shape and appearance of our heart cells. Lots of good science-based tips on how to flourish by incorporating art in your everyday life. For me, I’m planning to spend more time really listening (and dancing!) to new music, not just having it on in the background. ★★★★
Impermanence is something wonderful. If things were not impermanent, life would not be possible. A seed could never become a plant of corn; the child couldn’t grow into a young adult; there could never be healing and transformation; we could never realize our dreams.
Sometimes the universe sends you exactly the book you most needed to read. What a clear-eyed and compelling manifesto of living your best life right now. ★★★★★
Continuing my quest to go back and read the Stephen King books I’ve missed along the way. I listened to the audiobook of this one, narrated by actor Bronson Pinchot. I’ve listened to hundreds of audiobooks, but the narration of the ending of this story was one of the most incredible I’ve ever had the pleasure to hear. Bravo! ★★★★
Finished reading: The Silentiary by Antonio Di Benedetto 📚
What a strange little book. The narrator is slowly driven insane by all the commercial sounds encroaching on his family home: an auto repair shop next door, a nightclub across the street, an idling bus outside his bedroom window, all told in disjointed Kafka-like stream of consciousness. Made me appreciate the relative quiet I enjoy here at home. ★★★
Working through the few books of Stephen King I haven’t read. This is a collection of his early stories. A few are dated, and a few are exceptional. There is a bleakness that pervades many of these stories. I hoped for a good outcome for the protagonist against all odds, but I was seldom rewarded. Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut and The Raft were my favorites. ★★★★
Working my way through the backlog of Stephen King books I haven’t read (I’ve read over 50 of his books!?!). What a gifted and prolific storyteller he is!
A good premise perhaps weakened by too many characters and side stories. The depression era setting, poor living conditions, and the horrors of racism and cruel treatment of people with disabilities felt Dickensian. McBride held my attention by the end, but a good editor might have helped maintain it all the way through. ★★★
Mary Pat Fennessy is one of the most compelling characters I’ve encountered in a while. She made the bleakness of the story worth it. And yes, the story is bleak!
Have you ever run across a book you know you’ve read but can’t recall much about it? Or, come across a passage in a book while you were reading that seemed important — something you knew you could use at some point in the future — but didn’t know where or how to save it so you could find it again?
Too often, I’ll pick up a book I’ve read just a few years back and feel a familiar sense of despair. I may have spent hours of study at the time, but it’s already become a blur. And how many hours of my life have I spent searching for something I read but can’t find?
For someone who invests a thousand hours a year reading, this kind of poor knowledge return always bothered me. I needed a simple system to make better use of the time I spent reading, but didn’t distract or pull me away from the flow of reading itself.
I’m pleased to share that two innovative apps — Craft and Readwise — have finally become that system for me. Both require a paid subscription, and one works only with Apple devices, so they aren’t for everyone. Yet, using these two apps has improved my reading retention, and perhaps more importantly, unlocked a way for me to consistently integrate what I read into a broader system of curated thought and wisdom.
What follows are the methods I employ in the reading system across three key activities:
(1) Capturing notes and quotes from my reading;
(2) Curating what I’ve captured inside my note-taking system; and
(3) Compounding the knowledge and insights I’ve gleaned with daily reviews and Zettelkasten-style linking.
There are a few caveats I’ll share before diving in. First, these workflows only apply to books I actively read with an alert mind and a notebook and pen nearby. The books I read for pleasure at night before bed don’t see much action in this system. Second, we’re in the early innings of a golden era of note-taking and reading technologies. The tools and techniques I’m using in early 2022 will continue to evolve as new capabilities and services emerge. And finally, I have no financial incentives or affiliations with Readwise, Craft or any other service or product mentioned in this post.
Phase I — Capturing
Capturing insights from my reading is the first phase of my system. I’ve learned that to remember and learn from what I read, I need to take notes. This part of the system is decidedly old school. If I’m reading an actual book, I almost always have a pen in my hand to mark passages or scribble notes in the margins. If I’m reading on Kindle, I highlight passages with my finger, but jot notes down on paper, usually in a Field Notes notebook. I’ve gotten in the habit of summarizing the main points of what I’ve just read to help forge a mental lock on the material. Often, in the process of putting something in my own words, I stumble upon some new insight I hadn’t comprehended at first blush. I also occasionally reflect on what I’m reading in my journal.
I use Readwise to import highlights and annotations from Kindle ebooks and online articles using the Pocket read-it-later app. Readwise is a subscription service that gathers and resurfaces highlights and annotations from books and periodicals. Readwise integrates with almost 20 reading sources. Kindle and Pocket highlights sync to Readwise automatically, so I don’t have to think about it while I read.
Capturing quotes from printed books is a Readwise superpower. The OCR engine inside the Readwise app is fantastic. Snap a picture of the page with your iPhone, pick the beginning and end of the highlight with your finger, tap the book (it remembers what you’re reading), and type in an optional page number. If you want to include a note with the highlight, tap the record button and add it with your voice. I batch my capture of highlights in chunks, and each takes about 20 seconds to process. When finished, all those highlights and notes are now magically part of Readwise.
Capturing a highlight from a printed book in Readwise is fast and accurate.
Besides books, I read a lot of online articles and blog posts, but I resist the urge to read these on the fly. Instead, I save them into Pocket and take time on the weekend to read through them all at once. I enjoy the reading experience on Pocket’s iPad app, and it’s a simple thing to add articles, even those behind paywalls. The free version of Pocket allows up to three highlights which is sufficient for most pieces. Highlights I make in Pocket flow automatically into Readwise.
Once a week, I archive the best Pocket articles into DevonThink for future reference. DevonThink is a tremendously powerful document storage app that I use to keep various personal and professional files, including the entire ship maintenance system for our trawler, MV Indiscretion. DevonThink can save Pocket articles as bookmarks, web archives, PDFs, Markdown, or plain text, and I can easily link to them from other apps (like Craft). I love having an established workflow for online articles. Nothing important I read falls through the cracks.
Reading system flow diagram
Phase II — Curating
The process shifts from Readwise to the Craft app in the curation phase. Craft is a markdown note-taking app with powerful linking capabilities that I adopted about a year ago for all my reading notes. You can read more about why I love Craft here.
When I finish a book or article, I create a new literature note in Craft that will ultimately include my notes, favorite highlights, and a personal review of what I’ve read. I keep a folder of reading templates in Craft to bring consistency and completeness to the process. I have templates for fiction, non-fiction, essays, and articles. For example, my fiction template has a section for the plot, characters, key themes, questions I had during my reading, favorite quotes, and my overall review of the book.
With the literature note now created in Craft, I copy in the highlights and annotations from Readwise with its custom markdown export function. Some note-taking apps like Roam or Obsidian can be integrated directly with Readwise, but this really isn’t necessary. I like having control over when I bring in my reading highlights, which isn’t any more complicated than a simple copy and paste.
Next, I copy in my handwritten notes from the margins of the book or Field Notes. I’ll flip through my journal in Day One and copy in relevant passages I wrote during my reading.
At this point in the process, the literature note is quite a jumble of highlights, journal entry excerpts, and note fragments. I sort through it all and try to bring forth order. Luckily, it’s simple to rearrange blocks of text in Craft, so I move things into proper sections and rewrite or expand on my notes. I summarize the main ideas of the book and any takeaways.
Finally, I try to think more broadly about how what I’ve read connects to other books or concepts in my reading system. This is where links come in.
Linking is a Craft mainstay. Type the @ symbol in a note, and you can create links to other notes within Craft. I add links at the block level from inside the book note to related permanent notes (or other book notes). Block-level links are truly a Craft superpower. Many Zettelkasten proponents insist on creating stand-along “atomic notes” to get the true benefit of a linked note system. I think Craft’s block-linking capabilities do a better job of preserving the continuity and context of the literature note, while producing excellent backlink references inside the destination note. Whether you use atomic notes or block-level links from inside your notes, this connection between notes serves as the backbone of a knowledge system that generates an ever-growing convergence of insights.
An example of a permanent note in Craft.
Phase III — Compounding
This brings me to my system’s final and most valuable phase: the compounding of knowledge and wisdom from my reading. I compare this phase to the compounding of interest on your retirement savings. The more you save, the faster it seems to grow, until eventually, the interest outpaces the principal. Midway through this past year, I reached that crossover point in Craft when the connections between books, world views, concepts, themes, and ideas began forming at an accelerating rate.
There are three primary methods I use to promote this knowledge compounding effect: (1) creating or updating permanent notes of ideas or concepts that run through my reading; (2) daily Readwise reviews; and (3) open-ended exploration of the system, which I affectionately call my Craft Time.
Permanent Notes
In my system, permanent notes are concepts, scientific principles, philosophical beliefs, genres, human conditions, cultural practices, etc. — thoughts or ideas that span across the books I read. An eclectic list of examples: Field Theory, Tides, Origins of Religion, Sobriety, Hindsight Bias, and Memoirs. I currently have 130 permanent notes in my system, yet I still frequently encounter new themes or concepts in my reading that don’t exist in Craft. If I think it’s worthwhile, I’ll add the link anyway, which creates a new note in Craft’s Inbox. Later, I’ll open the note and bring it to life as a proper permanent note. This almost always starts with a CMD-O search through my system for any related notes that might deserve a link.
Searching a well-populated Craft database of your reading notes and inner thoughts invites serendipity and wonder. The search results are near instantaneous and displayed in a sensible order — documents with the search term in the title first, blocks next — with a preview of each result.
A CMD-O search in Craft always yields interesting results ...
In the early days of using Craft, these searches were ho-hum. But now, after curating hundreds and hundreds of interconnected notes, searches frequently yield something unexpected, insightful. With a few keystrokes, I discover connections to similar ideas in other books I’ve read in the past; call it my personal Wikipedia, written in partnership with the authors I most admire, just for me. How else would I connect Cheryl Strayed’s appreciation of solitude while hiking the Pacific Coast Trail with Susan Orlean’s happy time in a crowded public library or Maria Popova’s sanctuary within the pages of her private diary?
I usually discover other books or notes that relate directly or indirectly, and I add the appropriate links to these newborn permanent notes. I almost always sigh to myself at this point. How many books have I read over the past three decades that touched on this theme that are now gone forever from my mind because I didn’t have Craft?
Finally, I’ll add the permanent note to my master index, known in PKM circles as as Map of Content. But rarely is this the end of the note’s evolution and growth. Once a note enters Craft — and I suspect also my subconscious — I find myself adding more and more references and links to related content in fits and starts over time.
Daily Readwise Reviews
One of the benefits of being a Readwise subscriber is the daily review of a random selection of your reading highlights. These arrive by email or inside the app itself and follow a pattern of spaced repetition to help you improve retention. You can set how many highlights you want to review each day and create themed reviews that pull from selected books or tags. I was an early adopter of the Kindle e-reader, so I’m able to revisit a veritable treasure trove of highlights I captured years and years ago.
These morning reviews provide an opportunity to think deeply about a handful of highlights from a population of more than a thousand I’ve captured. For each one, I ask myself a series of questions. Why does this highlight resonate with me? Does it support something else in my reading system? Could I write something of my own that stems from this quote?
These review sessions almost always lead me into Craft to edit a particular permanent note, add a new link from that day’s highlight, or record a new writing idea or topic (which I also keep in Craft). It’s a rare day that I don’t add or revise my reading notes after a Readwise review.
Daily Readwise review examples on iPhone
Craft Time
I’ll call out my third way of compounding knowledge as simply Craft Time. More and more, I feel drawn to explore and broaden my reading notes, almost like seeking the dopamine hit from social media apps like Facebook or Twitter. Yet, here, the content is uniquely tailored to me, and in a sense, constantly growing and changing as I add and connect notes and ideas. Instead of refreshing an endless Facebook feed, I am exploring pathways of thought that are at once familiar but also entirely novel to me.
In practice, this involves reviewing and adding links between meaningful passages of books and articles to appropriate themes; developing notes for new themes or ideas; and most recently, breaking apart and propagating notes that have grown too large. Sometimes, my Craft Time is simply open-ended discovery. Scanning the backlinks from my notes on Friendship, Regret, Mortality, Meaning of Life, or Time can transport me mentally — sometimes quite spiritually — to a place I would be hard-pressed to find another way.
I recently read Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I read this twenty years ago, and it was one of those books that had fallen into that blurry category of non-remembering. This second reading mesmerized me with its beautiful observations of the natural world set alongside a backdrop of religion and philosophy. Before long, I was comparing Dillard’s breathtaking assessment of the vastness of the universe with similar musings from Blaise Pascal and Neil deGrasse Tyson. It’s like this reading system of mine has unlocked something in my brain that now permits me — no, implores me — to step outside the single book and see patterns and themes across books, across genres of literature, across vast swaths of science and philosophy.
In Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book, he describes the most advanced and challenging reading level — Syntopical Reading — as reading many books on the same subject and studying the differences and similarities in themes, ideas, arguments, and styles. I can’t say I often live up to Mr. Adler’s standards, but I think this system in Craft approaches his syntopical ideal with its blossoming cross-reference links and aha! insights that emerge from my time with it.
Is It Worth It?
Cost will be an issue for anyone considering a reading system like this. Between Readwise and Craft, I’m shelling out $150 per year in subscription fees. That might seem like a hefty outlay for reading, given there are free or less expensive options. For example, Readwise offers Bookcision, a tool that allows you to download properly formatted Kindle highlights for free. Obsidian, a popular PKM app, offers a capable free tier and supports at least one free community plug-in to download Kindle highlights.
While I could cobble together a free solution, it’s worth it for me to pay for a seamless experience. For me, the benefits accrue in three ways:
More focus, less distraction. Both Readwise and Craft offer an attractive, uncluttered design and user interface that promotes thinking over futzing with software settings. Focus is hard enough to come by these days, and I appreciate the calming interface these apps use in elevating my book highlights and notes. How do you put a price tag on sustained concentration?
Nothing slips through the cracks. No matter what or how I read, Readwise captures my highlights without thinking about it. While Bookcision or an Obsidian plug-in might work fine for Kindle highlights, what about printed books? Or web articles? I could process these manually with an iPhone scanner, copy and paste them into the proper text file, and then return to my reading. But for me, that’s the whole point of having a reading system. I can focus on the text without the worrying distraction of how I’m going to act on what I’m reading.
Higher return on investment. In the course of a year, I’ll read around 60 books and many hundreds of articles and essays. At typical adult reading speeds, this means I spend at least 1,000 hours each year reading. In addition, I spend about $1,000 a year on books and news subscriptions. Between time and money, my investment in reading is considerable. For me, spending a little on tools to ensure I get a great return on that investment is a no-brainer. At 15 cents per reading hour, I assure you that I am getting a good return on Readwise and Craft.
A Wish List
While I am pleased with this system, there are few things that I hope will improve in the future:
Kobo Support in Readwise. I read about half my books on Kindle, but am very interested in switching to the Kobo e-reader to lessen my reliance on Amazon as a company, and enjoy a better reading experience when borrowing books through Libby. Readwise doesn’t yet provide a way to import reading highlights and notes from Kobo, so I’m staying put with Kindle until that functionality exists.
Tighter Readwise and Craft Integration. I’m using a custom markdown export tool from Readwise to bring my highlights to Craft, but it requires the use of a web browser and text editor to make the transfer. having a built-in integration with Craft or a way to copy the highlights out of the Readwise app itself would be an improvement.
A Better Solution for Reading Articles. Pocket works for my article reading, but there are some downsides. The free version limits you to just three highlights, and you’re not able to add any notes to what you’ve highlighted. Readwise has announced their own read-it-later app called Reader which I’m told will provide a better overall reading experience. I’ll be very curious to try this out when it’s eventually released.
Smarter Reading
I can’t help but feel both excited and wistful about the state of reading today. As a lifelong bookworm, I am thrilled that technologies have emerged to take reading retention and knowledge assimilation to new levels. I am now more inclined to tackle difficult books because I have a method to mine and refine their gems of wisdom.
But, part of me laments the fact that these technologies didn’t exist when I was younger. I cannot even begin to imagine the level of knowledge a system like this would yield after thirty years of continuous use. While I read mainly for self-improvement and entertainment, can you imagine the power of a reading system like this for a doctoral candidate writing a thesis? Or a writer collecting research for a book?
They say the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The next best time is right now. There’s never been a better time to become smarter in how you read.
Questions about this reading system with Craft and Readwise? Leave me a note in the comment section below.
I spend a lot of time with my nose in a book. Last year, I read 61 books, and I'm on track to read that many again in 2021. Yet, as fast as I read, I can't seem to make a dent in my To-Be-Read pile. So many books, so little time. Sometimes it feels like I'm running on a treadmill with an ever-increasing speed.
Lately, I've been questioning whether this strategy of gulping down so many books is wise after all. When I scan down the list of the books I've read so far this year, a few stand out, but many are already a blur. I hover over a few on the list — wait, did I actually read that?
I'm pretty good at taking notes and highlighting favorite passages for most of the books I read. I subscribe to ReadWise, which provides a terrific way to resurface the best parts of past books I've enjoyed. That review process, along with the ability to automatically import those highlights into Obsidian, prompted me to switch my reading notes over from Craft. And while I do see benefits of these daily reviews and the curation of my reading notes and quotes into a personal knowledge management system, I still feel like I'm somehow not getting the most out of all these hours of reading.
Maybe reading more books isn't the right answer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson taught us to shoot for big goals with his advice to "aim above the mark to hit the mark," though I'm sure he didn't mean that for a reading quota. In Experience, he finds himself drawn to just "the commonest books, — the Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton." Gustave Flaubert seemed to agree: "What a scholar one might be if one knew well only some half a dozen books."
Could deeply reading (and rereading) a few classic books be better than my shotgun approach of inhaling a book or two every week?
In his Lectures on Literature, Vladimir Nabokov said: "Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader." In a series of university lectures, Nabokov shared his take on a half-dozen classics from Marcel Proust, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and others. I've read most of these, but after reviewing Nabokov's deep analysis of these books, I realized I had merely skated over the icy surface of these great works. I did not probe deep enough into the book's structure and writing techniques, did not discover, in Nabokov's words, that "shiver of artistic satisfaction" when a reader truly communes with the author.
Is this kind of deep, analytical reading necessary? I mean, can’t we just enjoy the books in the way the author intended them? Life is short; why read the same books again and again? I imagine Vladimir looking at me over his reading glasses as he delivers his judgment:
If a person thinks he cannot evolve the capacity of pleasure in reading the great artists, then he should not read them at all. After all, there are other thrills in other domains: the thrill of pure science is just as pleasurable as the pleasure of pure art. The main thing is to experience that tingle in any department of thought or emotion. We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.
— Vladimir Nabokov
I slink a little lower in my chair under Nabokov's withering gaze. I know he's right. If I'm going to spend all this time reading, why not aim a little higher?
Last year, I joined a group of like-minded readers on #BookTwitter to read In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. I had a few false starts over the years with this six-volume masterpiece, known for its pages-long sentences and intricate narrative style. Reading just ten pages a day with a cohort of distinguished readers helped me stay on track and enjoy it more. During the hard going parts, I felt better after seeing tweets from others who shared my exasperation. Misery loves company. We finished the final volume together in June — a voyage of more than 4,000 pages — and I was glad to be done with it. Few tingles, and even fewer shivers, I'm afraid. But, I wonder now if that first reading of Proust wasn't simply the preamble to a second, more profound reading? Could I start again, now knowing the storyline and themes, and burrow deeper under the skin of this recognized classic?
I'll be honest: I'm not ready to dive back into Proust. But, I do believe I need to change my approach in reading these classics.
I've joined another #BookTwitter group this month to read George Eliot's Middlemarch, considered one of the greatest novels of all time. I read this a long time ago but remember little about it. With Nabokov's advice fresh in my mind, I've decided to use this book as an experiment in deep, focused reading. For Middlemarch, I'm making some pronounced changes in my reading style:
I'm reading the physical book. I read many books on Kindle, and I love its light form factor and ability to easily highlight passages and look up words. But writing notes in the margins is iffy, and it's harder to flip around in the book. I bought the Penguin Classics Deluxe edition of Middlemarch even though I own George Eliot's complete works in a nice leather-bound set. I want the freedom to mark this book up without remorse, to make it my own.
I'm keeping a book journal. I'm dedicating a Field Notes notebook for this reading with sections for themes, character sketches, chapter notes, and unique vocabulary. These little notebooks are the perfect size to fill with a single meaty book and are slim enough to tuck inside the cover when I'm finished. I will ultimately transcribe the notes I take into Obsidian, but for this reading, I want to keep a physical, handwritten ledger for better synthesis and retention. If I reread Middlemarch (which Nabokov suggests I should), I can review and append to the journal.
I'm reading with focus and attention. I always read a book in bed before sleep, but not this one. I'm setting aside time in my reading room with the book propped up on a lap desk, a pen in hand, and an iPad nearby for tracking down literary and historical references.
I'm going down the rabbit holes. To finish this 900-page book in a month, we're reading 30 pages a day, which translates to about 30 minutes at my usual pace. I'm doubling or tripling that time with this book. Instead of guessing at uncertain historical figures or literary allusions, I'm looking each one up and noting it in the margins. I'm recording new words and their definitions in the back pages of my journal. I'm keeping a running log for each character and a list of themes that recur throughout the novel. I'm writing a summary of each chapter, which forces me to stand back and review what happened, how it moved the story forward, what new questions arose, etc., to gain a better sense of the novel's structure and story arc.
After finishing Middlemarch, I'll have a better sense of whether this deep reading approach provides the kind of return I expect. If it does, I'm very tempted to change my approach to reading in 2022. Forget the pressure of a sixty-book GoodReads challenge or an unending "To Be Read" pile to tackle. Instead, I'll spend the year reading just a few great books, deeply, with fun reads thrown in at bedtime.
We can't slow the race of time, but we can choose to be more discerning and diligent in making use of the time we have. Augustus had the right of it: Festina lente. Make haste, slowly.
A Slow Read of The Story of Civilization
