Everything I Read in July 2024
Lost in a featureless wasteland of my own mortality, and finding no traction in the reams of scientific studies, intracellular molecular pathways, and endless curves of survival statistics, I began reading literature again: Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, Woolf, Kafka, Mo
... See morePaul Kalanithi • When Breath Becomes Air
Taste—in books, music, clothing, people—is notoriously hard to define without resorting to a string of examples. I find it hard to put words to the kind of books I like to read, but I can tell you that I enjoy Vladimir Nabokov , David Sedaris , and Jon Krakauer —three wildly different writers. An LLM, however, detected underlying patterns across th
... See moreRhea Purohit • A Science-based Guide to Thinking Creatively—With LLMs
At present, we seem to be suffering from a widespread failure of literary imagination. We have become worse at imagining the experiences of other people, less inclined to credit these experiences as being as valid and real as our own. Why is this? In part, I think, because of the methods by, and pace at which, we acquire our stories. After all, eve... See more
Endless books and authors followed, as we worked our way methodically down the list: The Count of Monte Cristo, Edgar Allan Poe, Robinson Crusoe, Ivanhoe, Gogol, The Last of the Mohicans, Dickens, Twain, Austen, Billy Budd … By the time I was twelve, I was picking them out myself, and my brother Suman was sending me the books he had read in college
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