Reading

In Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, the profoundly human (i.e., imperfect) teacher, Hector, reminds his students that “The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met,... See more

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

— Gustave Flaubert

Reading is alluring. It has a nameless quality beyond satisfying desires for information and pleasure. Despite more colorful and interactive media, reading text somehow remains more refined, more seductive.

The one thing I do try to follow is to go on streaks of reading a lot of books on a particular topic around the same time. Doing this is useful because it means I don’t have to just trust one author’s perspective on a particular topic, and it helps me connect a lot of facts together, so I can understand things better.

I like to think of it it with the question: what is to reading what a text-editor is to typing? Social features for sure. We could also experiment with crazy stuff like SYNTACTIC SPACING. Here's an illustration on a paragraph from Doug Englebart's Augmenting Human Intellect:

Something super impressive I got shown today, how you can increase reading speed by playing on font weight: