Remembering what you want out of books

Notes on the art of reading books.

Remembering what you want out of books

Wednesday, December 6, 2023

Yesterday’s newsletter about the discipline of reading begins:

I drew this diagram last week when I found myself reading a writer who seems to be interested in all the things I seem to be interested in, but they write about them in ways that drive me absolutely nuts. This kind of writer is frustrating because they are both annoying and valuable — I can’t ignore them completely because they have things that I want! These are the writers I skim. I skate over their text with a razor blade, scanning for good quotes and sources and links I can steal, scraping their footnotes and bibliographies. (A writer in this category can become a creative nemesis who motivates me to outdo them.)

You can read the rest here.

Filed under: reading

Good-handedness

Tuesday, October 3, 2023

Writer Mark Slutsky on “good-handedness,” or “the immediate feeling on reading the first lines of a book, or starting a movie, etc, that you are in good hands”:

I’ve come to trust a certain feeling that comes over me when I first make contact with a piece of art. The opening lines of a book; the first 30 seconds or so of a movie; bars of a song, etc. It is a feeling of being in good hands, an intuitive sense that the author knows what they are doing and that the experience will be worth my time. It is an exciting sensation. I am not always right, but I would say at least 80-85% I can trust my instincts.

It occurs to me that feeling like you’re in good hands is a matter of getting off on the right foot with the author.

(via Robin Sloan’s excellent newsletter)

Read terrible books, too

Thursday, September 7, 2023

Here’s the writer Alan Moore on why writers should read terrible books, too:

As a prospective writer, I would urge you to not only read good books. Read terrible books as well, because they can be more inspiring than the good books.

If you are inspired by a good book, there’s always the danger of plagiarism, of doing something that is too much like that good book. Whereas, a genuinely helpful reaction to a piece of work that you’re reading is, ‘Jesus Christ, I could write this shit!’ That is immensely liberating — to find somebody who is published who is doing much much worse than you.

And by analyzing why they are doing so badly, this will immensely help your own style. You’ll find out all of the mistakes not to make. ‘Why did this story offend me so much?’ Analyze that. Find out why you didn’t like it. Find out all of the examples of clumsiness or bad thinking that spoiled the story for you.

That will probably be a lot more helpful to your career as a writer.

Yes! Reading bad writing not only boosts one’s confidence, it can be very instructive.

What you want to avoid, I think, is mediocre writing, which neither thrills nor instructs.

This is what Nassim Taleb calls a “barbell strategy” in Skin in the Game: Read the best and read the worst, but skip everything in the middle…

Thanks to @__mariamuller__ on Twitter.

Related reading: Make Bad Art, Too