You Are What You Read

September 13, 2010

Reading in iBooksYour reading life is almost as important as your “real” life, because the experiences are shoved down your senses in a linear fashion just like having the experience. A writer encodes. You select programming and “run” it by decoding and it and reproducing the ideas in your head. You have to do this often, in order to layer-up what’s important and let go of and prune out what’s not. Over time, you will have a better and deeper understanding of all things important.

Recent Books I’ve Read (on iBooks)

All these things are really after my phase of stopping all reading except for baby books for a year or two. I degenerated to popping excerpt-size info-bites like popcorn for awhile—like the rest of the Internet populace, but I’ve been clawing my way back up using the iPhone’s brilliant Retina display, combined with iBooks and my subway commute and snippets of down-time here and there. I am gradually regaining my reading life and the source of much of my edge in life. In reverse chronological order, the books since Adi’s birth are:

  • The Signal and the Noise
  • Slaughterhouse Five
  • Lord of The Flies
  • Rainbow’s End
  • The Children of The Sky
  • A Fire Upon The Deep
  • The Peace War
  • The Diamond Age
  • The Steve Jobs biography

Here’s what I’ve read lately on Instapaper:

Marco Arment has a lot of things right. One of them is that reading in long-form is required for a healthy reading diet. And it’s always the full books like I list above. Sometimes it’s just that article that you read the headline and excerpt, but now you need to fully read the article and consider the topic more deeply. And sometimes you have to do that on the subway or waiting in line somewhere where there’s no signal. For all these circumstances, there’s Instapaper, which I still haven’t given up even after iOS added a similar Reading List feature to Safari.

 

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