TOO MANY BOOKS
When I read I often come across references to other works. The more you read, the more references you see. Not all of them seem worthwhile or even interesting, but some do. The problem is that the rate of discovery already outpaces my ability to read.
What’s more: I’m not looking for new books. I’ve already got a backlog full of books that I I after a deliberate search. Still, over the past 60 days I’ve come across 22 books that I want to read. I discover them in book forums, weekly/monthly/quarterly publications, Hacker News threads, and personal recommendations.
Here they are, in order that I wrote them down.
- Why startups fail (Eisenmann)
- Exhalation (Chiang)
- This is how they tell me the world ends (Perlroth)
- A Theory of Justice (Rawls)
- Cynical Theories (Pluckrose)
- A History of Western Philosophy (Russell)
- Civilization and it’s discontents (Freud)
- The celts (Cunliffe)
- Capitalism without capital (Haskel)
- Hirohito and the making of modern japan (Bix)
- America, farewell tour (Hedges)
- Sorrows of empire (Johnson)
- Short account of destruction of Indies (de Las Casas)
- Swerve (Greenblatt)
- Omni Americans (Murray)
- Boston Made (Krim)
- Free World: Art and thought in the cold war. (Menand)
- The man who lived underground (Right)
- Autumn of the patriarch (Marquez)
- Strongmen, Mussolini to present (Ben-ghiat)
- Mechanism of the mind. (De Bono)
- Road to serfdom (Hayek)
I haven’t quite worked out how to get through this. I spend about 30-60m a day reading, which gives me 30-60h over two months. That’s enough to read a fraction of the books, but certainly not all. What’s more, the whole point isn’t to get through a specific number of books, but to gain an understanding. Rushing through won’t help.
I’m thinking of dedicating ~15m to each book I want to look at. Inspect the books TOC and index, flip through a few interesting chapters, and judge if it makes the final cut for something I really want to read.