Newsletter No. 6

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I flew to California on Monday for work. I started my day at 5 AM in Florida, flew seven hours, then spent five more hours walking through a warehouse. I had been going for fifteen hours straight which left me sapped out of energy by the early California evening. So I excused myself from group dinner invitations, checked into the hotel and went to bed.

I awoke Tuesday morning at 2:30 AM California time which is 5:30 AM in Florida, my usual waking up time. Sleeping-in has a paradoxical effect on me — it makes me groggy for the rest of the day. On days when I sleep-in, I spend nursing a low-grade headache. With the clock showing 2:30 AM I knew sleeping-in would be a disaster for the busy day ahead of me. So I decided to commit. I got out of bed, fiddled with the little coffee machine, and sat down with my book.

The book was Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. I read around 80 pages between 3 AM and 6 AM. In Caste, the author makes a strong case to identify the role that long standing caste systems play in American and Indian societies, and the role it played in Nazi Germany. I was naturally hooked to the topic as I had grown up in India under the Caste system. It was a heavy book and I was grateful that the quietness of the early hour opened the space for the chaotic humanity the book exposed.

I was in bed early that evening and I woke up early on Wednesday again. I repeated this early morning reading schedule for the entire duration of my visit. Those three quiet hours of reading every day were too precious to give up! I never left the Florida time-zone.

Thursday, somewhere 30,000 feet over Tallahassee, Florida in a Boeing 757, I finished the 400 page book.

I am not a speed reader by any measure. I am prone to day-dream while reading. So I was surprised to complete a large book with a heavy topic in half a week! I had picked up several hours of reading during the long flights, and additionally 3 hours of daily reading during this visit. This reminded me of Casey Neistat who said air travel is the closest thing to time travel.

James L. Gibson says in his book Ecological Approach to Visual Perception that an environment provides us good and bad options for movement. These he called Affordances.

Business travel three timezones away provided the affordances to read uninterrupted (I have deputized reading to be a form of intellectual movement). My Florida home does not provide three uninterrupted hours to read on weekdays. I read in the morning for ninety minutes before life pulls me away. Feed the cats, make coffee, make the bed, get dressed, pour cereal, turn on the computer and start the workday.

There is nothing I want more than the routine of a harmonious life at home in Florida. Reading in the morning, albeit shorter, is not the same without one of our cats sleeping on my lap. There are obvious drawbacks to traveling all the time. I will tolerate with staying in hotel rooms, eating hotel food and drinking hotel coffee in short and temporary bursts. What I notice is the disdain of business travel has shifted for the better. The affordances of transit — cramped airplanes, noisy airports and hurried schedules — used to be a bother but have now morphed into gateways to a temporary world where uninterrupted reading can happen.

Business travel is starting to look like a portal to uninterrupted reading time. On a trip I don’t have to make the bed, do dishes, feed the cats and take out the trash. I go to work during the day, and when I am not working, I can read!

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I write this newsletter once a week but I post short articles daily on my blog. Here is what I posted last week:

Variety in My Reading Diet

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A sure-shot way for me to lose interest in reading is when it gets monotonous. Reading gets monotonous if I read book after book without extracting new ideas from it, when book after book feels stale. Pursuit of unknown-unknowns is key, and this comes from reading a variety of books.

Plus, I love making connections between two ideas taken from two very different contexts. Here are two examples: Management and Team Building principles from Italy Talgam’s Ignorant Maestro (which is about Symphony conducting) and Suzanne Clothiers Bones Would Rain From The Sky (which is on dog training)!

I get majority of reading recommendations from the books that I am already reading. When an idea I am reading stands out, I look at the footnotes to see what paper or book the author is referencing. If the idea looks rich, I add the source book to my reading list.

Getting to the source material an important activity — A book is an author’s interpretation of the source idea. Interpretations are selected by authors to forward their own thesis. It reflects the author’s worldview and their biases — and these are valuable. It is the photograph of a slice of cake from a specific angle.

But also of value to me is the original idea in the source material — I don’t know what that might spark in my own thoughts. This is like getting to the whole cake so you get to decide what it tastes like.

Now, source material has its limits. It keeps me within the same echo chamber of the idea. It is important for me to get out of the echo chamber.

This is why I have challenged myself to get reading recommendations from novel sources this year. Here are how I plan to do them:

  • Ask friends what they are reading — I have three new recommendations from friends and acquaintances so far
  • Stroll around a library and pick up books that sound good
  • Stroll around a used book store — this will require some traveling since good used book stores are on the decline. I discovered Phillip Pullman’s excellent “His Dark Materials” trilogy browsing down cluttered aisles of a used book store
  • Join a book club — this is harder than it seems. I crave face-to-face discussions. This is nearly impossible given the small town I live in and the unstoppable pandemic. I’ll settle for Zoom.

My Reading Habit

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Cal Newport says on his podcast that he reads 5 to 6 books a month by making reading his default activity.

Cal has three kids, teaches in Georgetown and runs a growing media empire! He still manages 5 to 6 books a month — this adds up to 60 to 72 books a year!

Cal said look at your phone’s Screen-Time report, so I did. I was using my phone 2 to 3 hours a day. That is almost 20 hours a week! A part time job of looking at my phone on top of a full-time job on my computer.

If you ask people, they will say they want to read more but can’t find the time. I found some time to read one book a month. So I decided to make more time.

Here is what I did:

  • Deleted all social media apps
  • Deleted YouTube app, signed out of YouTube on my browser
  • Put the TV in the house where it is not too comfortable to watch it for long
  • Read in the morning before the world wakes up — I read between 6 AM and 7:30 AM
  • Make reading intentional by taking Fleeting Notes and Literature Notes
  • Made reading my default activity as I wait between tasks — so I may get 30 mins during lunch, 15 mins while dinner is cooking and maybe another 30 mins before bedtime

One last but important technique on reading more is to add variety. I sorted my unread books into four stacks.

  1. Easy Fiction — less than 300 pages, easy to read. Leguin, Grace Paley, Ian McEwan are in this stack.
  2. Short and Hard (fiction or non-fiction) — less than 300 pages, academic or classics where the language or subject matter make it harder to read. Virginia Wolf, Jane Jacobs, Michael Oakeshott are on this stack.
  3. Short and Easy Non-Fiction — these are less than 300 pages and are typically not written by academic types, so the language is easy.
  4. Long or Hard Non-Fiction — these are over 300 pages, typically 500 or more pages. Zuboff, Dalio, Ian McGilcrist and Nassim Nicholas Taleb are in this stack

I alternate between each stack. When one stack makes me think hard, another replenishes my brain. When one book takes over two weeks to read, I finish another in a few days.

I finished four books in October, five in November and six in December. The variety surely helped. Removing the habit of phone and TV helped the most!

Books I read in December

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I surprised myself as I finished my sixth book at 10:30 PM on December 31st. Never had I finished these many books in one month, ever!

Here are the books I finished reading in December:

I had started a few of these books before December which helped push the number to six. I always enter a new month with one or two books already started. Capturing the month when I finished books is a good enough metric.

But this is also the trap, the fascination of the numerical metric, the high-score! Six is better than four which is better than one! If all my books were in the genre of Stulburg’s Groundedness then I could have read 10 books easy. This is because the concepts and ideas among similar books are more familiar, and thus faster to absorb.

For example: Two books I have read in 2021 referenced Natasha Dow Schüll’s book, Addiction by Design. This makes the material familiar and thus faster to absorb as I re-read it.

I am turning my focus from hitting a number of books to getting a variety in my diet of books. I have given myself a rough guideline of 1 book a week or 4 a month. However, I have detailed guidelines on adding variety to the books I read.

How do you add variety to your reading list?

2021 in Review

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2021 was a year of extremes. It was the second year of living in the COVID pandemic. My wife and I are fatigued by how restricted our movements are. On the other hand, living at home more than not has encouraged me to form insights that I am not sure I would have gained had there not been a pandemic.

With a slight hint of ableism and a dash of first-world-problems, here are things that worked well and some that didn’t:

Things that I struggled with:

  1. Project Dog — We adopted Ruby, the calmest and quietest 5 year old dog from the Humane Society in April. Turned out she dealt with anxiety, panic attacks, never lived indoors, and was in poor dental health. She possibly had attention-deficit-disorder type symptoms that made it impossible for her to learn obedience.
  2. Burnout — we skipped vacation in the Spring and Summer. Work was high because everyone wants to ship commerce now. Our Project Dog was a lot of work. Summer was exceedingly hot and humid. I got increasingly irritable till my wife insisted we take time off.
  3. Delta variant, and then Omicron — when it felt safer to start going out and seeing friends, the Delta variant broke out and we retreated back into our shells. It has been frustrating to see masks disappear almost everywhere outside a doctor’s office. My wife and I tend to be the only masked people at stores.
  4. Immunocompromised — We found out earlier this year that my wife is immunocompromised. This makes it extra hard for us as the variants come out while people get more and more relaxed about masking up!
  5. No Podcasting — I had hopes and dreams to write, record, edit and publish 6 episodes this year. I think I posted one. Everything I mentioned above sucked all willpower to be creative.

Things that worked well:

  1. Realizing the power of taking time off — this has to be on the top of the list. We took a vacation after I was already feeling burned out. It helped to get away. Just getting away, no internet, several books and hiking trails near by.
  2. Refining Perspective — By August I was claiming the whole year 2021 was a bust. By September I started realizing it was only the Summer that was tough. I used this insight to start logging my thoughts daily so I can question my own ideas, especially the big-bad ones like “2021 sucks”! Now I have a plan for 2022 thanks to this insight.
  3. Books, books, books — I started reading a lot more, enough to push through an inertia of sorts and gain momentum in reading. I went from a book a month to 6 books in December! I started taking detailed notes but in a way that I have not taken before. I should expand on that another day.
  4. Metacognition — this puts a name to the thing I have been pursuing. The idea of metacognition — thinking about my own thinking, finding out that my love for truth is bigger than my love for what I already know — this feels like a core value and I am glad I discovered it. Now I know its name.
  5. Internet Sabbath — I switch off internet use on Saturdays allowing only texts and phone calls on my phone. The effects flow into the weekdays. This has significantly curtailed the amount of YouTube and Internet-TV shows I used to binge. Probably 2 hours or more every day! Gone!!
  6. High-Quality Relaxation — With TV gone, I found a few ways to have a high-quality relaxation. Walking our dog with my wife is one. Taking a drive in the evening and listening to a podcast is another. There was a time I felt passively watching TV was all I could do at the end of a workday. What a waste!

Showing, not telling

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Friday, noon. Four of us were on our way to lunch. Someone asked me if I liked the book he had recommended. Friday lunch is to decompress and we are normally frank with each other. I said, “It wasn’t written well”.

I am no judge of English literature. But it was Friday lunch and I was asked for a judgement. There it was.

A good novelist once invited me to find awareness of the difference between showing and telling. I am a slow reader; my mind frequently wanders around the prose while I gaze between the folds of the pages. Years passed since that invitation and years of reading while aimlessly wandering seems to have helped me spot novels that show versus those that tell.

Below are the beginning lines from two novels. See if you can tell.

1

2

The first excerpt paints a beautiful picture that slowly comes into focus. I can’t wait to read further. The second sort of spoils the ending. This chapter continues telling what’s going on with Nicholas’ life. I didn’t read past the first chapter so I don’t know if this was really a spoiler but I don’t feel like finding out.

The first is like sipping a beautiful wine. The second is like chugging lager.

It is not only a matter of taste; it is a question of appetite.

Reading Fiction

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A funny thing happened when I started reading fiction last December: I wanted to work with photographs again. Creative pathways came unstuck. Good fiction paints vivid word-pictures much like a photographer builds an image. I started looking through and processing all the photographs from the October's Boston/Shenandoah trip. I sent off six old 35mm rolls to get developed. I started carrying my Nikon FE around.

And then I started getting really into it. I bought the Mamiya C220, a Pentax Digital Spotmeter and started shooting medium format. I am deep into sensitometry in Ansel Adams’ Book 2. I went all academic with this pursuit.

This is how I overthink. I will get impatient soon, then burn out! I’ve done it before with other interests.

Incidentally my enthusiasm to purchase novels far surpasses my conviction to read them all. Ian McEwan’s The Children Act is next in a long queue of unread books. I am one page into it and it is already working.