“If you’re not keeping what you read, you probably want to think about what you’re reading and how. While not impossible, it’s harder to have conversations with library books. You can’t pull out a pen and write in the margin. You can’t highlight something. Having conversations with books is one of the ways that I learn.”
“…paradoxically, as you read more books, your pile of unread books will get larger, not smaller. That?s because your curiosity will grow with every great read. This is the path of the lifelong learner.”
— Shane Parrish, The Best Way to Find More Time to Read and Why You Shouldn’t Slog Through Books
While I won’t pull out a pen and write in a book, I’ll certainly pull out a pencil and do so. Here’s what I’m currently reading:
Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies by Ross King (non-fiction, biography). I’ve only two pages left to read, but just can’t get myself to finish it as I’ve enjoyed it so much. I’m not ready for the conversation to end yet. I might have to continue it by going back through the pages looking for passages I marked or wrote comments against.
Marketing: A Love Story, How to Matter to Your Customers by Bernadette Jiwa. A book that might (will, hopefully) help me with the story-telling aspect of my painting. I find it easier to talk about the how than I do about the why, and want to get better at the latter.
The End of All Things by John Scalzi. A collection of science fiction short stories that supplement the universe created in some of his other books. I’ve read it before, and I no doubt shall read it (and the others in the series) again, for the imagination and vocabulary and story-telling. It includes a story that has ideas on how it’d be to not live in a body.
What are you reading right now? What are you planning to read next?
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man