Reading Habits

I like to read, and like a lot of people with the same affliction, I've sometimes found that I'm not quite where I want to be as regards reading. Maybe I'm not reading enough, maybe I'm not reading the kinds of things I want to be reading, or even if I am maybe there's still a mountain of things that I feel like I should have read but haven't got round to, and I wonder if I ever will. At one point I was legitimately confused at how it's possible that I seem to have read thousands and thousands of books when I only seemed read about ten books a year if that. Twitter's search function isn't what it was and I couldn't find the tweet, but perhaps some of you will relate.

The good news is that while I'm still not exactly where I'd like to be with respect to this stuff, I'm in a much better place than I used to be a few years ago. I've hit on a few habits that I find help me, and I'm going to talk about them here. I'm not recommending you try any of this stuff at home; different things help different people and we don't all have the same options in our lives. This post is about me.

Three books at once

Perhaps the biggest breakthrough was when I hit on the system of having three books on the go at the same time. It's great, and so much better than what I was doing before. I used not to have a system at all really; I'd start a book when I thought I could handle taking it on or couldn't wait, whatever else I was reading at the same time. I'd often put one book on hold to read another, and then put that on hold to read another, until I ended up with a matryoshka of unfinished books with bookmarks sticking out of them somewhere near the beginning. That's no way to live.

In the current system I'll read three books at once, but not just any three books. It's three distinct slots with different purposes, not an unstructured quota of three. Basically the idea is to have a light one, a heavy one, and an intermediate one.

The light one doesn't have to be especially light in either its content or its materiality; previous occupants of that slot include The Goldfinch and Crime and Punishment, although admittedly I read those on an e-reader rather than lugging them around. The key criteria are that it should be a book that I can still appreciate if I read it in short bursts, and it should be something that I can reliably get in the mood for when circumstances provide a short burst for me to read it in. The current occupant is Upstate by James Wood. I'm not as into it as I was into his The Book Against God, which I think I've read twice, but I'm still enjoying it and I'm glad to be finally checking it out after it's sat on my bookshelf so long. It's good; I just really liked his other one.

The heavy slot is for books which very much don't fit the two criteria for the light slot, but which I'd still like to read. The Critique of Pure Reason went in the heavy slot, for example. The current occupant of that role is the set theory textbook I mentioned a couple of weeks ago — I am now partway through chapter 3 but have been slacking off on the exercises — and the previous heavyweight was A Discourse Concerning The Love Of God by Damaris Masham. I've mentioned this before, but it's especially important to have at least one other book on the go when I'm reading a book by Kant, because otherwise when you think "ugh, that's enough Kant for the day" you also have to stop reading books for the day altogether, and things really don't need to be like that. Just because you're willingly reading a book on your own initiative doesn't mean it's not effortful or even a bit of a chore, and you don't want to put yourself in a position where reading in general is, for you at this time, a chore.

I've sometimes heard people who for professional or educational reasons had a lot of books to get through saying that they feel bad about reading anything not on their list of obligatory reading, because if they're reading at all they feel they should be working their way through the list. But of course they're not always up for reading something from the list, and so they just scroll on their phone or watch TV or go to the gym or whatever instead. This doesn't make sense. There can be reading on both sides of your work/life balance.

The intermediate slot is for other books. Books which are in no way a chore to read but which don't quite fit the criteria for the light book. The current intermediate book is Why Are We 'Artists'? 100 World Art Manifestos, edited by Jessica Lack. There's a certain amount of slippage between the intermediate slot and the slots on either side; when I finish Upstate I may put the art manifestos in the light slot and put a philosophy book in the intermediate slot.

Occasionally I'll be down to two books when I've finished or given up on the book in one slot and haven't decided what to replace it with, and sometimes after very careful consideration I'll introduce a fourth. The latter only really works when it's something I'm confident I can get through pretty quickly, because otherwise I'm back to the matryoshka. I tried it once with Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit when I was reading it along with Gregory Sadler's YouTube lectures, and you won't be surprised to learn that I did not get especially far into it, although that was still a lot of lectures and I think that at the time I got a fair idea of what the Preface is about¹.

Recordkeeping

The other big breakthrough for me was that in January 2019 I started keeping a record of what I read. I don't include squibs like Daily Mash articles, but books, magazine articles, blogposts, encyclopedia articles, op-eds and poems go on there. I originally intended to include things I only read parts of but that's no longer such a big issue because now that I've got my system I tend to finish things more.

It's sometimes useful to be able to check whether I've read something or to find something I've read — I include URLs to things I read online in the entry — but it also just makes me feel better about my reading life to have a record of it. I don't show the list to other people, and to be honest I don't really understand why it makes me feel better. I guess it's partly that knowledge is power and so recordkeeping is empowering, and partly that if you're scared that you're not where you want to be with respect to your reading life, then some of that can be a fear of the unknown and keeping records makes it less unknown. If I spent a lot of time reading through the list and thinking about what a great guy I was to have read all those things then that would explain it, but that's not something I really do, so it isn't that. But whatever it is, it does seem to make me feel better about my reading, and so I'm going to keep doing it.

Read on the bus

I get the bus to and from work, and on the bus I usually read my light book. I also read it on my breaks at work. That's why it's important for the light book to be something that works when read in short bursts and which I'll reliably be in the mood for when those short bursts present themselves.

One benefit of this habit is that I don't have to make the effort to carve out time to read. I'm as lazy and weak-willed as the next person, and when I'm left to my own devices I'll often go on social media or play online chess or do some puzzles. But it's nice to have a book on the go which you dip into regularly, a little narrative running in the background, and having dedicated situations when I dip into it makes sure that this nice thing is an ever-present part of my life. Except when I'm off work.

Read at bedtime

I'm actually not doing this one at the moment. Currently at bedtime I just go on the internet for a bit, and sometimes watch some TV or a movie if there's time. But a month or two ago I was in the habit of reading at bedtime instead, and it was really good. I got to sleep more quickly, I was safe from the possibility of getting stressed out by the internet when I was supposed to be going to sleep, and I had extra time to read. What's not to like? I didn't stop for any particular reason. Perhaps I'll get back into it, although as I say, I'm as lazy and weak-willed as the next person. I got a new bedside lamp recently so maybe that'll tip the balance.

Read aloud

It's a little unusual to read a book on the bus these days, but probably my most eccentric reading habit is that when I'm reading by myself I often read aloud. As I recall I first started doing this with Thomas Kuhn's The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions, which according to my records I finished in July 2020. I suppose a lot of people probably developed some eccentricities around then what with the pandemic and the lockdowns, but I've kept this one up and I'm glad of it. I think I understand things better when I read them aloud, and it gives you a heads up when you're misparsing a sentence because you'll read it wrong and probably stumble over it.

Reading aloud also opens up new avenues for having a bit of fun with what you're reading. One thing I sometimes find happening is that I'll do different voices for blockquotes, perhaps modelled on the voice that was used for reading out viewers' letters on the old BBC show Points Of View, or at least my memory of it; doubtless if I went back and listened to it the voice they do would turn out to be nothing like the one I do. I also sometimes find myself reading the footnotes in my head even when I'm reading the main text aloud. I don't know why.

Some people will tell you that the ancients all used to read aloud except for St Ambrose, but I vaguely remember hearing that this is based on a misunderstanding of something St Augustine wrote. So I won't pretend that by reading aloud to myself I'm participating in a long and venerable tradition. I expect some people would also find that reading aloud slows them down a lot, but I read pretty slowly at the best of times, at least for someone who reads as much as I do — I usually reckon on about three minutes a page, adjusted up or down a bit depending on the usual sorts of thing — and so I don't have to slow down all that much for my voice to keep up.

Device compartmentalization

I don't have a smartphone but don't be fooled: I'm still probably at least as internet addicted as you are, and perhaps more so because I'm accessing the internet on a Chromebook with a proper keyboard and a much bigger screen and so it's much more enjoyable for me. So ideally I wouldn't do my reading on an internet-enabled device, with the siren song of social media within earshot. Sometimes this is hard to avoid of course, but I've managed to get round it to some extent with one weird trick that I call device compartmentalization.

Put simply, in addition to the Chromebook that I use for my social media and so on, I also have a PC laptop that I don't. I break the rule occasionally, for example when I slip on some ice and break my Chromebook, but for the most part I don't use social media on my PC. This, somehow, has the effect of meaning I'm generally not tempted to go on social media on my PC. So if I'm reading something and don't want to be distracted, I can read it on my PC. I read FH Bradley's Appearance and Reality that way, and let me tell you that if you can focus on the longer second part of that ('Reality') without getting distracted then you can focus on anything.

Print magazines

There's a flaw in the device compartmentalization method though, which is that it only works when I'm at home, as I don't carry my big chunky PC laptop around with me. And sadly when I'm out and about is exactly when I want to read quality longform magazine articles. What to do? Enter the last of my eccentricities to save the day: I subscribe to the print edition of a well-known American magazine. Perhaps you think this is an absurd thing to do in 2025, and that as a fully grown adult you would simply get a hold of yourself and read 15,000 words of Louis Menand on whatever he's become interested in this week without abandoning ship for your favourite microblogging site, but in the words of Cher, I really don't think you're strong enough. I'm certainly not. See you next week!

Notes

[1] It's about dialectics.

Bananas

I'm not really a big one for new year's resolutions, but this year, and not for the first time, I began with the intention of eating more bananas. I like bananas, and when I do my weekly big shop at the weekend I almost always buy a bunch, but I've often found that by the end of the week I've only eaten one or two and the rest have had to be thrown out. It's far from ideal, and I've now decided to take control of my life in this small way and eat lots of bananas.

It's been going well: to the best of my estimation, I've eaten one banana each day this year, and I don't remember having to throw any out. I think once or twice there have been small parts of the day's banana that weren't good and which I didn't eat, but that goes with the territory when it comes to bananas.

I've also been recording my journey in a Twitter thread, which mostly consists of posts with a number of banana emojis corresponding to the number of bananas I've eaten to date. I also occasionally use the thread to document obstacles I've encountered and the like. It's now day 52 and I think I've proven my commitment to the bit, so although I have no intention of stopping any time soon I thought I'd take some time to reflect.

Because It's There

An obvious first question that someone coming across my thread might ask is "Why are you doing this?" It's a fair question. A mutual called The Outsider Humanist actually did ask me this on February 4, and my response was "I felt like I wasn't living my best life". I think that's accurate: I mentioned above how I like bananas but I wasn't getting through the ones I bought and that wasn't ideal. Eating a banana every day is much closer to ideal. But although that was why I started doing it, I think that the project has gathered an increased significance for me.

It's not just about eating bananas anymore; it's about starting something and then keeping it going come rain or shine, or snow. Leaving the record of it in my Twitter thread is important to me too: there's a lot of sadness in the world and a lot of it probably gets presented to you on the timeline of your favourite microblogging site, but I hope that when people see my banana tweets they'll think "Ah good, Mike's still out there eating his bananas" and that'll give them something positive to cling to.

Human endeavour is not typically something that stands in need of external justification. People run marathons, they put people on the Moon, and I'm eating a daily banana, not to secure some instrumental good, but just as a further expression of the human spirit. Humans are not the only animal that eats bananas, and we may not even be the only animal that eats a banana every day, but we're the only animal that decides to eat a banana every day and then follows through on it for as long as fate permits, and I think this unique quality of ours is something to be celebrated.

The Thread

If you'd like to read the thread and you're willing to access Twitter, it begins here. I'll briefly recount some themes that have emerged when making the thread.

Arrangements

Partly to inject a bit of interest, and partly just to make them easier to count, I often put the banana emojis into some kind of special arrangement rather than just putting them in a long string. I first put them into a 2D rectangle on day 15. On day 19 I arranged them into the number 19, which was how I learned that they don't always display the same way when you post them as they did in the composing box, and so the 19 is a bit wonky. I tried finding a blank emoji that I could put in as a spacer, but I didn't find anything suitable so I've just been using spaces and being mindful of how it might look with different widths for the emojis and/or spaces. On day 36 I arranged them into a triangle rather than a square, to draw attention to the fact that in addition to being the sixth square number, 36 is also the eighth triangular number. On day 42 I arranged them into what was supposed to be a Babel fish. And on day 50 I arranged them into an L.

Shopping

Bananas often don't last the whole week between my big shops, especially since most of the bananas in a bunch will tend to be at around the same stage of ripeness, so I've often found myself running out of bananas midweek and having to swing by a shop to secure the supplies I need to keep my project on track. The most dramatic occasion was fairly early on, when I still wasn't sure how committed I was, and buying the bananas would mean taking a detour through the snow and ice. Near the end of last year I had quite a scary fall on some ice and so when it got icy again in January I was quite nervous walking through it, but I decided to make the effort and continue with the daily banana-eating. Forty-six days and forty-six bananas later, I'm glad I did.

It's also not so bad having a midweek banana run pencilled into the diary on occasion¹, because it means that if there's something else I need or want I don't have to decide between going without and making a special trip.

Potassium

More than one person has suggested that by eating so many bananas I might eat too much potassium. It is possible to do yourself a mischief by eating too much potassium — if you get it your doctor will apparently call your condition "hyperkalemia", which sounds to me like Greek for "too much potassium in the blood" — but I looked it up and I'm not worried about this happening to me. In the course of researching this issue I learned that, assuming I didn't miscalculate, a healthy amount of potassium to eat is about a kilo a year. (That's about 2.2 pounds, for my American readers.)

Eating a banana also exposes you to a small amount of ionizing radiation, apparently mainly due to the radioactivity of one of the isotopes of potassium. The Banana Equivalent Dose is even sometimes used as a unit of radiation, equivalent to approximately 0.1 microsieverts. My understanding is that this is not very much radiation and so I don't need to worry about this either.

Discipline

[W]hen philosophy is not disciplined by semantics, it must be disciplined by something else: syntax, logic, common sense, imaginary examples, the findings of other disciplines (mathematics, physics, biology, psychology, history, etc.) or the aesthetic evaluation of theories (elegance, simplicity, etc.). Indeed, philosophy subject to only one of those disciplines is liable to become severely distorted: several are needed simultaneously. To be ‘disciplined’ by X here is not simply to pay lip‐service to X; it is to make a systematic conscious effort to conform to the deliverances of X, where such conformity is at least somewhat easier to recognize than is the answer to the original philosophical question. (Williamson 2006: 182)

It's a long time since I read that paper; I haven't reread it in order to research this post, and I don't appear to have read it since I started keeping extensive albeit non-meticulous and non-comprehensive records of my reading in January 2019. But the idea in this passage that philosophy must be disciplined by something stuck with me. Of course Williamson says that you need to be disciplined by more than one of them, but why is it OK not to be disciplined by all of them?

I really don't expect this would be Williamson's answer to the question, but I think that at least some of the value of discipline is that by anchoring oneself to a project with legible constraints you give yourself a structure for valuable things to accrete around. You give yourself problems you need to work on, and reasons to do things you'd rather not do. Discipline your philosophy of language with logic, and you can't just wave away semantic paradoxes. Discipline your philosophy of time with physics and you can't just wave away the relativity of simultaneity. Discipline yourself with going to the Moon and you have to invent teflon and astronaut ice cream, or whichever of the supposed by-products of the space program wasn't an urban myth. Discipline yourself with daily banana-eating and posting about it, and you have to face your fear of the snow, go to the shops midweek and figure out which arrangements of banana emojis will display properly on the screen. Or decide to write more frequent blogposts even when you don't have anything to say, and perhaps you'll eventually find that you do.

Last week I said I wasn't intending to write them weekly, but I've changed my mind and now that's the plan. It wasn't long after finishing the last one that I started looking forward to writing this one. It feels good, like I've finally got my voice back. See you next week!

Notes

[1] Why not every week? Well, after acquiring some bananas midweek I'll sometimes have some left over when I do my big shop, which means I can buy a bunch that's still green and so will have its most delicious period at the back end of the following week.

References

• Williamson, Timothy (2006), 'Must Do Better', in Patrick Greenough, and Michael P. Lynch (eds), Truth and Realism (Oxford, 2006; online edn, Oxford Academic, 1 Sept. 2010), pp.177–187, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199288878.003.0010, accessed 21 Feb. 2025.

Field Of Dreams

Fans of the blog will have spent the last decade or so becoming increasingly dissatisfied about the infrequency with which I post on here, and so have I. It's not that I don't have the time, and every so often I am still struck by inspiration for a post which never makes it up here. Part of it is doubtless down to a lack of things to say, but I think a significant part of it is that the process of writing a post and putting it up here, from start to finish, is very time-consuming for me. I fantasize about posting here regularly; perhaps every Tuesday I would sit down for an hour or two and put something up. But of course I'm very far from that place at the moment, and realistically if I was to get to that place I'd need something in the way of a production line.

To this end, I thought it'd be good to write a post with the kind of production values I'm aspiring to, in the kind of time-frame I'm aspiring to, but without putting too much pressure on the content. This way I can try to get the basic mechanics down, and once I've got that in position, the hope is that in future I'll be able to let the banger content pour out me unobstructed by practicalities, much as one might on Bluesky (other microblogging sites are of course available), or in an IRL conversation. It may take a few such test posts to get there, but this is the first. Just so that nobody who likes reading this sort of thing gets their hopes up, I have no intention of putting them out weekly at this stage.

The Template

I'm writing this on an html template that I made back in the day. I'm not what one thinks of as a person who codes, but I do write these things directly as html, because I find that if I use Blogger's wysiwyg interface things don't end up looking the way I want. Here is the template:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
<font face="calibri" size="3">
<h1></h1>
<div style="line-height:1.5">
<h3>Notes</h3>
<h3>References</h3>
<ul>
<li></li>
</ul>
</div>
</font>
</body>
</html>

I am happy for you to use or adapt it for your own blogposts without acknowledgement. I had to look up how to get the html to display as plain text rather than having it behave as html. You have to replace "<" with "&_l_t_;" (minus the underscores) and ">" with "&_g_t_;" (likewise). The underscores are there because without them I don't know how to make them display as is rather than turning into "<" and ">". I considered not showing you the template at all, but I figured that my production line should allow for a certain amount of looking things up, as long as I don't get too carried away and try look up every last thing, such as the second thing which I didn't look up. It's OK to use a workaround if it's the difference between getting these things out there and having a bunch of fragments sitting on my computer.

There are a few things that aren't in the template but which I do use in my posts, for example hyperlinks, footnotes and images, but text, headings and bullet points are the main thing. I should add templates for links and notes even if not for images, but right now is writing time, not template construction time.

When I'm writing from the template, I need to save a new copy of it with the blogpost title, the date and the .html extension and save it somewhere that my Chromebook will allow me to open html files in a browser from. Then I write the post as html in Caret, periodically saving it and refreshing the version in the browser to see what it looks like. It's presumably not an optimal system but I find it fairly pleasant and it's what I'm building on at the moment. Once I've got the html document as I want it, I can paste it into Blogger, read the preview on that site, correct inevitable typos, read the preview again, and post it. This is supposed to give me control over the process rather than having to do things Blogger's way.

The Production Line

To summarize and elaborate, let's look at the production line as a set of bullet points. This will also allow me to test out another key blogging mechanic:

• Percolation: In the week leading up to sitting down to write the post, I can turn over the ideas for what I'm going to write about in my head. I might write down some notes, but on no account must anything that looks like drafting the post start early.
• Set-up: On the day, get myself somewhere I can work, close my browser tabs, locally save a version of the template with the post name and date, and open it up in the browser.
• Draft: Write the thing! Try not to stop in the middle. Write it in Caret as html and refresh the version in the browser to see what it looks like.
• Proofread: Proofread it in the browser.
• Blogger: Only at this point do I open up Blogger. I paste it into their html interface.
• Preview: Open Blogger's preview and correct any typos. I should do the corrections in Caret and paste the whole thing in again, rather than typing in Blogger and having to go backwards and forwards to get my own copy accurate.
• Final read and post: Once I've read a version in the preview that I haven't seen any typos in, I can post it to the site. For the post's keywords, choose three and don't stress too much about what they are.
• Promotion: Post the link on Bluesky or wherever I'm mostly microblogging nowadays. Watch the plaudits roll in.

Perfectionism

I think that one of the things that stands in the way of me being as prolific as I am in my fantasy is a kind of perfectionism, but I don't want to mislead: perfectionism paradigmatically has benefits and maleffects, and my variety of it is skewed towards the latter. I think my blogposts do skew towards a lack of typos, but aside from that it's really just a kind of obsessive anxiety about putting out something that's not as it should be, even in parts. Last year I did a bit of work on that particular debilitating personality trait of mine with some success, and in a more interesting post than this one I might take a little digression and talk about it, but this is just a test so I'll move on. ¹

The negative aspects of perfectionism speak for themselves, I think, at least in terms of how they might slow a person down. But the positive aspects perhaps deserve a little comment. There are some things that really can't be done well if they're not done with a meticulous attention to detail. But that's not how I roll when it comes to my personal projects. I do a bit of html but don't know how to make "&_l_t_;" display without the underscores, I learned Esperanto on Duolingo but can't follow a podcast in it, I play the guitar badly, I have a blog I hardly ever post on. Regular readers will recall that I occasionally write about set theory but instead of talking sense about it I talk nonsense and make a joke out of it. I actually got a set theory textbook out of the library recently and have been working through it; I'm currently partway through chapter 2 and will let you make your own speculations about how that'll pan out. You get the idea. Perfectionism can lead to perfection, but in my case it typically doesn't. A possible exception is my ability to learn flags, capital cities and other such things that come up in geography trivia games.

The Future

I've got a kind of "If you build it, they will come" attitude towards actually finding interesting things to write about on here. For the moment you should just expect more test posts like this, and you shouldn't expect them regularly at first. The important thing is just getting back in the game, so that when I feel like I've got something interesting to write about, the infrastructure will be in place for me to get it out there.

When I was thinking over some posts I'd written that I was proud of, four that came to mind were this poem, this post about the normativity of logic, this post about a book about ancient Greek philosophy by WKC Guthrie, and this post about collective nouns. So I think poetry, philosophy, and frivolity are the ways to go. I've written about politics in the past too but I don't think I'm very good at it.

I don't often get inspired to write poetry, and while a post like the present one can be dashed off without a great deal of thought, I don't think that's true of poetry, at least not as I write it. Similarly with the two philosophy posts I mentioned: there's no way I could have written those in an hour or two. But frivolity I can probably manage, and probably some less intense philosophy too. I recently had an idea about the Repugnant Conclusion that I could perhaps write a post about. I could also write posts inspired by other people's posts. People sometimes say blogging is dead, but this is obviously bunk. And if the time to write the next instalment comes and I don't have anything interesting to write about, I can just write another one of these. Wish me luck!

Notes

[1] I considered saying a little bit more about it in a footnote to test out the mechanics of footnotes and avoid interrupting the lightness of the main text, but decided to test the mechanics by writing this instead.