7858
@7858.eth
496 Following
2613 Followers
Book review status update, short term plans, and reflections:
We're almost exactly halfway through 2025.
I've been writing a book review per day since January 1st. That's 183 reviews without missing a day, as far as I know.
I've reviewed everything that I read in 2024 and almost everything I've read in 2025.
The reviews I got the most engagement on were mostly recent-ish (last 75 years) and pop-leaning. Childhood favorites punched above their weight class.
I'm planning on taking a break for at least 3 months, maybe even 6. I'm almost out of books to review, and I think this review business works better as an every-day-or-never thing.
Plus, I want to spend more time fishing, working on side projects, and playing outside with my kids while they're on summer vacation.
This is the second most fun I've had on social media (the most fun was running a popular NFT account through the rise of NFTs, if you're wondering). Thank you all for the likes, the comments, the quotes, and the rest of the engagement. My favorite reactions were the respectful disagreements. You all are great at that. Thank you especially for pushing back gracefully.
If you've made it this far, I'm inferring that I've earned some credibility with you, and I'd like to expend it all right now. Please carefully consider the following.
You must read good books.
Your entire experience is downstream of the information you consume. The way you think about problems, the way you see the world, the way you feel about other men and women, the things you value, and your sense of how to live a good life are all a product of the playlist of thoughts you put on in your head.
We consume culture with mothers' milk, as the Romans believed. But we retain some degree of mental plasticity through our whole lives. That means that you, as an adult, are choosing your own propaganda. The thoughts you permit to pass through your mind, the things you look at, the things you watch, and the things you read are not just database entries. They're updating your firmware in real time.
If you choose to consume short shelf life information, you're depriving yourself of abilities to process and understand the world's most important patterns. If you choose to consume partisan information, you are willfully warping your perspective. A poor nutritional diet causes lifestyle diseases of the body. A poor information diet causes lifestyle diseases of the mind.
It's impossible to know what the ideal piece of information for you to consume at any given moment is. Reading about Bictoin on HackerNews in 2011 was extremely high yield for some people. But chances are, if you were reading the latest tech news in 2011, you were mourning the death of Steve Jobs or getting hyped about Arab Spring unfolding on Twitter or something. The chances of a piece of content 100 hours old proving itself of substantial long term value to you rounds down to 0.
On the other hand, the chances of something 100 years old, or better yet 1000 years old, proving itself of substantial long term value to you round up to 1. It's not a perfect system, but give older books the benefit of the doubt nonetheless. The Lindy effect is real, and young content should require extraordinary proof of value before you allocate your time to it.
Don't worry about falling behind on the news. You can't escape it. I've got 15 years of practice, and I fail at least a little every day. You won't be left behind.
And to state the implicit part of all this explicitly: prioritize books above all else. You should not consume information with the primary goal of adding database entries to your memory. We have the internet for that now. You are training the LLM in your head. You are refining your ability to process novel situations by building up a stable of mental models that have proven themselves valuable across millennia.
I encounter no greater catastrophe on a daily basis than a high horsepower mind malnourished by a suboptimal information diet, or worse, turned against itself by an information diet antithetical to its own true interests.
You are smart people. You don't just sit around on the couch eating chips and candy. Despite your base urges, you eat right.
I implore you to take your mental wellbeing as seriously. You shouldn't just watch short form videos and read political listicles. Read good books, because reading is thinking and every thought that passes through your head leaves behind some trace of itself, great or small, in your deepest nature.
You must read good books. 19 replies
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The Sound and the Fury
Three brothers and their servant experience a day each, which collectively tell a story of decay and misery.
This book ultimately fails because it doesn’t tell an interesting story. It doesn’t generate meaningful experiences for the reader.
Maybe it did once. Maybe it still means something to some southerners.
But no matter how much you bend over backwards with crafty modernist literary technique, if you’re going to ask for a reader’s attention, you’re on the hook for telling a story that means something. This is not that.
I remember an old tweet from Aella where she told about how her and her polyamorous friends would watch movies together and whenever the conflict was driven by monogamy they’d shout at the screen, “monoplot!”
The whole time reading this a voice in my head was shouting “southern honor plot!” The first three parts are just dumb, sad, and miserable reactions, respectively, to a non-event.
I can imagine that there are some people still living who have the perfect slumdog millionaire mix of values, experiences, and intelligence to crack this as an intellectual nut and still have bandwidth to spare for an emotional reaction to it. They are certainly few.
I believe that this book survives today primarily on momentum of people who report admiring it to the next generation, because they heard someone admirable report liking it.
At the height of its power, this was a critics’ book. 98% critic score, 51% audience score kind of thing.
Today, it’s just one of those pieces of cruft that clutters up greatest of all time lists because too many people are afraid to out themselves as philistines by openly declaring “I thought it was confusing, boring, overwrought trash.”
Well, I thought it was confusing, boring, overwrought trash.
Not recommended for anyone. 3 replies
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Redwall
Game of Thrones meets The Wind in the Willows; a young mouse goes on a quest to find ancient arms then uses them to vanquish terrible foes.
This is a book for kids. Adults should not read it on their own. But it’s probably better than a lot of the books you’ll read this year.
The book opens with one of the all time great feasts, which the author probably justified to the editor as an important technique for establishing that Redwall Abbey is a place of peace and security for the community. But clearly it’s mostly just an expression of Jacques’ exuberant and genuine love of food.
Following hot on its heels, we meet Cluny the Scourge, leader of a horde of invaders and one of the book’s two great villains.
The hero Matthias seeks out the lost sword and shield of Martin the Warrior, the founder of Redwall Abbey. In the course of overcoming various obstacles, he meets and befriends the Sparra tribe and the Shrew tribe, and also slays Asmodeus, a giant magical snake monster.
He returns to the Abbey with a full complement of gear and a new sense of his own capabilities, and leads the forces of good to victory. His mentor dies in the assault, but Matthias gets the girl and the two have a son.
The story is timeless, the writing is good, the characters are quirky and lovable. The whole thing is incredibly well done.
This is one of my boys’ all time favorites and it’s one of the best kids’ books I’ve ever read.
Highly recommended for 4-11 year olds. 6 replies
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