What I read this quarter
Six books, two of them worth your time, one of them worth reading twice.
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A quarterly habit: everything finished, briefly, honestly, including the ones that did not work.
Worth reading twice
On the shape of long arguments. A book about structure that is itself unusually well structured, which is rarer than it should be. The middle third — on how an argument earns the right to its conclusion — changed how I outline.
Worth reading once
A history of the workshop. Excellent on the first hundred years, thinner after that. Read the first half.
Letters, collected. Uneven, as collections are, but three of the letters are extraordinary and the editor's notes are generous rather than showy.
Did not finish
Two books I set down at around page ninety, both for the same reason: they had made their case by page forty and spent the remainder restating it with new examples.
This is a specific failure mode of a certain kind of non-fiction — the article that was expanded to book length because books are what get published. It is not a failure of the idea. It is a failure of format, and the fix is usually to read the original article.
Currently reading
Something long and slow that I am not going to describe until I have finished it, because describing a book in progress tends to fix an interpretation before it has earned one.
Written by
Dana Okonkwo
Editor
Founder and editor of DStillPoint. Writes about attention, craft and the slow parts of building software.
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This landed at the right time. The bit about protecting the first hour rather than the longest one is the part I keep getting wrong.
Thanks — that framing came from watching how badly a fragmented morning wrecks an otherwise clear afternoon.