{"id":7330,"date":"2014-02-15T13:47:45","date_gmt":"2014-02-15T18:47:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/?p=7330"},"modified":"2023-09-26T20:29:23","modified_gmt":"2023-09-27T00:29:23","slug":"reading-list","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/2014\/02\/reading-list\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading List"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You may note that I have cleared out the seldom-updated &#8220;Reading List&#8221; section on the sidebar of this blog.\u00a0 The reason?\u00a0 Here are the books I finished reading in 2013:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li id=\"text-4\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/07\/05\/books\/a-farewell-to-arms-with-hemingways-alternate-endings.html?_r=0\">A Farewell to Arms<\/a> by Ernest Hemingway<\/li>\n<li id=\"text-4\"><a href=\"http:\/\/books.google.com\/books\/about\/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street.html?id=CWxfkOBQ8VMC\">A Random Walk Down Wall Street<\/a> by Burton G. Malkiel<\/li>\n<li id=\"text-4\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/0465029574\">America&#8217;s Unwritten Constitution<\/a> by Akhil Amar<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That&#8217;s it &#8212; all three of them.\u00a0 I never even got to the books whose titles begin with <em>B.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Seriously, this is pathetic.\u00a0 While there are several other books I started to read last year, the results speak for themselves.<\/p>\n<p>I resolve to do better.\u00a0 Why is this important?\u00a0 First, I always learn something from reading, fiction or non-fiction.\u00a0 Books expose me to new ideas and different ways of thinking about the topics that interest me.\u00a0 Even if a book only serves to validate my currently-held points of view, the author&#8217;s formulation is usually more coherent than mine.\u00a0 Second, reading more books will peel my eyeballs away from the computer screen and perhaps reverse the decline in my attention span.\u00a0 Third, reading books of all types can only help improve my writing.\u00a0 Good books serve as examples of how to use words and organize ideas.\u00a0 Bad books, annoying as they are, have value as counterexamples.<\/p>\n<p>So, my aim is to finish one book each month, for the rest of this year.\u00a0 This may seem like a modest goal to you, but it represents a four-fold improvement for me.\u00a0 I will count a book as &#8220;finished&#8221; if it turns out to be a bad book and I make a conscious decision to stop reading it.\u00a0 The clock starts now.\u00a0 I intend to finish &#8220;Thinking Fast and Slow&#8221; by Daniel Kahneman in the next two weeks.\u00a0 I will then turn my attention to &#8220;The Art Spirit&#8221; by Robert Henri and go from there.\u00a0 You can follow my progress in the 2014 Reading List (see sidebar).<\/p>\n<p>If any of you have must-read book suggestions, let me know.\u00a0 My non-fiction-to-fiction ratio has historically been about 20:1 but don&#8217;t let that stop you from mentioning a good novel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You may note that I have cleared out the seldom-updated &#8220;Reading List&#8221; section on the sidebar of this blog.\u00a0 The reason?\u00a0 Here are the books I finished reading in 2013: A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway A Random Walk &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/2014\/02\/reading-list\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-notes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7330"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7330\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7331,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7330\/revisions\/7331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}