Just Start: 18 noteworthy lines from books I loved this year
According to the list of these things that I keep, I read 57 books this year (and DNFed about another 20). Lots of them were really good, and I’ve already put out a video featuring seven of my favourites — but also, a couple of weeks after I read each book, I tend to flick through the quotes I’ve copied down, dog-eared or highlighted, and pull out my favourites to keep or think about some more. These are some of the best: some of them might change the way you look at the world, some of them are lovely bits of writing, and some are just interesting. All of them are from books I’d recommend.
“Imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin.”
Zeke Faux gives the most memorable explanation of the blockchain — and its environmental costs — that I’ve ever read, in Number Go Up.
“One way to visualise a tank of gas is to imagine a mass of ancient plant matter weighing as much as fifteen blue whales crammed into a tank just behind your child’s car seat. All those distilled plants were grown by the same sun that grows our food today, so what we’re burning is, in essence, ancient, super-concentrated solar energy.”
John Vaillant is always good at explaining things, but this explanation of fossil fuels really brings home how precarious our reliance on them is, in Fire Weather.
Cezanne’s determination to seek to truly represent a three-dimensional subject in a painting while not attempting to deny the two-dimensionality of the canvas was revolutionary. It led directly to Picasso and Braque’s experiments with Cubism… and that led to a visit by Piet Mondrian, which led to his abstract geometric grids, which in turn influenced the design style of the Bauhaus, modernist architecture, and — eventually — Braun toasters and Apple iPhones.
Will Gompertz connects the creative dots in See What You’re Missing: 31 Ways Artists Notice The World.
Escape competition through authenticity.
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant nicely summarises something I’m trying to do at the moment.
The natural sciences have the clearest patterns. Physics admits of a lovely unification, not just at the level of fundamental forces, but when considering its extent and implications. Classifications like ‘optics’ or ‘thermodynamics’ are just straitjackets, preventing physicists from seeing countless intersections.
Ted Chiang’s short story “Understand” does a good job of presenting the viewpoint of a newly superintelligent human.
Figure out the hard thing first. Try to solve that as quickly as possible.
Quit by Annie Duke sums up the monkey-pedestal problem.
Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly—about any subject at all.
I wish I’d read William Zinsser’s Writing To Learn twenty years ago.
Be direct but not mean. If you think someone’s presentation sucks, don’t say “It’s really good, but it could use one more pass to tighten up.” It’s much better to say “I couldn’t follow it and I didn’t understand your point and here are the reasons why.”
Ben Horowitz has a lot of tough but good advice in The Hard Thing About Hard Things
I don’t make many films, but I have a great admiration for the likes of Steven Spielberg, who often makes two films more or less at the same time and they’re often great. I asked him about it, and he said something interesting: “One is a holiday from the other.”
I quite often feel like this when I’m in the flow of work: going from one project to another can be a palate-cleanser, rather than exhausting, if they’re different enough. (From George Miller, quoted in Blood, Sweat and Chrome: The wild and true story of Mad Max: Fury Road)
Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know: were persimmons his favourite fruit, or had they just now become his favourite fruit because they were growing in his backyard?
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin is full of beautiful little characterisations of its three main protagonists’ viewpoints, just like this one.
Nullius in verba was the Royal Society’s motto. Don’t take anyone’s word for it.
From James Gleick’s excellent biography of Isaac Newton
“When you’ve reached a real impasse…then the routine kind of mathematical thinking is of no use to you. Leading up to that kind of new idea there has to be a long period of tremendous focus without any distraction. You have to think about nothing but the problem: just concentrate on it. Then you stop. After that there seems to be a kind of period of relaxation in which your subconscious takes over and new insight comes.”
Fermat’s Last Theorem by Simon Singh is full of insight onto how to tackle problems - mathematical or not.
What feels like divine inspiration is actually instinct.
Think Like an Artist by Will Gompertz is all about the ways doing research and deeply understanding your subject unlocks creativity.
Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley was right.
Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death was written about TV in the 80s, but it’s never been more relevant.
Your politics are not what you tell yourself you believe. They are not the set of ideas that you identify with, or look to for personal validation of your goodness as a human being. Your politics are expressed in the choices that you make, the way you treat other people, and the actions you perform.
John Higgs’ William Blake vs. the World is partly a biography, but also a look at art, philosophy and neuroscience.
There is plenty out there worth doing alone, but for everything else, there is a need for your people. It would behoove you to have a crew.
From Hanif Abdurraqib’s Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest
“Silly things cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.”
I loved Jane Austen’s Emma for a lot of reasons, but its wordplay is one of the biggest.
“There are genuine mysteries in the world that mark the limits of human knowing and thinking. Wisdom is fortified, not destroyed, by understanding its limitations. Ignorance does not make a fool as surely as self-deception.”
Mortimer J. Adler’s How to Read a Book is another book I should have read two decades ago.
Help me read more books
A holiday request! I don’t do paid subscriptions for this newsletter, but I sincerely appreciate everyone who’s offered to commit to one. And I have an alternative! If you’d like to contribute to my never-ending reading habit (and therefore, hopefully, help me make more creative connections and make this newsletter better), you can find my reading wishlist here.
Thanks for reading, and happy holidays!
Joel x