Reading Nowadays
Had a taker from yesterday's prompt to create an issue in the Github repo. It created this Write.as post:
Hi there,
Enjoying your blog posts more ever since you started posting almost on a daily basis.
Reading your quotes from Figuring makes me want to pick it up as soon as I am done with current ones. What else are you reading nowadays?
Appreciate the support Simbly! How fitting that you mentioned the almost daily posting basis. I had a fleeting thought the other day that I should stop posting that way. Don't know why. Perhaps it was because I felt a vague sense of entropy. Your encouragement helps diminish the weight of that thought (and the entropy).
Figuring is absolutely lovely. An aspect of author Maria Popova's main project, Brain Pickings, that I relish is her own writing. There's a richness to the prose that Popova weaves around the passages and quotations and stories that make up a Brain Pickings post. To have that over 500 pages is a treat. It's also been enlightening to learn about great figures in the history of art, literature, and science that are overlooked — who comes to mind especially are Mary Somerville, Elizabeth Peabody, Maria Mitchell, and Harriet Hosmer. Even if you don't read the book, take some time to look into them — they're each extraordinary in their own unique ways.
As far as other books, I've been also digging into Bill Bryson's The Body: A Guide for Occupants. It's the kind of book that induces continuous partial wonder. So much about the functioning of the body that I don't know. What an education! There's something about Bryson's grounded yet comical style that makes him a welcome guide — not “an education” from a school teacher but from a friend. I've also enjoyed his book on the universe as well as his history of the home.
Oh if I could only read more than two books at once! That appears to be the artificial cap I put on myself. Never more than two. Then again, if could read another book right now, I don't know what it'd be.
Anyways, I'll leave you with two books I read lately and would recommend — Laura Dassow Walls' deeply satisfying biography of Henry David Thoreau and Wittgenstein's Poker, a great book that uses the alleged scrap between Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein to describe their philosophies as well as the cultural and world history of their time.
Thanks again for writing Simbly! Writing this post makes me think that I should adopt a reading list similar to yours.