Reading massive tomes: less slog, more joy
Summary
Instead of accruing a backlog, I’m looking for opportunities to get the essence of longer books with a smaller investment of time and energy. Thus, I’ve organized my ideas into a 2×2 diagram to how I’m making tradeoffs and deciding which books to read this year: Interviews with the author on podcasts are often the sweet spot. Plus, a podcast, especially when sped up, is a tiny fraction of the time it takes me to read a short book, let alone a considerable tome. I think of this as quiz-level literacy: I might remember enough to answer a pub quiz question on these, but I would not be able to debate even the granular points in either of those books with someone who had read them. I want to read a Robert Caro book this year, either The Power Broker (definitively a tome) or Working (relatively short).