raluca
@raluca
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Book review status update, short term plans, and reflections:
We're almost exactly halfway through 2025.
I've been writing a book review per day since January 1st. That's 183 reviews without missing a day, as far as I know.
I've reviewed everything that I read in 2024 and almost everything I've read in 2025.
The reviews I got the most engagement on were mostly recent-ish (last 75 years) and pop-leaning. Childhood favorites punched above their weight class.
I'm planning on taking a break for at least 3 months, maybe even 6. I'm almost out of books to review, and I think this review business works better as an every-day-or-never thing.
Plus, I want to spend more time fishing, working on side projects, and playing outside with my kids while they're on summer vacation.
This is the second most fun I've had on social media (the most fun was running a popular NFT account through the rise of NFTs, if you're wondering). Thank you all for the likes, the comments, the quotes, and the rest of the engagement. My favorite reactions were the respectful disagreements. You all are great at that. Thank you especially for pushing back gracefully.
If you've made it this far, I'm inferring that I've earned some credibility with you, and I'd like to expend it all right now. Please carefully consider the following.
You must read good books.
Your entire experience is downstream of the information you consume. The way you think about problems, the way you see the world, the way you feel about other men and women, the things you value, and your sense of how to live a good life are all a product of the playlist of thoughts you put on in your head.
We consume culture with mothers' milk, as the Romans believed. But we retain some degree of mental plasticity through our whole lives. That means that you, as an adult, are choosing your own propaganda. The thoughts you permit to pass through your mind, the things you look at, the things you watch, and the things you read are not just database entries. They're updating your firmware in real time.
If you choose to consume short shelf life information, you're depriving yourself of abilities to process and understand the world's most important patterns. If you choose to consume partisan information, you are willfully warping your perspective. A poor nutritional diet causes lifestyle diseases of the body. A poor information diet causes lifestyle diseases of the mind.
It's impossible to know what the ideal piece of information for you to consume at any given moment is. Reading about Bictoin on HackerNews in 2011 was extremely high yield for some people. But chances are, if you were reading the latest tech news in 2011, you were mourning the death of Steve Jobs or getting hyped about Arab Spring unfolding on Twitter or something. The chances of a piece of content 100 hours old proving itself of substantial long term value to you rounds down to 0.
On the other hand, the chances of something 100 years old, or better yet 1000 years old, proving itself of substantial long term value to you round up to 1. It's not a perfect system, but give older books the benefit of the doubt nonetheless. The Lindy effect is real, and young content should require extraordinary proof of value before you allocate your time to it.
Don't worry about falling behind on the news. You can't escape it. I've got 15 years of practice, and I fail at least a little every day. You won't be left behind.
And to state the implicit part of all this explicitly: prioritize books above all else. You should not consume information with the primary goal of adding database entries to your memory. We have the internet for that now. You are training the LLM in your head. You are refining your ability to process novel situations by building up a stable of mental models that have proven themselves valuable across millennia.
I encounter no greater catastrophe on a daily basis than a high horsepower mind malnourished by a suboptimal information diet, or worse, turned against itself by an information diet antithetical to its own true interests.
You are smart people. You don't just sit around on the couch eating chips and candy. Despite your base urges, you eat right.
I implore you to take your mental wellbeing as seriously. You shouldn't just watch short form videos and read political listicles. Read good books, because reading is thinking and every thought that passes through your head leaves behind some trace of itself, great or small, in your deepest nature.
You must read good books. 19 replies
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...close, from 2am to 4am
i was in disbelief as i didn't know at the time that that was a possibility. alas, my new friends and i had no choice but comply. one of them pointed out that there was a gas station close by, so we headed there. on our way there we met the fourth stranded passenger carrying his very many suitcases
we sat down at a table inside the gas station, exchanged more context about each other: where are we coming from, where are we heading towards. one of them was a rock singer on tour, he played something on the guitar. we exchanged some souvenirs from different places we visited, and drank hot chocolate
although i never got their names, and i will never see them again -- or at least not recognize them --, this has been one of my favorite memories to this day. four strangers "kicked out" of the airport, chatting and drinking hot chocolate in the middle of the night at a gas station in Italy 2/2 1 reply
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lovely story :)
i have a few fun stories from airports, one quite similar to yours, perhaps more chaotic as it happened during the height of covid restrictions
but my favorite is from an airport in Italy. i went to the airport a few hours earlier than necessary as my flight was at 6am, and all things considered it was the most cost-efficient choice for me to be there around 1am
so i make it there after barely figuring out the bus situation, carrying a large suitcase and thinking of how to spend that sleepless night most productively
the airport was rather unpopulated, but i didn't pay too much attention to it, and instead looked for some seats i could comfortably sit on for hours, preferably with some people around. i found two people and joined them, paying my due civil inattention
just about one hour later, after the two fellow travelers and i -- and no one else around -- have chatted briefly, but enough to become airport friends, a staff member approaches us and tells us that the airport will... 1/ 1 reply
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