Writing is an encapsulation of someone else’s thoughts, fed to you at much faster speeds
Books are specifically written by a single author, so present a coherent worldview missing from jumping from Substack to Substack
Even if you don’t remember the specific content, you remember the narrative, the pointer to whether something was good or bad, and can go back to refer to it later
It takes a while to actually have something sink in; tweet vs article vs book
Reading is practice at skimming & reading faster, which is useful for loading more shortform stuff into your memory
Tyler Cowen’s “What do you practice the way a pianist practices scales?” — reading
Against reading books
Talking with people forms bonds, you can’t bond with a book
Except with vague hero-worship towards the author
What are the alternatives? What does reading funge against?
Reading book titles and tweets and articles
Listening to books or podcasts
Watching videos
Guess: People’s short-term memories are degrading as a result of screens and persistent internet connection; it’s not that books are getting worse, but humans are getting more distracted
Also, the people saying this are extremely well read. Perhaps “no alpha left in books” is correct for them on the margin, but not for you, person who reads three books a year.
Correlation between success and lifetime # books read?