First, I love to hear you are reading Tolkien and Vagabond. Two of my personal favorite works.
I am feeling this similar torn feeling, mine is between reading “The Great Books” collection, which I started earlier this year, reading the Dune Chronicles, and learning Japanese.
I started with the Iliad and Odyssey and got a start on Greek Tradegy, and then I paused to start a reread of Dune which I am up to the 5th book, but now all I want to do is study Japanese and do an immersion course. Which I think I may just jump into.
There is something very valuable to reading deeply, and I think it is necessary to truly understand authors and topics. But I also think reading 2-3 things at once can often help to inform your simultaneous readings. As I was reading Greek Tragedy and Dune, I noticed the simple, but meaningful connection the Herbert wrote Dune as an Epic, like the Iliad, and Dune Messiah is written like a play, or a tragedy. Seeing these forms echoed in more modern literature got me super excited and wanting to study them both more and understand how Herbert was informed by some of the great works.
All that to say, I totally agree with reading deeply and I love to do so, for me, right now it seems I can stick with a topic for 3-4 months, which often feels sufficient, but someday it would love to really throw myself at a bigger project.
2) Two years ago, the multi-decade Darwin Correspondence Project finally finished publishing all known correspondence to and from Darwin. If I were on the Noble Prize for Literature committee, this stupendous (30-volume) work would get my vote. Over many years, I have gradually bought every volume as it was released, but as of two years ago I had only read the first eight. Inspired by meeting two of the project team (and drinking several beers with one of them), I decided it was time I read the rest, making copious notes as I went. So, on 1st January 2023, I began my ‘Daily Darwin’ project in which I try to read at least ten pages of the correspondence every day I’m at home (i.e. almost every day). So far, I’m delighted to say I haven’t missed a single day. This morning I finished reading volume 24. If I continue at the current rate, I should finish just in time to crack open a bottle of Laphroaig to celebrate on New Year’s Eve.
(Shameless plug: I’m currently writing a book about looking at the world through Darwin’s eyes. Please subscribe to my SubStack newsletters if that sounds like your kind of thing. https://richardcarter.substack.com/ )
Side projects in reading keep me motivated. I often read more than 6 books at a time. But it has its downfalls too of course. Reading Proust or all Tolkien's work is very challenging, but totally worth it in end I think. Good luck!
Oh, I love a good reading project! This is one of my favorite topics. I'm always in the middle of several of them. For example, I recently decided to read more nonfiction historical books. I started with Jill Lepore's These Truths, a history of the United States, and now I'm reading Stephen Harrigan's Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas. After that I plan to tackle Robert Caro's series of books about L.B.J. (All of this ties into a writing project about my home state, Texas.) Other projects I'm in the middle of: listening to Middlemarch on my daily walks, and reading Ducks, Newburyport, Lucy Ellman's 1,000-page run-on sentence novel about the inner life of a housewife in Ohio in 2017. I find that the best way to manage ambitious reading projects is to assign a certain time of day to each one: I read my big, fat nonfiction books in the morning, I listen to Middlemarch when I walk the dog, and I read novels at night before bed. That way, at least in theory, I can make a little bit of progress on each project on a single day.
I have recently done two reading projects. I read all the Greek plays that are in translation, a d thread all the plays of Shakespeare in approximate order of writing. Both were exciting, fulfilling and informative. I'm planing on reading the Greek philosophers next year. I'm getting the bookstogether atthe moment.
I suppose this is a project - at the end of the year, I review my past 12 months of books read and make a list of the authors I’d like to read more of in the coming year. There certainly are and have been authors I read to completion this way, without sitting down to do it all at once.
Great post! I tend to struggle to complete projects, but often I feel it's because I choose rather open-ended projects with no real defined "completion" point, and I kind of cycle among them, working on 1 or 2 until I hit some kind of wall or plateau, and move on to something else until the original project inevitably comes back around and piques my interest again. Or sometimes I just feel I've learned enough about what I set out to learn from the project and run out of motivation to continue (such as when I decided to learn how to be a white hat hacker). My projects usually involve just diving into some topic I feel my knowledge is lacking in and trying to learn/understand as much as I can about it, which of course is something that never really ends.
The end result is that I become pretty proficient with a lot of different skills and learn a good bit about a lot of different topics (which is good because the more I learn the more I find connections between apparently disparate topics and schools of thought), but I do feel l miss out on the joy and sense of accomplishment that comes from completion, and I fail to truly master most of them.
I think I may try to start breaking up my grand ambitions into smaller projects, concrete chunks with defined completion conditions and see how that affects my overall progress and satisfaction with the work. Thanks for the motivation!
Great stuff! I struggle constantly with the whole “you can only work on one thing at a time” thing. It can really be a drag, especially when things are continually becoming more interesting.
It seems to me a problem of filtering, but it may also be an issue related to framework thinking where you have to evaluate based upon your conscious narrative/framework.
If you figure it out, make sure to write about it because I’d like to know so I can turn it into another project!
First, I love to hear you are reading Tolkien and Vagabond. Two of my personal favorite works.
I am feeling this similar torn feeling, mine is between reading “The Great Books” collection, which I started earlier this year, reading the Dune Chronicles, and learning Japanese.
I started with the Iliad and Odyssey and got a start on Greek Tradegy, and then I paused to start a reread of Dune which I am up to the 5th book, but now all I want to do is study Japanese and do an immersion course. Which I think I may just jump into.
There is something very valuable to reading deeply, and I think it is necessary to truly understand authors and topics. But I also think reading 2-3 things at once can often help to inform your simultaneous readings. As I was reading Greek Tragedy and Dune, I noticed the simple, but meaningful connection the Herbert wrote Dune as an Epic, like the Iliad, and Dune Messiah is written like a play, or a tragedy. Seeing these forms echoed in more modern literature got me super excited and wanting to study them both more and understand how Herbert was informed by some of the great works.
All that to say, I totally agree with reading deeply and I love to do so, for me, right now it seems I can stick with a topic for 3-4 months, which often feels sufficient, but someday it would love to really throw myself at a bigger project.
This came at the right time, thank you.
I recently got laid off too and I’m finally putting my efforts into Count of Monte Cristo
1) A tweet on X is called an ‘X-cretion’.
2) Two years ago, the multi-decade Darwin Correspondence Project finally finished publishing all known correspondence to and from Darwin. If I were on the Noble Prize for Literature committee, this stupendous (30-volume) work would get my vote. Over many years, I have gradually bought every volume as it was released, but as of two years ago I had only read the first eight. Inspired by meeting two of the project team (and drinking several beers with one of them), I decided it was time I read the rest, making copious notes as I went. So, on 1st January 2023, I began my ‘Daily Darwin’ project in which I try to read at least ten pages of the correspondence every day I’m at home (i.e. almost every day). So far, I’m delighted to say I haven’t missed a single day. This morning I finished reading volume 24. If I continue at the current rate, I should finish just in time to crack open a bottle of Laphroaig to celebrate on New Year’s Eve.
(Shameless plug: I’m currently writing a book about looking at the world through Darwin’s eyes. Please subscribe to my SubStack newsletters if that sounds like your kind of thing. https://richardcarter.substack.com/ )
Side projects in reading keep me motivated. I often read more than 6 books at a time. But it has its downfalls too of course. Reading Proust or all Tolkien's work is very challenging, but totally worth it in end I think. Good luck!
Oh, I love a good reading project! This is one of my favorite topics. I'm always in the middle of several of them. For example, I recently decided to read more nonfiction historical books. I started with Jill Lepore's These Truths, a history of the United States, and now I'm reading Stephen Harrigan's Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas. After that I plan to tackle Robert Caro's series of books about L.B.J. (All of this ties into a writing project about my home state, Texas.) Other projects I'm in the middle of: listening to Middlemarch on my daily walks, and reading Ducks, Newburyport, Lucy Ellman's 1,000-page run-on sentence novel about the inner life of a housewife in Ohio in 2017. I find that the best way to manage ambitious reading projects is to assign a certain time of day to each one: I read my big, fat nonfiction books in the morning, I listen to Middlemarch when I walk the dog, and I read novels at night before bed. That way, at least in theory, I can make a little bit of progress on each project on a single day.
I have recently done two reading projects. I read all the Greek plays that are in translation, a d thread all the plays of Shakespeare in approximate order of writing. Both were exciting, fulfilling and informative. I'm planing on reading the Greek philosophers next year. I'm getting the bookstogether atthe moment.
I suppose this is a project - at the end of the year, I review my past 12 months of books read and make a list of the authors I’d like to read more of in the coming year. There certainly are and have been authors I read to completion this way, without sitting down to do it all at once.
Great post! I tend to struggle to complete projects, but often I feel it's because I choose rather open-ended projects with no real defined "completion" point, and I kind of cycle among them, working on 1 or 2 until I hit some kind of wall or plateau, and move on to something else until the original project inevitably comes back around and piques my interest again. Or sometimes I just feel I've learned enough about what I set out to learn from the project and run out of motivation to continue (such as when I decided to learn how to be a white hat hacker). My projects usually involve just diving into some topic I feel my knowledge is lacking in and trying to learn/understand as much as I can about it, which of course is something that never really ends.
The end result is that I become pretty proficient with a lot of different skills and learn a good bit about a lot of different topics (which is good because the more I learn the more I find connections between apparently disparate topics and schools of thought), but I do feel l miss out on the joy and sense of accomplishment that comes from completion, and I fail to truly master most of them.
I think I may try to start breaking up my grand ambitions into smaller projects, concrete chunks with defined completion conditions and see how that affects my overall progress and satisfaction with the work. Thanks for the motivation!
Great stuff! I struggle constantly with the whole “you can only work on one thing at a time” thing. It can really be a drag, especially when things are continually becoming more interesting.
It seems to me a problem of filtering, but it may also be an issue related to framework thinking where you have to evaluate based upon your conscious narrative/framework.
If you figure it out, make sure to write about it because I’d like to know so I can turn it into another project!
Who knew Proust was the original live laugh love?