The Weekly Update | July 27, 2025
We have overcome the dreaded Event
Very soon, we’ll be reading Zhuangzi together. I’ve recommended the Oxford World Classics edition, translated by Fraser, after having it vouched for by several people I trust. The goal is to begin in mid-August. I’ll have a landing page and schedule made for this installment of the book club early next week.
If you follow my work here and on YouTube, you can probably tell that I have my hands full. This week, I spent quite a bit of time working on another project — but this one is really big. I’ll be able to announce it in another month or so, but this project represents the fulfillment of months of work and the achievement of a long-standing goal of mine. I’m excited to share it with you.
Of course, in about a month, I hope to be sharing another bit of news with you, as that is when we are expecting my daughter to be born. There may be a small lull in posts in the early weeks, save for the Zhuangzi readings, as we adjust to having two children. Fortunately, my wife’s parents will be staying with us for a few months to help us transition to being a family of four. They run a successful restaurant in central China, so I can at least guarantee that we will eat well.
This week, I was feeling stretched thin. I had tried to write for a few weeks, and as you could tell from the last few updates, I was not making huge progress. I was still making progress on videos, but not at the pace I would reasonably expect. Perhaps I had finally reached my limit.
My wife could tell, as I apparently have a strange habit: when I’m very stressed, I play video games. I’ll go weeks or even months without playing a game, but when things get very stressful, she’ll find me in front of the PC. So when she saw me playing Far Cry 4 (an old stand-by of mine), she knew something was up.
It turned out the solution was to stop writing and simply read. I read a Pynchon novel recently, The Crying of Lot 49, that left me feeling inspired; I’m trying to read a good bit of Pynchon before his new novel comes out. Pynchon made me want to work on my novel again. So maybe to feel that way about my book and channel, I needed to read some good books.
So, I read (or at least partially read) these books this week:
Inbar Graiver’s Asceticism of the Mind, on the mental disciplines of early Christian ascetics in Gaza, Syria, and Egypt. This made it into a post on Substack and will be briefly discussed in my book. If you have any interest in meditation, mystical Christianity, ascetic practices, or even early moral psychology, it is worth a read.
Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. This book, I always point out, is woefully misunderstood. We’ve all imbibed a caricature of it; we’d see that caricature for what it is if we bothered to read the damn book. I pick this book up often and read a chapter or two. It is always good for the soul.
Nicholas Carr’s Superbloom. Carr is always an enjoyable writer — you’ve probably heard of The Shallows, his award-winning book on attention and modern technology. Superbloom is a spiritual successor to The Shallows, and it is highly relevant to a few things I’m working on.
Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants. This book is a history of the attention economy, starting with 19th-century newspapers in New York and ending with the digital age.
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow as part of my Pynchon project. What could reasonably be said about this?
Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Lions of Al-Rassan. Kay is a good fantasy writer, but I think I’ve hit my limit for his books. They are all competently written, but as I read this, my thought was, ‘It’s a Kay novel.’ As a book critic friend of mine, Steve Donoghue, once remarked, that is death for a novelist. Thank you, Kay, for all the great reads, but I think we’re parting ways for a time.
After spending more time reading, I found that I couldn’t help but write. I made substantial progress on my book and on some new videos. More details below.
