Hi friends,
Greetings from Brooklyn!
What's a book you're looking forward to reading over the holidays?
I'm planning to spend the last crumbs of 2024 finishing Dickens'Great Expectations. Oh, and my fellow Substackers' end-of-year reflections, best-ofs and 2025 aspirations - really looking forward to those as well.
Until next time,
Florian
14 realizations from my year of reading great literature.
That it is sobering to think that at a rate of about 10 books a year, I only have time to read another 500 before I return to dust.
That 99.9% of the best works of literature and philosophy have already been written in the last 2,500 years making any “best of the year” list pretty trivial.
That it is profoundly liberating never having to look at the best-selling shelf of a bookshop for inspiration about your next read.
That reading is just like exercising; it requires a scheduled routine and the discipline to get pages in.
That Homer, Dickens, Nietzsche and Wallace are both more approachable and harder to read than you think.
That wisdom is best remembered when you can put a name on it, whether the name is Odysseus, Siddhartha, or Lee.
That it is only upon the second reading of a book that the reading truly begins.
That a book can fill you up with roaring energy even though you only understand 20% of it.
That reading without a pen in hand for marginalia now feels like drinking water with a fork.
That the only “book review” worth reading says more about the reader than about the book.
That every book is a piece of a 2,000 year old civilizational genome.
That we’ve somehow convinced ourselves the Internet revolutionized access to information when we’ve always had libraries.
That a good book is one whose highlighted passages you often return to for comfort, advice or inspiration.
That great books are like lighthouses on the hills of time that help you find your way back through the fog of memory.
Weekly Wisdom
📖 My lifetime reading plan: Ted Gioa, a jazz writer and cultural critic, has a lifetime reading plan. At a very early age, he decided to just read every foundational text of literature, philosophy, history and basically teach himself the fundamentals of every topic he was curious about. This short piece summarizes his approach and what he got out of it. It is the ultimate antidote to our hacks-and-tricks-infested culture. Hey, wanna be just a little bit less ignorant? Wake up at 5am every day to read 2,000-year-old texts for two hours and do that for forty straight years. See you on the other side! Thank you, Ted.
📚 Lost in Thought: I am listening to this book for the second time and loved it so much I have now bought a physical copy so I can enjoy it with my eyes too. If you’re the kind of person who loves learning something new just for the intellectual thrill of it and feel slightly alienated by the current obsession with productivity, this book is for you. It’s a rare thing to encounter a book that validates so many of your inner strivings.
🎥 Tokyo Story: There’s a scene in the movie Tokyo Story where a grandmother and her grandson are outside, playing. The grandmother asks her grandson what he will be when he grows up: “Will you be a doctor, just like your father?” He barely registers the question, completely absorbed in collecting blades of grass. “By the time you become a doctor,” she continues, “I wonder if I’ll still be there.” This short scene is devastatingly beautiful. The film explores our evolving relationship with time: the child is oblivious to it, the adult desperate to control it, but only the elder has truly tamed it.
Lateral Thought
“All that can be done is for each one of us to invent our own ideal library of our classics; and I would say that one half of it should consist of books we have read and that have meant something for us, and the other half of books which we intend to read and which we suppose might mean something to us. We should also leave a section of empty spaces for surprises and chance discoveries.”
Italo Calvino (Why Read the Classics)
Florian, I think you introduced me to Hardcore Literature one year ago, and I can't thank you enough! I read Anna Karenina first and fell absolutely in love.
This year I read East of Eden, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, and Song of Solomon, sound familiar?:) I am so happy I get to read such amazing books all the rest of my days. It makes me so happy. I can't wait for this year!
I love No. 12 - "That we’ve somehow convinced ourselves the Internet revolutionized access to information when we’ve always had libraries". The library holds such a fond place in my heart as it was where I was able to access books at a super early age since owning books was a luxury for my family growing up 💗✨.