What I Read

I wish I could read in this room. LOL.

People should read more. I read a lot and I still think I should read more. But it is important to have a strategy to prevent wasting unconscionable amounts of time.

Internet

I have some basic rules when it comes to reading on the internet. I try to read a lot, as quickly as possible, from a large variety of sources. I try not to spend too much time each day doing it. I avoid reading “the news” as much as I can — it simply doesn't matter as much as everyone seems to think it does.

I block, and try my best not to use, time-wasting websites like Reddit, Instagram, the New York Times, etc. But I do read The Economist.

Links that I find very interesting, and want to preserve a record of, if only for myself a few years from now, I preserve at overvale.com/links.

Papers

I think everyone should read more academic papers. They’re everywhere on the internet, and often behind the headlines you read in the news. Reading them is often revealing in a way that reading the news is often not.

Reading papers can be intimidating, but my basic strategy is below. Go step-by-step and bail at any point you think you’ve got everything you want from a paper.

  1. Read the abstract. This is a summary of what the paper is about, and its findings.
  2. Read the conclusion. It is often nearly identical to the abstract.
  3. Look over all the figures (charts, graphs, images, etc).
  4. Start reading from the beginning, skim if you want, and read as much of the whole thing as you care to.
  5. Look at the paper’s bibliography and start reading those papers.

You’ll find that you can get the gist of a paper very quickly. For the ones that are only a little interesting you can be done in a minute or two, and the ones you find really interesting you can open up hours (or weeks) of research.

These days, I also use AI chatbots to better, or more quickly, understand complex papers. AIs are great at this!

Here is a small collection of my favorite papers (I’ve stretched the definition of a paper somewhat):

Books

Books are one of humanity’s greatest creations. Perhaps Carl Sagan said it best:

What an astonishing thing a book is. One glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you.

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs, books break the shackles of time. A book is a proof that humans are capable of working magic.

Recommended Fiction:

Recommended Non-Fiction: