Finished reading: A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle 📚Being the first Sherlock Holmes story, I was surprised that nearly half of it ended up being about Mormons in Utah. Coincidentally there were many parallels with Riders of the Purple Sage, which I happened to have read earlier this year.
Reading
Finished reading: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond 📚In college I minored in anthropology, so naturally I enjoyed this one. I found the discussion of oligarchy and big man theory in this context to be especially interesting.
Carl Sagan, in Cosmos:
If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.
I continue to struggle with prioritizing what books to read. My list is longer than I care to count, and I’m always trying to balance the tension between reading things that I feel I “should” read vs. reading what I want to read. I certainly read more, and more quickly, if I’m reading a book that I’m genuinely compelled toward. Maybe as long as I’m working in little bits of the stuff that’s good for me, like vegetables, then whatever else keeps me reading is good enough.