Tap Left Margin -> Next Page; my favorite feature of the iPad. This means I can comfortably read while drinking tea and not worry about which hand holds my iPad.
The majority of the time I’m reading a book I just want to go forward. It always felt clumsy to swipe with my left thumb. Advancing with just a tap means the device never breaks my flow.
Do our reading environments encourage active reading? Or do they utterly oppose it? A typical reading tool, such as a book or website, displays the author’s argument, and nothing else. The reader’s line of thought remains internal and invisible, vague and speculative. We form questions, but can’t answer them. We consider alternatives, but can’t explore them. We question assumptions, but can’t verify them. And so, in the end, we blindly trust, or blindly don’t, and we miss the deep understanding that comes from dialogue and exploration.
Explorable Explanations is my umbrella project for ideas that enable and encourage truly active reading. The goal is to change people’s relationship with text. People currently think of text as information to be consumed. I want text to be used as an environment to think in.
Bret Victor – Explorable Explanations.
Continuing in the style of last week I spent most of today reading my Instapaper backlog and listening to podcasts. Good day. Here are the highlights:
Spent the evening with my Kindle, a few cups of tea, and my most recent items from Instapaper. The highlights of my reading list for the night:
Ian Beck’s post the other day inspired me to jot down some notes here about what I recently read. Similar to Ian, I am a binge reader of sorts. There are months that go by where I hardly crack open a book. Other months I will finish a half-dozen.
Before I moved this site to WordPress.com I had a custom post type that listed out which books I recently completed in a special page template. Since that is no longer, here is what has kept me interested recently.
A relatively easy read but superbly interesting. Matthew Crawford writes about his experiences in life as a mechanic and at a think tank. The guiding philosophy behind the book is one I agree with.
I just finished this the other day and loved it. I had heard good things from others and the book did not disappoint.
This has the benefit of being a 7-part series. I have been a Stephen King fan since 5th grade but I really think this is his finest work. I started the series a couple times before but this time I finally have consistent time to finish it. Since August I read volumes 3-5 and am about halfway through volume 6 now.
The Dark Tower is a wonderful mix of futurism and western fiction with a few dark twists thrown in. Handily the first volume is short and easy to read. I would encourage anyone to give that a read. If it hooks you the series just gets better from there.
Fairly interesting. Extremely fast read. This was decent but not great. I would recommend reading it and then listening to John Siracusa tear it apart in “The wrong guy” (pt. II).
Michael Pick recommended this to me at our Budapest meetup. It was fascinating. If you don’t mind non-linear fiction with a bit of imaginary world construction I cannot recommend it highly enough. Possibly the best piece of fiction I read this year.
If you are interested in ideas around managing teams this is a good one. Yes it is from the 1960s, but the advice is solid. Unlike some other business books it focuses on the concrete with digestible advice that actually gives you something to take back to your work.
Information consumption also has a consumption chain, just like food does. Most news, for instance, comes from a set of facts on the ground, that get processed, and processed and processed again before it ends up on your television set boiled down into chunks for you to consume. But it also gets filled with additives— expert opinion, analysis, visualizations, you name it— before it gets to you. If this was food, a vegan would want none of it. They’d head straight to the data, to the source, to the facts, and try and get as much of that additive business out of their way.
Clay Johnson – Why Infovegan. via Daniel.
The idea that someone can program our consumption is becoming obsolete, and fast. The front page of the paper disappears in a digital world, where there is no front page–merely the page I got to by clicking on a link from a friend.
Seth Godin – The extraordinary revolution of media choice.
So sad and so true:
No app built for reading starts with the premise that the publisher has done an acceptable job.
Brent Simmons – The Readable Future.