Tracking My Reading and Books on Tap

I’ve just now (January 2025) added this section to the blog – I’ve wanted to do it for a while, in part to hold myself accountable not only for reading but also (and more importantly) to push myself to think more carefully about what I’m reading. It’s also part of the larger plan to move more of my thinking and writing into a public space — call it a digital garden. Even on a site as rarely visited as this one, there’s something about knowing that it’s available to others that changes my relationship to my thinking.

It was relatively easy to add the entry for January 2025 since the books are waiting expectantly in my backpack and on my desk. And I wrote blog posts while in an earlier phase of tracking my reading in the latter half of 2023 and January 2024; I easily re-tagged those earlier posts so they would show up here. I’m thinking I’ll add at least placeholder entries for the rest of 2024 as I can get to it – those are mostly so that I can easily remind myself of what I read then. Those are bare-bones lists now; I read most of those books before I moved my note-taking to denote. If/when I pull together any notes I might have written I’ll come back and add some reflections there.

Meanwhile, I’m using this space to list books currently on tap for reading. This is an attempt to winnow rather severely my much-too-massive TBR list into something manageable. I’m still thinking through how this might work, but my current plan is to move a book from here into one of the monthly files when I’m actually reading it.

• Ben Ware, On Extinction: Beginning Again at the End.
• Mark Lilla, Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting not to Know.
• Edwin Frank, Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel.
• Joseph Henrich, The Secret of our Success: How culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter.
• Laura Beers, Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and warnings for the twenty-first century.
• Roland Allen, The Notebook: A history of thinking on paper.
• Mary McCarthy, A Bolt from the Blue and other essays (selections).
• Elizabeth Hardwick, The Collected Essays (selections).
• Peter Godfrey-Smith, Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind.

And some books that I really want to read again, to re-visit in light of other things I’ve read more recently:

• Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition.
• Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World.
• Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas.
• Collin McGinn, Prehension: The Hand and the Emergence of Humanity.