Reading Notes: July

A few things worth writing down, none of them long enough to stand alone.

On finishing books. I stopped forcing myself through books I'd lost interest in, and my completion rate went up. The guilt of an unfinished book was keeping me from starting the next one.

On margin notes. Writing in the margin is a filter, not a record. I almost never reread the notes. The value is entirely in the moment of deciding something was worth marking.

On technical books specifically. The half-life is shorter than it looks, but not for the reason people say. The APIs go stale, sure -- but the part that ages worst is the implicit assumption about what hardware is expensive. Half the advice in older systems books is optimizing for a bottleneck that stopped mattering a decade ago.

On reading two at once. One technical, one not. The switch is restful in a way that stopping entirely isn't.

Next month: starting Crafting Interpreters, and actually building both interpreters rather than reading along and telling myself I'll do the exercises later.