I’ve ushered in a new era of reading, one that takes more time to metabolize the wisdom I carefully choose to accept or reject into my worldview.
My literary birthday is on July 22, 2026. It was on this day that I realized I have been reading and intellectualizing wrong for the past n-years. Normally, I would read through a book as fast as possible and move onto the next, driven by a voracious appetite. Instead, I need to digest the book as slowly as I can.
Gone are the day of consuming massive amounts of literary junk food — now I am consuming highly-nutritious books that force me to take my time to chew through properly, getting my full attention.
The goal is not for me to collect wisdom, it’s to metabolize wisdom. As I read a book in syntactical style, highlighting sections I find thought-provoking and stopping to process some passages, I’m also going to keep these questions top of mind.
- What happens when all of these ideas pass through you?
- What survives?
- What conflicts?
- What do you reject?
- What do you synthesize?
- What becomes yours?
- What do you create that wasn’t simply present in any one of them?
From there I start to draft an essay of my thoughts, either in support of a thesis, against one, or a formulation of my own. By wrestling with the content, only then do we grow from it.