An Annotated Reading List

I read a lot; I mentioned the response when I talk about reading in my nascent thoughts on hobbies recently, stating “when I tell some people about this one, they shrug it off as something that all people do.” That is unfortunate because I don’t think that can be assumed anymore.

When the blog (as I understood it) was at its 2000s peak, the form it would often take was a linked list, think Daring Fireball or early Twitter. A person would read an article, post the link with a blurb and potentially their own thoughts. The linked list blog was replaced by modern social media and rightfully so given the types of output.

Social media was the perfect place to share a link with a block quote and a simple followup thought or addition. This site has gone through many iterations, almost all of them included some type of linked list approach, but with my most recent moves, I culled much of the archives and got rid of all but my long-form writing, perhaps better defined as my own thoughts, rather.

However, I read a lot. And I want to share what I read, so I am going back to an idea I had ages ago: to annotate my reading and share interesting things along the way. Here is how this will be different from the linked list blogs of old and social media’s disruption of that medium:

• I will include only things that have longevity, meaning very little likely from tech or political spectrums.
• I will include block quotes, but only those that led to deeper thoughts from me directly.
• I will provide context for why these things interested me in the first place.
• I will post at most one of these posts per day.
• I will be using the category “annotation” to group these and adding a note to the beginning of each post linking to the series.

I think these ground rules will help keep this from ballooning into something noisy for those that follow along and unwieldy for me.

As a preview, the first one will be about this article from The Atlantic (Apple News Link): A Secret Code May Have Been Hiding in Classical Music for 200 Years by S. I. Rosenbaum.