I’d like to get much, much better at giving really astute summaries (which are, I think, analyses) of what I read and what I get out of it. Writing in Word docs for myself hasn’t motivated me to practice at all. My friends are too nice to really push to me on poor efforts. I sometimes muse on twitter, but that’s not really a skill I’d like to develop. Let’s see if a public blog does a little better at getting me to write like the writers I like.
Ta-Nehisi wrote that David Carr “made us feel like the writers at the big publications—at GQ, at The Atlantic Monthly, at Esquire—were no better than us. He pushed to go harder, to try match their pace” by having “stories from Esquire or The New Yorker photocopied. He would distribute these photocopies to his writers…with the task of reverse engineering. Then he would assemble us around a long table in the conference room, and quiz us on what, precisely, we’d gleaned”. That’s basically what I’m hoping to do here – try to see what’s involved in writing something that feels like the things I admire in the New Yorker, NYRB, and n+1.
I mostly like political theory, intellectual history and grand, sweeping economic history. I’m very aware that most of what I’ve read in each of these comes from a narrow geographic range and I’d like to expand, but I’m still catching up on classics. So expect a lot of Arendt, some Nietzsche, a lot of old left radicals, maybe some on the right, and a lot of attempts to engage with Islamic, Indian, post-colonial and East Asian thought and history.
Mather on Books 