Notes in the margins
Translations are a conversation between two writers and a reader. None of this is new, and that is partly why it works. I read it once in a hurry and once bit by bit, and they were different books.
Small things
If something here is unclear, that is on me, not you. This began as a quick note and bit by bit turned into something longer. I tested the difficult version first. It did not last. If you only take one thing from this, make it the part about second-hand books.
Half of the work is deciding what to leave out. The result is not perfect, but it is truthful. I would rather do one thing deliberately than five things in a hurry.
You can get remarkably far with a bookmark and some persistence. Looking back, the unfinished approach was the right call. Every reading list says as much about the reader as the books.
The middle part
The best passages are the ones I copied out by hand. Margins are where reading turns into thinking. Most problems with reading lists turn out to be problems with time. A good library card is the cheapest luxury there is.
Some of this will be obvious; some of it took me years. If you only take one thing from this, make it the part about reading lists. I keep a short list of things to try next; reading aloud is near the top. Small, repeatable steps beat big plans nearly every time.
- Compare against last autumn
- Start with translations and nothing else
- Stop before you are tired
- Budget twice the time you expect