reading

Melanie Walsh on what the internet has made of Infinite Jest in its first thirty years: the Infinite Summer read-along, BookTok, the litbro caricature and its feminist critics, and a 4chan literature board that voted it the best book of all time in 2014 (and… again in 2015). She reads the fight over who the book belongs to as a proxy for anxieties about attention, masculinity and reading. Walsh is frank about Wallace’s abuse of Mary Karr, and likes the novel anyway. (My fourth Infinite Jest link this year. I’ve read the book twice, and I’m tempted to go again.)

Readwise (of Highlights and Reader fame) released a new app today, Readwise Books. If you use Reader to read and highlight articles and PDFs, this is the equivalent for ebooks. You can upload files you already own and buy them through an in-app store.

I’ve been beta testing it over the past few months and I really like it. There are some very light social features: the team view it as a cross between the Kindle and Goodreads apps.

Access is currently invite-only; here’s my link if you want to skip the queue.

On the importance of deep reading and community engagement to truly understand and “get the most out of” (whatever that might mean to you) books.

Tell it how long your commute is and it builds a Wikipedia rabbit hole sized to fit. One continuous scroll instead of twenty tabs you’ll abandon at your stop. There’s a “Surprise Me” mode and fifteen languages, and it cites its CC BY-SA source like a good citizen. Whether the chain actually reads as one story or just vaguely adjacent topics is the part I haven’t tested, but time-boxing the spiral instead of fighting it is a neat inversion.