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Looking through algorithmic social media feeds today, a user is met with a whiplash-inducing barrage of ads, influencer garbage, and other clickbait content. It can be stressful and overwhelming. Perusing search results, too, it can be hard to tell what’s trustworthy or reputable—to comprehend how you even came to be looking at a certain photo, video, or text. On news sites it can be hard to decipher sponsored content from an editorial. The internet has long stopped feeling like a town square—it feels like a shopping mall. And streaming services are part of that shopping mall, even if their sleek interfaces don’t currently frame it that way. Liz Pelly ‘Mood Machine’

With Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist, Liz Pelly unpacks Spotify’s primary goal, that being to hook users and reduce amount paid in association stream share. Instead of challenging capitalism on the back of the pirate culture, she explains how the platform is really an ultra-capitalist advertising company. Built on the back of learnings from torrent sites, the focus is on the illusion of frictionless. However, like the illusion of processed food, such magic ignores everything involved. Everything played by the user acts as a test, with the goal of the platform becoming the passive soundtrack to our lives, where the only competition is silence itself. This constant collection of data leads to the development of a ‘taste profile’, built around the idea of what you listen to and when. This simulacrum of ourselves risks taking a three-dimensional picture and flattening it into two dimensions. As a former machine learning engineer suggests:

“What do you want when you listen to music?” he continued. “I don’t think there’s a single answer. Some of the records that I would consider really life-changing, really profound, are records that in terms of listening time, they wouldn’t even show up in my top 100. Partially because they’re really challenging records. They’re records that opened me up to certain things. But they require a lot of investment. I’m not going to sit down and eat dinner to it. I need to be in a space where I can really devote myself. There is a lot of music that listeners find important but it’s not what you want to listen to all day.”

Ultimately, he determined that there was really only so much that could be gleaned from a bunch of information about someone’s listening history—from reducing a person’s music taste to a pool of data. “It’s like taking a three-dimensional picture and flattening it to two dimensions,” he told me. “It still has some relation to the actual object you’re trying to study, but it leaves out a fair amount. To say your tastes are really represented by a list of the things that you’ve listened to—almost anyone would say that’s not exclusively true. They’re correlated, certainly. But it’s decontextualized. Looking at a stream of all the tracks I’ve played, it tells you something.” But there is, of course, much that the data does not say.

Source: Mood Machine by Liz Pelly

For example, the focus on mood music and vibes that is a part of the two-dimensional vision is never really music that anyone knows and it does not create fans. While monetisation built around repeats moves artists away from more challenging ideas. It also leads to the development of cheaper standardised ‘perfect fit content’ where artists are legitimately paid to generate particular content – a concept similar to say a wedding artist – which Spotify then owns the masters for. One of the issues is that this all becomes centred around data about Spotify, rather than our music. Going beyond the town square, Pelly suggests that Spotify is best considered as another part of the social media shopping mall where you never quite know what is you and what is the algorithm.

In addition to corrupting the culture around music listening, Spotify pays labels and distros on percentage, rather than paying artists per play. This is further confounded by ‘Discovery Mode’ where artists can accept lower royalities in exchange for algorithmic promotion. This leads to the situation where independent artists are confronted with the question: “Is $0.0035 really better than nothing?” In case that was not bad enough, 86% of tracks with less than 1000 plays in the year are actually demonetised , while at the same time artists are being forced to do more and more.

“If retailers are going to take your vinyl album, it’s like, Well, what are you doing to tell people it’s on sale here? Are you doing street posters? It’s the same thing on digital services. It’s not just Ah yes, you’ve got a great record and we are going to support you. What’s the campaign? What’s the story? What can we expect? Have you got any festivals or TV appearances? All of these things feed into whether people support the music or not. I’d love to think it’s all about the music but it’s really not. Clearly having great music helps. But there’s actually a lot of great music out there.”

Source: Mood Machine by Liz Pelly

All in all, Spotify is akin to playing the slots where the house always wins.

For Pelly, the future involves rethinking profit motives and power structures. The fear is that with all the current constraints, we are losing music that will never be made.

if we keep giving too much power to corporations to shape our lives, and we don’t protect working musicians’ abilities to survive. We are foreclosing that possibility for music to evoke those ephemeral unknowns. We are losing a lot of music that will never be made. We are letting new expressions, emotional articulations, and points of connection slip away.

Source: Mood Machine by Liz Pelly

In the end, the challenge is bigger than music, it is about building the world that we want.

Mood Machine is a strange book. On the one hand, many of the ideas neither felt new or read is somehow obvious. For example, here are some links from my bookmarks collected over the years:

  • Reflecting upon Spotify’s Wrapped, the yearly review, Kelly Pau reminds us of the place of algorithms and artificial intelligence embedded within these choices and recommendations, which often come with their own sets of biases and assumptions around gender and mood.
  • Wondering about how much Spotify understands us, Meghan O’Gieblyn explains that there are limits to how much an application can know, such as your thoughts and beliefs, personal history, and the unspoken nuances of the relationships that have made you who you are.
  • Discussing the collapse of genre and music loyalities, Jack Hamilton argues that Spotify’s main focus is time on app and the data it can collect from this.
  • The Patent Drop newsletter explores a patent for mood-recommendations based on wearable data and what this actually means. For example, do you suggest songs that allow a user to revel in that mood, or do you suggest songs that try to shift a user’s mood.
  • Unpacking the Discover Weekly feature, Sophia Ciocca discusses the three main types of recommendation models that Spotify employs: Collaborative Filtering models, Natural Language Processing (NLP) models, and Audio models.
  • Widening the sources of data used to help profile users, Sarah Zhang discusses Spotify’s move to team up with AncestryDNA to provide richer results and the problems with this.
  • Discussing the role of technology in our future as a part of her Boyer Lectures, Genevieve Bell argues that all companies now are first and foremost data companies, whether it be a music application, a supermarket or an airline.

Yet, I had never really joined all the pieces as Pelly does in such a concise manner in Mood Machine.

I was interested in Pelly’s exploration of the problems with how Spotify captures our data to build a profile and how this does not really capture all the ways we listen and consume. It is interesting to consider the way in which Spotify helps mold a ‘templated self’ or what David Marshall describes as a ‘dual strategic persona’. As Michel Faber captures in his book Listen, music and the act of listening is so much more than can be condensed down into a few data points.

Personally, I am always intrigued by both the suggestions for different playlists or end of year. I always wondered how this information was garnered, especially when it compiled such weird mixes as this combination of Fleetwood Mac, Nine Inch Nails, Supertramp, Bruce Springsteen, Tool and Neil Young:

A screenshot of a playlist involving a diverse range of artists.

I knew that Spotify collected information around key and scale, but I was unaware of the other elements that fed the ‘taste profile’. (Ironically, I actually listened to the above playlist wondering if in fact it worked together. Sad to say, it did not. I wonder what Spotify took from that?)

Often I will read the name of an artist somewhere, not a mood or anything, and go and listen to a track or an album to find out more. This is not a ‘like’ or anything else, it is simply serendipitously perusing the shelves. The same can be said when I dive into some human playlists, from artists such as Fourtet, Caribou, Jamie XX, Aphex Twin, Worker & Parasite and Twinkle Digitz, or based on books and podcasts, such as Half Deaf, Completely Mad, Rip It Up and Start Again and Only the Shit You Love podcast. In addition to this, there are times when I play music for my children. Yet Spotify takes all this and somehow flattens it into the same sausage.

In the end, I feel that Mood Machine provides an account of the enshittification of Spotify. With this, I appreciate the push for different models, but fear that I am trapped in convenience, especially when I am within a family account where it is bigger than me. Here I am reminded of Cory Doctorow’s point about collective action:

Any time you encounter a shitty, outrageous racket that’s stable over long timescales, chances are you’re looking at a collective action problem. Certainly, that’s the underlying pathology that preserves the scholarly publishing scam, which is one of the most grotesque, wasteful, disgusting frauds in our modern world (and that’s saying something, because the field is crowded with many contenders).

Source: Pluralistic: MIT libraries are thriving without Elsevier (16 Aug 2024) by Cory Doctorow

Personally, I have turned to vinyl and Bandcamp for supporting artists and trying to step beyond my ‘taste profile’. However, I always find limits to this. However, maybe I need to accept that frictionless experience comes at a cost:

Resisting the algorithm is hard and often requires sifting through more noise yourself to find the signal, but it is doable with intention. It takes both knowing what you are looking for and being open to finding something totally not what you were expecting.

Source: Accepting friction: listening without a streaming subscription (Part 1) – Tracy Durnell’s Mind Garden by Tracy Durnell

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A lot of people say or think that tearing up the pope’s photo derailed my career. That’s not how I feel about it. I feel that having a number-one record derailed my career and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track. I had to make my living performing live again. And that’s what I was born for. I wasn’t born to be a pop star. You have to be a good girl for that. Not be too troubled. Sinéad O'Connor ‘Rememberings’

I decided to read Sinéad O’Connor’s memoir Rememberings after being reminded of her music via a playlist shared with me. I remember reading reporting about the book and extracts when it was released, and was interested in reading it, but had lingered on my list of books to read.

The book feels like it is made up of two halves. The first part covers O’Connor’s childhood and early career, up until the fallout following her appearance on “Saturday Night Live” where she tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II. This includes part of the book explores her fractured and abusive relationship with her mother, being sent to Grianán Training Centre in response to her shoplifting, her early music career, recording her debut album while pregnant, and the rapid rise associated with the success of Nothing Compares 2 U.

The second part covers the rest of O’Connor’s career. This includes a reflection on her various albums, her challenges with mental health, her experiences with drugs, her exploration of different religions, discussion of encounters with famous people, such as Mohammad Ali, and having four children with four fathers. The second part is a bit patchy, as she had a breakdown and struggled to remember anything much afterwards.

The reason I haven’t written much about what happened between 1992 and 2015 is that in August 2015, after I’d written the first part of this book, I had an open-surgery radical hysterectomy in Ireland followed by a total breakdown.
I had gotten as far as the Saturday Night Live story, but I did not write anything else for the four years it took me to recover from the breakdown, and by the time I’d recovered, I was unable to remember anything much that took place before it.

Source: Rememberings by Sinéad O’Connor

Whether it be choosing to shave her head after being told to be more feminine, being encouraged to terminate her first child by record executives, tearing up a picture of Pope John Paul II or escaping a pillow fight with Prince, it feels that the book was largely a cathartic effort to reclaim the narrative of O’Connor’s life. This was all brought to a head with her postscript written to her father in which she links her mental illness to being hit in the head by a train door at the age of a 11.

All in all, Rememberings is equal part sad and funny, maybe because through it all she was able to survive. Its fractured and rambling nature reminded me a little of Tony Cohen’s somewhat incomplete memoir. Listening to O’Connor’s reading (via Borrowbox) also helped make the book real, especially when she would often laugh at the humour and absurdity associated with various situations. Although not necessarily seeking sympathy, Remembering provides a peek behind the curtain.

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Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive. Robert Pirsig ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’

At its heart, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a simple tale that praises basic values and decries ugly technology. Pirsig tells his story while riding the secondary roads across the Dakotas to the mountains, touching Yellowstone National Park before a pause in Bozeman, Montana. From there, he crosses into Idaho and over to Oregon before dipping down into California and reaching the Pacific coast and San Francisco. Pretty good trip, really.

Source: Zen and Art by Mark Richardson

I always find it strange how the same book can take on different lives based on the actual experience of reading. I was given Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Stacey and Dan for my birthday. Dan’s dad taught high school philosophy and Dan said it was a good introductory text. I must admit, I’m not sure I took it all in at the time (I feel I took more in this time.) Although I remember the discussion of gumption, “the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going,” and the different appreciation of the motorcycle. I feel that a lot of the philosophical side may have gone over my head as I did not necessarily have the patience or prior knowledge to connect it to.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a novel intertwined with different threads. It is part memoir, tracing Pirsig’s own life and experiences, part travelogue recounting a journey across America from east to west, part philosophical treatise, exploring the question of quality, and part reflection on life with mental illness. On the Overdue podcast, Andrew Cunningham and Craig Getting suggest that it is similar in style to Moby Dick where the story is interspersed with other narratives about the philosophy of quality. While Pirsig once explained the various characters a ‘Greek chorus’:

Pirsig: I explained to them that the story isn’t really about them, that they are like a Greek chorus there to “Oh” and “Ah” and give a semblance of reality to a tale that seems always to ride at the very edge of incredibility and needs all the help it can get.

Source: Zen and Now by Mark Richardson

However, the relationship with Chris does balance things and provides more than a chorus.

Personally, there was something compelling in re-reading the novel having lived more of a life. I feel like I have gone through my own Phadreas-like experience. (Although it may also be something of a mis-reading of quality.) Not a psychotic breakdown, but a grapple with ideals. I tried to get students to self-grade themselves. (See for example reflections on Genius Hour, Robotics and Digital Publishing.) I tried to help them manage their own inquiries and ‘turn into free men.’

The purpose of abolishing grades and degrees is not to punish mules or to get rid of them but to provide an environment in which that mule can turn into a free man.

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

It too felt like a battle between doing something because it has always been done that way as opposed to developing a deeper appreciation of the practice itself. My students were confused as this somewhat contradicted what was happening within their other classes, it did not necessarily make sense. (I say this, but interestingly in cleaning up some old school things that I kept for far too long I actually found a card from a student thanking me for the opportunity to develop an excursion, which I guess was a win.) I do not believe my intent was not directly inspired by Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but if we are to believe Pierre Bayard, that we are the sum of our accumulated books, then it must have inspired me in some way on the journey.

One of the things that I was surprised by was how useful the book was for my work with technology as it was personally. In particular, I was left thinking about Pirsig’s list of gumption traps. Whether it be external setbacks:

  • Inadequate tools or materials: When the tools or materials you have are not suitable for the task.
  • Environmental factors: Such as poor lighting or uncomfortable working conditions.
    Or internal hang-ups:
  • Value Traps: These block affective understanding. For example, when you undervalue the importance of a task.
  • Truth Traps: These block cognitive understanding. For instance, when you have incorrect assumptions or misunderstandings about the task.
  • Muscle Traps: These block psychomotor behavior. An example is physical fatigue or lack of coordination

It was also interesting to consider the various lessons as I have been watching the house being built across the road by the owner builder. Each day he returns, either overseeing the various trades or working away on things. It often seems like he is not doing much, but as Pirsig suggests, he is probably looking at the underlying form.

An untrained observer will see only physical labor and often get the idea that physical labor is mainly what the mechanic does. Actually the physical labor is the smallest and easiest part of what the mechanic does. By far the greatest part of his work is careful observation and precise thinking. That is why mechanics sometimes seem so taciturn and withdrawn when performing tests. They don’t like it when you talk to them because they are concentrating on mental images, hierarchies, and not really looking at you or the physical motorcycle at all. They are using the experiment as part of a program to expand their hierarchy of knowledge of the faulty motorcycle and compare it to the correct hierarchy in their mind. They are looking at underlying form.

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

All in all, there was something about Pirsig that reminded me of something I read once in a review of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time:

When did he first find evidence of the alien landscape that’s inside his narrator Christopher’s head? “Oh, I think that if you’re a writer you have that in your own head from quite an early age. I think it’s true there are two types of kids as school. One type probably breezes through school like gazelles across the veldt. For the more troubled types on the edge of the playground, how you get from one day to the next is a mystery. All writers come from the latter, because only if you’re in that group does the working of the human mind become an object of interest.”

Source: Mark Haddon: This year’s big read by John Walsh (Independent)

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Is autodidacticism about how you get to know something? Or is it about what you know? It is who you know? Is it how you know? (Or rather how you demonstrate knowing?) Is autodidacticism an aptitude or an attitude? A behavior? A predilection? A performance? Is autodidacticism a signal of learnedness? Audrey Watters ‘How Do Schools Affect Autodidacticism?’

I was reading Laura Hilliger’s recent missive in which she shared her experience of overhearing the hairdressers at the hair salon talking about going to a conference. For Laura, this experience was a reminder of all the things she has no idea about and how lifelong learning is about more than just picking up new skills:

Lifelong learning isn’t just about skill development, you know? It’s also about becoming aware to the world around you and pondering the implications of what you haven’t thought about before. There are so many thoughts you haven’t thought.

Source: FBT on Complacency and Conferences

This got me thinking about what it is I talk about when I talk about lifelong learning. Here then are some thoughts on the matter.

Reflecting on a life lived, Wouter Groeneveld recently wondered about the idea of developing a personal philosophy to live by?

Now you know why my hopes of reaching eighty diminish by the day. But it’s not too late to create my own philosophy. I’ve never felt a more urgent need to do something than this. I have been taking notes on how to live and how great philosophers before our time approach life in general, but in 2025, it is time to grab those notes and rework them into something of my own. Then I too can rest assured that the remainder of my life, all I have to do is to live up to my own set of rules.

Source: You Should Compile Your Own Philosophy by Wouter Groeneveld

I wonder about this, is such a pursuit an example of lifelong learning or life learning? I wonder if a personal philosophy is itself a lifelong pursuit, something continually devised. Ideas “held tightly, let go lightly?”

In Pierre Bayard’s exploration of reading and identity, he argues that we are the sum of the accumulated books we have read.

For we are more than simple shelters for our inner libraries; we are the sum of these accumulated books. Little by little, these books have made us who we are, and they cannot be separated from us without causing us suffering.

Source: How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard

However, I don’t believe this is some Matrix-style “I know kung fu”, where we know everything about books, or anything for that matters. We do not take in books as an objective entity, some things stand out, other parts are missed, others are forgotten over time.

Gert Biesta talks about the shift when it comes to lifelong learning to be about being ‘productive and employable’:

In about three decades, then, the discourse of lifelong learning seems to have shifted from ‘learning to be’ to ‘learning to be productive and employable’. Or, as Peter Jarvis has put it:

“The lifelong learning society has become part of the current economic and political discourse of global capitalism, which positions people as human resources to be developed through lifelong learning, or discarded and retrained if their job is redundant. (Jarvis, 2000, quoted in Grace, 2004, p. 398).”

The question this raises is how we should understand these developments and, more importantly, how we should evaluate them.

Source: Learning Democracy in School and Society: Education, Lifelong Learning, and the Politics of Citizenship by Gert J.J. Biesta

This focus on the economic comes at the expensive of personal fulfillment and democratic understanding.

Aspin and Chapman make a distinction between three of such purposes which, in their words, are: (1) lifelong learning for economic progress and development; (2) lifelong learning for personal development and fulfilment; and (3) lifelong learning for social inclusiveness and democratic understanding and activity (see Aspin and Chapman, 2001, pp. 39­40).

Source: Learning Democracy in School and Society: Education, Lifelong Learning, and the Politics of Citizenship by Gert J.J. Biesta

Another consequence to the economic is the shift of responsibility to the individual.

Yet the point is not only that learning has become increasingly an individual activity. Under the influence of the learning economy learning has also increasingly become an individual issue and an individual responsibility (see, for example, Grace, 2004; Fejes, 2004). It is not only that under the imperatives of the learning economy only the economic function of lifelong learning seems to count as ‘good’ or desirable learning. There is also a clear tendency to shift the responsibility for learning to the individual ­or, at a larger scale, to shift this responsibility away from the state towards the private sector. In the learning economy learning ceases to be a collective good and increasingly becomes an individual good. In this scenario the state is less and less a provider and promoter of lifelong learning and increasingly becomes the regulator and auditor of the ‘learning market’ (see Biesta, 2004[a]).

Source: Learning Democracy in School and Society: Education, Lifelong Learning, and the Politics of Citizenship by Gert J.J. Biesta

This is fascinating to think about as the onus in the organisation I work in is for people to find their own professional development. Although there is money allocated, limited support or guidance is provided. What makes this even worse is that when you put in a request for professional development, you need to justify.

Reflecting upon lifelong learning and autodidacticism, Audrey Watters provides a series of questions to dig deeper:

what are the effects of an institution on an -ism?

Is autodidacticism about how you get to know something? Or is it about what you know? It is who you know? Is it how you know? (Or rather how you demonstrate knowing?)

Is autodidacticism an aptitude or an attitude? A behavior? A predilection? A performance?

Is autodidacticism a signal of learnedness?

Source: How Do Schools Affect Autodidacticism? by Audrey Watters

Thinking about this, maybe lifelong learning is actually people? This has me thinking about a post I wrote a few years ago wondering whether people not presentations make conferences and whether the power of a good PLN is the ability to bring in different ideas. I feel this is something I have lost with the changes in social media or maybe it reflects the changes in my work?

In the end, I wonder if the best lifelong learning is actually stopping and considering what it is we consider by lifelong learning? Learning about learning? Collecting and connecting the dots. To return to Laura’s point at the start, here is to more thoughts I haven’t thought.

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Our relation to books is a shadowy space haunted by the ghosts of memory, and the real value of books lies in their ability to conjure these specters. Pierre Bayard ‘How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read’

With How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, Pierre Bayard explores the complexity of texts and why reading is not always what we may think it is. Across twelve short essays, Bayard explores ideas such as the cultural collective library of books we know about, the place of books as a means of discourse with others, the way we share an invented screen book to protect from the real book, books representing a sum of our inner library, and the importance to demonstrate a truthfulness to ourselves, rather than being trapped by the truth. In the end, Bayard calls for a freedom for readers. Extending beyond Roland Barthes’ ‘death of the author’, he makes the case that we are always already talking about books we have not read because we cannot ever actually read them.

Paralyzed by the respect due to texts and the prohibition against modifying them, forced to learn them by heart or to memorize what they “contain,” too many students lose their capacity for escape and forbid themselves to call on their imagination in circumstances where that faculty would be extraordinarily useful.

To show them, instead, that a book is reinvented with every reading would give them the means to emerge unscathed, and even with some benefit, from a multitude of difficult situations.

Source: How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard

I wish I had read this book when I was at university (although I couldn’t have as it wasn’t written) as it captures many of the ideas that I grappled with as a part of my Arts degree. With regards to the story of Valery simply skimming a book to write an article on it, I was reminded of one of my tutors who in a casual conversation outside of class spoke about how he writes professional reviews for academic books without actually reading them in order to get a copy of the books in question, which touched on his PhD topic. Or touching on Umberto Eco’s talking around a book, I remember my lecturer suggesting that nobody really needs to read Jacques Lacan anymore. I then wrote an essay about why it is important to read Jacques Lacan. Of course, I missed the point, there is always a limit to what can be read.

Where it would have been most helpful was with my Honours thesis. I remember starting out thinking that I was going to write about the historical connections between psychoanalysis and modernist literature. However, I fell into something of a deconstructionist quagmire. With each piece of reading, my ideas would morph and change. In particular, I realised that what we talk about when we talk about psychoanalysis is not always clear or concrete. I ended up arguing that psychoanalysis is just as interpretive as a piece of literature, dividing my discussion between the idea of following a thread and being a part of an interpretive community.

All in all, this was a thought-provoking read – ironically – that had me thinking long afterwards. It was also interesting to think about this alongside Daniel Pennac’s The Rights of the Reader, in which Pennac tries to reinstate the importance of joy when reading.

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What James Taylor said of Joni is true of Taylor: “She’s building the canvas as well as she is putting the paint on it.” Now we live in a world of Taylor Swifts. Rob Sheffield ‘Heartbreak is the National Anthem’

With my daughters, I have read bits and pieces of various books on Taylor Swift bought through school bookclub. They often capture the myth or artist as commodity, always with an eye to being objective, starting from the beginning and working their way through, trying not to get bogged down by distraction. Rob Sheffield’s Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music is different to this, his book embraces the distractions.

Heartbreak is the National Anthem is complicated. On the one hand Sheffield is a writer for Rolling Stone, with his focus on various questions, connections and access, but he is also a a 6’5 middle aged man who loves Taylor Swift and has from the beginning. For example, he maintains a running list of all her songs ranked, with Bad Blood always being last. Sheffield’s text zooms in and out as required, capturing various aspects, myths, the brand, the cultural phenomenon. He is both inside and outside of the conversation. On the one hand critiquing the machine as a reviewer for The Rolling Stone:

I went to Taylor’s Tribeca apartment in the fall of 2017 to listen to her new album Reputation, for security reasons. (It was the only place where she could guarantee there weren’t any hidden microphones.) Two vinyl albums were propped up on the piano where she wrote most of the album: David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs and Kris Kristofferson’s Border Lord. She had a book (and only one) sitting on her dining room table: the collected lyrics of Bob Dylan.

Source: Heartbreak is the National Anthem by Rob Sheffield

While next minute at the very heart of it:

On the Reputation tour in New Jersey, in July 2018, she asked me before the show: “Enchanted” or “The Lucky One”? She knew it was an easy choice for me. But it added an element of stomach-churning anxiety to the show, as if people should be warned that something so cataclysmic was about to happen in the wild-card slot. There had been rain showers off and on that afternoon, but she triggered a full-on thunderstorm with this song. The clouds burst the exact moment she hit the “Please don’t be in love with someone else” coda—and nobody will ever convince me she didn’t make that happen.

Source: Heartbreak is the National Anthem by Rob Sheffield

He will zoom out to capture particular situations, such as the saga involving Kanye West or the decision to re-record her back catalogue. While he also zoom in to dig into particular tracks.

What I enjoyed about the book was Sheffield’s placement of Swift within the wider pop pantheon. He often compares her current status with artists of the past to place it in context:

Eighteen years in, even the greats tend to hit a dry spell. Let’s put it this way: When David Bowie was at this point in his career, he was hitting the skids with his 1980s shoulder-pads era with Never Let Me Down. Prince was turning into the Artist Formerly Known As, with Emancipation. Springsteen was in his Lucky Town era. Dylan bottomed out in his preachy born-again phase. Stevie Wonder got lost in The Secret Life of Plants.

Source: Heartbreak is the National Anthem by Rob Sheffield

He also situates her work in a wider literary tradition. For example, he compares her re-recording of songs with William Wordsworth’s lifelong revision of The Prelude or makes the connection with John Keats’ obsession with a particular kind of desire.

“Cruel Summer” is her ultimate window song, and not just the way she sings “Killing me slow, out the window.” There’s so much mystery in the erotics of windows in Taylor’s song—she’s got a Keatsian obsession with the kind of desire that doesn’t dare use the door. Heading out the window, she feels a rush that she doesn’t feel when she gets wherever she’s slithering off to. These lovers keep it on the hush, but that’s the attraction, the sub-rosa thrill. She’s seduced by the window.

Source: Heartbreak is the National Anthem by Rob Sheffield

It was interesting to think about this alongside Peter Kirkpatrick discussion of song lyrics as a form poetry on Late Night Live podcast. “Words used in an astonishing way.” Although, there are also some who, such as Simon Armitage, who argue that although they are related, lyrics and poetry are distinctly different:

In most cases, the orchestration has been built into the language already … when a composer takes those words, they want to fit them around another tune … very often what we admire in the poem gets lost in the transference.
…
Lyrics are made to come with this other stuff called music. When sung they can be transcendent, but when read on the page they can be inane.

Source: “Like portals to other worlds”: UK poet laureate Simon Armitage on the power of poems – ABC listen

Sheffield makes links with other artists throughout. including a bridge to the book of thirteen songs that Swift might have on a playlist.

One of the interesting things about Sheffield’s book is that he questions what writing can be. I initially wondered if the book was patched together due to lack of time, making the most of the current moment. However, the more I thought about it, the more I wondered whether I even wanted a dry and critical biography. In some ways, this book is as much about how to best capture the complexity that is ‘Taylor Swift’ as it is about Taylor Swift herself. Although the book begins with a traditional timeline, from there it embraces the subjectivity associated with culture and music. Some examples include listening to “Coney Island” on Coney Island.

I’ve spent an hour on the Q train each way just to hear “Coney Island” in Coney Island with the sun going down.

Source: Heartbreak is the National Anthem by Rob Sheffield

Having an attachment with the Archer when his mother passed away:

“The Archer,” that was the one. It spoke right to me, as I tried to blend into the background, pretending to be invisible. I flinched every time the line “they see right through me” led into “I see right through me!” Like most of the album, it’s a song about having secrets that you kid yourself you’re doing a great job of hiding, when they’re written all over your face. The woman in “The Archer,” she believes she’s making a bold confession, unaware that her intimacies are already obvious.

Source: Heartbreak is the National Anthem by Rob Sheffield

(In addition to the personal patchwork, another quirk to Sheffield’s writing is his perchance for littering the text with lyrics throughout.)

I came to this book after seeing Sheffield mentioned in Dylan Jones’ Sweet Dreams. I did not have much expectation other than a book about Taylor Swift. What I ended up enjoying was the way Sheffield’s bias as a fan invited me as a listener and reader into the text to reflect upon my own experiences as no book could properly do justice to all the nuisances.

She will be so many different Taylors, way too many, and they’ll all want the microphone all the damn time.
She will make brilliant moves—or catastrophic gaffes, because that’s what rock stars do, giving us facepalm concussions. She’ll break up with country music, then get back together. She will break up with being single, then get back together. She will get judged, denounced, laughed at, condemned. (Ignored? That one’s not really in the cards.) She will have great ideas and terrible ideas. She will turn some of these terrible ideas into great songs, or vice versa. She will find the drama in any situation, no matter how trivial or ordinary it might seem. She will change how pop music is made, heard, experienced. She will bait. She will switch. She will be a terrible role model for anyone trying to lead a calm and sensible emotional life. She will jump into every feeling with the certainty that it’s the last one she’ll ever have.
In 2024, it’s a cliché to say Taylor Swift is the music industry, but it isn’t necessarily wrong.

Source: Heartbreak is the National Anthem by Rob Sheffield

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The very thing that seems most worth resurrecting from postpunk is its commitment to change. This belief was expressed both in the conviction that music should keep moving forward and in the confidence that music can transform the world, even if only through altering one individual’s perceptions or enlarging one’s sense of possibility. Simon Reynolds ‘Rip It Up and Start Again’

I remember when I first saw chocolate being served as a part of the main dish on some gourmet cooking show. It was not what I had been brought up to expect. For me, chocolate was a sweet, a snack, not savory a part of a meal. However, what it highlighted was the way in which ingredients can be used in different circumstances for different purposes. I think something similar can be said about the post-punk movement that Simon Reynolds captures in his book Rip it Up and Start Again.

I always thought the punk ethos was about three chords and a DIY attitude, but had never really considered what was meant by ‘post-punk’. This confusion is something Jim Windolf touches on in his review of the book:

“Postpunk” proves to be a slippery label. If Reynolds wasn’t aware of this when he started his research, he learned it the hard way while talking with various postpunk musicians for this book. “A lot of them, when I mentioned postpunk, didn’t quite understand what I meant,” he said in an interview posted on his Web site. “Which is odd, because I did all this research in the music papers, and that was what people called it, even then. . . . It’s not something I’ve invented!”

Source: ‘Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984,’ by Simon Reynolds – The New York Times Book Review by Review by Jim Windolf

Reynolds sums up post-punk as a mindset of ‘constantly looking forward’ and a ‘commitment to change’.

The very thing that seems most worth resurrecting from postpunk is its commitment to change. This belief was expressed both in the conviction that music should keep moving forward and in the confidence that music can transform the world, even if only through altering one individual’s perceptions or enlarging one’s sense of possibility.

Source: Rip It Up and Start Again by Simon Reynolds

The openness of the definition allows the movement to encapsulate a range of genres from new wave, no wave, goth, new synthpop and industrial. So many different flavours, but always coming back to the notion of change.

Unlike Dylan Jones’ book Sweet Dreams – The Story of the New Romantics, which focuses on years, tying together various voices, Reynolds’ book provides each chapter with a particular focus. Sometimes this is a particular band, but more often than not it is about a scene or genre in a particular place and time. Although organised chronologically, beginning with Public Image Limited and ending with Frankie Goes to Hollywood, each chapter spans a few years and sometimes overlap with other chapters and scenes.

What was interesting were the various through-lines that linked all the different scenes, the background characters that pop-up again and again, whether it be Malcolm McLaren, Brian Eno, Trevor Horn, Martin Hannett and Martin Rushent. For example, after seemingly laying the groundwork with David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy, Brian Eno then worked with Talking Heads, Devo and U2, and produced the No New York no wave compilation.

Rip It Up and Start Again was good to read after listening to Damian Cowell’s Only The Shit You Love: The Podcast, in which he provided his own reflections of growing up through the punk and post-punk movements. It also provided a wider perspective on the time and filled some of the gaps in Jones’ Sweet Dreams. However, as thorough and informative as Reynolds’ book is, I was still left unsure about what actually constituted ‘post-punk’? For example, Reynolds touches on the Eurythmics, but not Blondie. This is something Windolf touches on:

That’s also how it went for the Clash, which made a rude noise in 1977 and sold big in 1982 with a brand of expensively produced pop that borrowed from funk and reggae. But the Clash doesn’t make Reynolds’s postpunk list. Neither do similar acts of the era, like the Jam, the Police, X, Elvis Costello and Blondie, all of whom began by making raw music only to end up turning out more sophisticated fare tinged with soul, funk, reggae, disco, hip-hop or Latin touches.

Source: ‘Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984,’ by Simon Reynolds – The New York Times Book Review by Review by Jim Windolf

I think one of the challenges of this sort of book is that some bands, such as U2 and Talking Heads, started out with ‘post-punk’ ethos, before transitioning to something more post-post-punk:

Many groups born in the postpunk period went on to enjoy huge mainstream fame, including New Order, Depeche Mode, the Human League, U2, Talking Heads, Scritti Politti, and Simple Minds. Others who were minor or background figures at the time went on to achieve later success in a different guise, such as Bjork, the KLF, Beastie Boys, Jane’s Addiction, and Sonic Youth. But the history of postpunk is definitely not written by the victors. There are dozens of bands who made landmark albums but never achieved more than an abiding cult status, earning the dubious consolation prize of being an influence and reference point for ’90s alt-rock megabands (Gang of Four begot Red Hot Chili Peppers, Throbbing Gristle sired Nine Inch Nails, Talking Heads even supplied Radiohead with their name). Hundreds more made just one or two amazing singles, then disappeared with barely a trace.

Source: Rip It Up and Start Again by Simon Reynolds

In addition to a question of starting and stopping, I assume that there are always limits to what can be included. For example, Clinton Walker’s wrote Stranded – The Secret History Of Australian Independent Music to give voice to the Australian underground movement:

When English writer Simon Reynolds published his history of post-punk, Rip It Up and Start Again, in 2005, I was disappointed to find it was biased towards the UK and US in exactly the way that had always infuriated me, and against which I had attempted to deploy my writing as a corrective. But at least he had the diplomacy to apologise for ‘having regretfully decided not to grapple with European post-punk or Australia’s fascinating deep underground scene’.

Source: Stranded: Australian Independent Music, 1976–1992 by Clinton Walker

All in all, I feel that the more I read and listen, the more there is to know.

On a side note, I found a playlist of all the songs mentioned on Spotify.

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Expecting your career, social life, or significant relationship to develop in new, unexpected ways when you do the same things over and over again is, after all, how Einstein defined insanity. Increase your serendipity surface! Doug Belshaw ‘Increasing your serendipity surface’

Over the last few weeks, there have been a number of posts reflecting on the podcasts people are listening to. Read Bryan Alexander, Alan Levine, Tim Klapdor, Laura Hilliger, Doug Belshaw and John Johnston for example. As is my habit, I am late to the party. However, better late then never.

Inspired by Alan Levine, I pulled by OPML file from AntennaPod and published a full list of the podcasts I follow here . It was interesting making sense of the various podcasts. According to AntennaPod, my top five based on minutes are:

However, I don’t think that always tells the full story. There are some regular daily / weekly podcasts that I dip in and out of and usually having running in the background, while others are only release sporadically, therefore they do not have the same amount of minutes.

To be honest, I have a lot of podcasts in my feed, more than I could ever listen to even at x1.5, unless I stopped listening to books. A part of my intent is to extend my serendipity surface and create a repository of podcasts to search. (Of course, I could search Spotify, but I would just prefer not to.)

Rather than a list dictated by how I listen, such as while running (I actually listen to music) or doing the dishes, I have broken my list into key areas, with a highlight from each.

Ideas

When it comes to new ideas, I have interests in history (Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, The Rest Is History, Dan Snow’s History Hit, Real Dictators), literature (In Our Time, Overdue), technology (Download This Show, Darknet Diaries, Future Tense) and food and health (Eat This Podcast, What’s That Rash?). However, the one podcast that I come back to regularly for new ideas is Late Night Live. I was somewhat late on this one. In the past, I used to rely on other ABC podcasts Nightlife and Conversations, but this year have been listening to a lot of Late Night Live. I really enjoy the breadth of topics explored and David Marr’s youthful enthusiasm as an host, something that he has carried on from Phillip Adams.

Dialogue and Debate

There are a few current affairs podcasts in my feed, such as The Party Room, The Ezra Klein Show and Today in Focus, however the one that I hold out for each week is The Minefield. In it, Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens work with a guest to “negotiate the ethical dilemmas, contradictory claims and unacknowledged complicities of modern life.” I am going to assume all involved come each week with their own ideas, but they are also always willing to jettison them if and when required. This podcast is useful reminder that there is always more to life or than can be presented in a social media feed. Not only do I often find myself needing to go back and listen to episodes twice, but I also find myself stopping afterwards, seeing the world differently.

Music

I love music, not only the actual product, but how it was achieved. I subsequently have a number of music podcasts in my feed, such as Song Exploder, Take 5, hanging out with audiophiles, Tape Notes and Switched on Pop. More and more, I find myself just listening to the episodes that stand out. However, the one podcast that I usually turn up for no matter the episode is Kirk Hamilton’s Strong Songs. This podcast unpacks songs and rebuild them. Hamilton has a penchant for going down rabbit holes with such intrigue and excitement that you cannot help be pulled in. Music is never quite the same after listening.

Entertainment

Looking through my feed, one of the interesting things is that it is all so serious. The one podcast that bucks that trend is Tony Martin’s Sizzletown. It is a spoof of a late night talkshow, where Tony takes calls from various characters, even a cat. It is a useful reminder of the artifice within podcasting. Tony also has a deft art of adding commentary to the current moment from the fence.

Thinking about these podcasts, one of the oddities of the medium, compared to blogs or books, is how the voices stick in your head. They become something of a theatre of the mind.

As a side-note, like John Johnston, I too was sad to see HuffDuff-Video die this year. There are several YouTube channels / videos that I would listen to as a podcast. However, I am yet to find a replacement for that workflow.

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Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Francis Bacon ‘On Studies’

I will never forget studying the representations of Holocaust at university whilst also emerging myself into the world Jean Baudrillard and postmodernism. My interests in literary theory could not help but bleed, let alone clash, with historical thinking. I had a similar experience recently while reflecting upon my year reading books.

While I was wondering if reading without responding was reading at all, I stumbled up Jim Groom’s post ‘Blog OR DIE!‘. In it, Groom appeals to blogging as a way of life.

So this post is where I throw down the gaunlet and say Blog OR DIE! Not just as some blustery slogan (although that too!), but as an ongoing commitment to a way of life. A way of closing in strong on twenty years of blogging on this outpost of sense making in the wilds of the world wide web. 4life!

Source: Blog OR DIE! | bavatuesdays by Jim Groom

Although not directly related, this is what I was thinking about in regards to reading. Respond of DIE? If I have a thought in my head, in my notes or in my diary, is it really a thought if I have not really thought it through? Here I am reminded of the extract from Clive Thompson’s Smarter Than You Think published on Wired, in which he talks about the benefit of making your thinking public:

Having an audience can clarify thinking. It’s easy to win an argument inside your head. But when you face a real audience, you have to be truly convincing.

Source:  Why Even the Worst Bloggers Are Making Us Smarter by Clive Thompson

This also feels like an extension of something Hannah Arendt wrote in The Human Condition in regards to the tangibility of thinking:

If labor leaves no permanent trace, thinking leaves nothing tangible at all. By itself, thinking never materializes into any objects. Whenever the intellectual worker wishes to manifest his thoughts, he must use his hands and acquire manual skills just like any other worker. In other words, thinking and working are two different activities which never quite coincide; the thinker who wants the world to know the “content” of his thoughts must first of all stop thinking and remember his thoughts. Remembrance in this, as in all other cases, prepares the intangible and the futile for their eventual materialization; it is the beginning of the work process, and like the craftsman’s consideration of the model which will guide his work, its most immaterial stage. The work itself then always requires some material upon which it will be performed and which through fabrication, the activity of homo faber, will be transformed into a worldly object. The specific work quality of intellectual work is no less due to the “work of our hands” than any other kind of work.

Source: The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt

It has me wondering if blogging is ‘intellectual work of the hands’?

With all this said, there is actually a strange side-effect about maintaining a blog for a long period of time. Ideas once lost have a habit of rising up again and haunting, rather than helping. This is something that Kin Lane has touched on in the past.

Our history is such a powerful thing. How we should learn about it, remember it, learn from it, but also understand when to leave it behind. Where is that fine line between, “Ok I have learned so much from writing and thinking about the first 40+ years of my life”, and “thinking about all of this much more begins to give it new power in controlling me and preventing me from moving on”.

Source: Leaving the Past Behind by Kin Lane

It is also something that Doug Belshaw has spoken about. He talks about the idea of ‘creative destruction’.

As humans, I think we are by nature both creative, in that we build things, and destructive, in that we destroy them. Creative destruction is a term that usually used in economics to describe the cyclic accumulation and destruction of wealth, but I’m using the term in a different way. I think we need to destroy the things we’ve created before they destroy us.

Source: On our tendency toward (creative) destruction by Doug Belshaw

An example of my blog as a living memory for me relates to the efforts to ‘make Twitter great again‘. It brings into question Peter Skillen’s concern about living off a diet of drive-by learning.

Many educators are living on a diet of abstracts, one-line wisdoms from Twitter, and drive-by professional development.

Source: Another Brick in the Wall by Peter Skillen

When Skillen wrote this, I was adamant that there were benefits associated with short-form media. However, there are clearly side-effects. With this said, I am left thinking that the comment around our ‘diet’ goes beyond short-form media.

While thinking about reading, I was left mulling over the association between ‘processed food’ and ‘processed media’. In Johann Hari’s book on Ozempic, he outlines the ways that processed food undermines our fulfillment.

Hari explains how processed food undermines satiety in seven ways:

  1. You chew it less.
  2. The unique combination of sugar, fat, and carbs seems to activate something primal and we go crazy for it.
  3. It affects your energy levels differently.
  4. It lacks protein and fiber.
  5. Processed drinks contain chemicals that may be actively triggering us to be more hungry.
  6. Flavor is separated from the quality of the food.
  7. It seem to cause our gut to malfunction.
Source: REVIEW: Magic Pill (Johann Hari) by Aaron Davis

Hari’s discussion of chewing less, activating something primal and flavour being separate from quality has me thinking about the current state of the media, especially after watching Paul Barry’s Media Watch farewell episode, in which he demonstrates how we are all scraping the bottom of the attention barrel.

Coming back to blogging, Amy Burvall talks about the importance of collecting the dots:

“in order to connect dots, one must first have the dots”

Source: #rawthought: On Ditching the (Dangerous) Dichotomy Between Content Knowledge and Creativity by Amy Burvall

However, this does not mean we need to collect every dot. With this in mind, I stumbled upon a quote from Francis Bacon, while searching for a quote by Austin Kleon:

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

Source: Of Studies by Francis Bacon

In the end, I feel that there is a fine line when it comes to blogging. Although I think it is important to have an ‘intellectual work of the hands’, I wonder what it actually means to forget, of holding tightly and letting go loosely, when data can easily be loaded into a chatbot?

With all this said, I will leave the closing remark to Audrey Watters:

So I’m leaning into the newsletter and its paywall. Email isn’t perfect (read Sarah Jeong’s wonderful The Internet of Garbage) but the inbox feels intimate and personal without being so exposed to the extraction machine. “Open” doesn’t just feel dangerous; it feels naive.

But here I am, blogging on my own domain. Silly me.

Source: The Year in Writing by Audrey Watters

So here I am, silly me, blogging again. Saying something, although I am not really sure what.

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“in order to connect dots, one must first have the dots” Source: #rawthought: On Ditching the (Dangerous) Dichotomy Between Content Knowledge and Creativity by Amy Burvall

I remember there was a time when I would choose one word to focus on each year. Since putting my newsletter on hiatus, I have not had the same interest in such methodical approaches. However, if I had a word for this year, it may well have been books.

This year I really doubled down on reading books. It is not that I had stopped, but I felt that I was spending more time on other forms attention, such as online posts, music and podcasts. I was bugged by something that AJ Juliani posted a few years back about books being ‘the purest forms of creativity and thought’:

I love creative work, and quite frankly, probably spend too much time thinking of new projects and ideas (as well as books and blog posts!). But, I’ve found that spending time reading every day has helped ground me in high-quality content and information. There is something special about a book that a blog post or article cannot replicate. Maybe everyone does not feel this way, but books (to me) are one of the purest forms of creativity and thought.

Source: How to Read More Books (A Nerdy Solution) by A.J. Juliani

Now I am not sure about ‘purest’, but I feel that a book, even poorly written, is going to have been put through the fire of thought and criticism by nature of the medium more than say a social media hot-take.

Like Juliani, I have really doubled-down on audiobooks. I get these from a number places, whether it be purchasing from Libro.fmor Audible, as a part of the ‘Plus’ collection associated with on-off Audible subscription, as a part of my monthly audiobook minutes associated with my Spotify Premium subscription, or via subscriptions offered by the local library, such as BorrowBox and Libby. If I cannot find an audiobook, I also listen via the text-to-speech function using Moon Reader application. This is usually the same application I use to annotate digital texts too.

Here then are a list of books that I read this year:

Non-Fiction

  • All In by Joel Selwood – A sporting memoir that touches on life on and off the field when it comes to leadership.
  • Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder – a fascinating inquiry into the life and influence of Eileen O’Shaughnessy on her husband, George Orwell
  • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder – a series of instructions on how to combat the rise of tyranny, such as “Defend institutions”, “Remember professional ethics”, and “Believe in truth”.
  • Killing for Country by David Marr – a detailed saga of politics and power in the colonial world stemming from Marr’s own family history.
  • Strive by Adam Fraser – an exploration of ‘happiness’ as being a challenge just outside our reach.
  • The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife by James Hollis – A guide for reimagining midlife as an opportunity to transform our lives.
  • The Writer’s Crusade: Kurt Vonnegut and the Many Lives of Slaughterhouse-Five by Tom Roston – An examination of the connections between Kurt Vonnegut’s life, Slaughterhouse-Five, and whether he actually suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
  • Adventures in Time: The First World War by Dominic Sandbrook – A book zooming in and out of the First World War, picking out the interesting points, rather than getting too bogged down by nuisance and complexity.
  • So You Want to Live for Longer? by Norman Swan – An exploration of how to stay young and healthy for longer.
  • Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction by Manfred Steger and Ravi Roy – An exploration of what we talk about when we talk about neoliberalism.
  • Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction by Catherine Belsey – A general introduction to poststructuralism based around language, culture, desire and truth.
  • Poetry: A Very Short Introduction by Bernard O’Donoghue – An extrapolation of the many ideas associated with poetry, a book with as many questions as conclusions.
  • Range by David Epstein – A provocation about the many benefits of breadth in a complex world, rather than a straight-forword manual for success.
  • The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt – An exploration of human activity, focusing on ideas of labor, work and action.
  • Magic Pill by Johann Hari – A look at the obesity epidemic and the rise of drugs being used to fight it
  • Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Carl Jung – Jung’s psychic journey through his life and his ongoing engagement with the unconscious.
  • Lifelong Kindergarten by Mitchel Resnick – A book written for those who care about kids, learning, and creativity.
  • Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – An exploration of the ways we are unaware of the randomness, whether it be by overestimating causality or seeing the world as explainable.
  • Did I Ever Tell You This? by Sam Neill – A memoir written as a distraction while receiving treatment for cancer.
  • How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell – A critique of the way even our attention has been capitalised upon through our use of technology and a meditation for how to do something more meaningful and human.
  • Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton –  A response to ten theoretical objections to Marxism.
  • Fake by Stephanie Wood – An examination into the perils of finding love and connection via online spaces.
  • Principled by Paul Browning – An exploration of trust destroyed and regained and as it does, aims to impart practical advice that can be adopted by any leader wishing to become a more trustworthy leader.
  • The Internet is Not What You Think by Justin E.H. Smith – A dive into the basis of the internet in attention, the link to the past in figures such as Liebnez and Lovelace, the blur of where it actually starts and stops, as well as metaphor as a way of understanding.
  • The Season by Helen Garner – A document of a moment in life, time and culture, capturing all the ebbs and flows of an U16 football season.

Music Books

  • Listen by Michel Faber – An exploration into how and why we listen to music
  • Sweet Dreams by Dylan Jones – An exploration into the music that influenced the New Romantics and those caught up in the movement.
  • Shiny and New by Dylan Jones – Ten moments in music to explore the eighties.
  • Retromania by Simon Reynolds – An inquiry into the the different ways that the past plays out in music.
  • Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany by Uwe Schütte – An exploration of the origins, output and legacy of Kraftwerk.

Fiction

  • The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemmingway
  • Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  • The Stranger by Albert Camus
  • A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
  • Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
  • The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
  • Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton
  • Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy
  • Walkaway by Cory Doctorow
  • All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy 
  • As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
  • The Midnight Zoo by Sonya Hartnett
  • Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut  
  • The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan
  • Lola in the Mirror by Trent Dalton
  • For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemmingway
  • A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
  • No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
  • The Scarlet Letter by Nathanial Hawthorn
  • Slaugherhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut 
  • Middlemarch by George Eliot
  • The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin
  • The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
  • Breakfast of Champians by Kurt Vonnegut
  • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
  • Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  • The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
  • Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami 
  • Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
  • Turn of the Screw by Henry James
  • The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
  • Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami
  • A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
  • A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes
  • Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
  • Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene
  • Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
  • Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
  • The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
  • Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
  • Such is Life by Joseph Furphy
  • The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
  • Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
  • The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
  • The Great World by David Malouf
  • The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins

I do not necessarily have a rating system, however these are the books that I have managed to reflect on in more detail:

By numbers, I feel I have read (or listened to) a lot this year. However, one of the challenges I still find is carving out the time and space to write and make sense of my reading. (Like this piece, which was pulled together over several weeks.) J. Hillis Miller’s once wrote that “there is always already writing as an accompaniment to reading,” however like food past its used by date, I fear that this ‘writing’ sometimes goes off before being processed and turned into muscle, fibre and energy, and therefore gets added to compost to be broken down, or worse, sent to landfill. Although I feel like my commonplace blog is littered with guides collected from the web on how to ‘remember everything’ (such as this), I worry that there are some books that I remember very little about. Too often my initial seeds of thoughts will be added to my notes, but never quite getting beyond that.

Although books might be more pure, I worry that without stopping and reflecting that they just become another form of mid-level consumption? This is something that Alan Jacobs has discussed:

you could listen to a Sally Rooney novel on Audible while chopping the veggies. Same, basically. This is what I think about almost everything from current big-studio Hollywood movies to new literary fiction to music by Taylor Swift or Beyoncé: it’s … okay. It doesn’t offend.

Source: more rational choices – The Homebound Symphony by Alan Jacobs

I also wonder if by listening to a book, it is easy to “chew it less”. You get through one book, only to be offered the next one to continue the consumption. I worry that reading without writing is not in fact reading at all?

But then I read something from Austin Kleon and was left wondering if maybe reading without intent was in fact ok?

A book doesn’t need to have a “takeaway”, it only needs to take you away.

Source: Instragram by Austin Kleon

More than ok, maybe reading is the perfect medicine at times, as is captured by the idea of bibliotherapy?

Reading has been shown to put our brains into a pleasurable trance-like state, similar to meditation, and it brings the same health benefits of deep relaxation and inner calm. Regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels, higher self-esteem, and lower rates of depression than non-readers. “Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines,” the author Jeanette Winterson has written. “What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.”

Source: Can Reading Make You Happier? by Ceridwen Dovey

Or as Kin Lane captured so well, reading a book is answer to a lot of things.

Reading a book is the answer for a lot of what troubles me. When I’ve had to much screen time–read a book! When I’m tired from work and want to turn on the TV–read a book. When I’m frustrated with the current state of things in this country–read a book. When I can’t shut down the voices in my head because I’m spinning out about something–read a book.

Source: Reading a Book is The Answer by Kin Lane

In the end, I probably need to work on developing better habits when it comes to reading, but I might also need to give myself more permission sometimes to just walk away at times. Maybe, to borrow from Doug Belshaw, it is okay not to have an opinion on everything?