It’s an argument for focus in an age of distraction, but more than that, it’s a convincing argument for focus in an age of distraction. Deep Work by Cal Newportĭeep Work may be the only book I both read and reread this year. And some were to widen my own perspective, to remind me that there’s more going on right now than this administration, this moment in politics, this day of anger and outrage. Some of them were to better resist the pressures of this moment, to change the way I was absorbing information, to fight the clamor of distractions.
Some of them, as you’ll see here, were to better understand this moment by better understanding other moments. And yet we all want to understand it, we’re all desperate to understand it, and amid that emotional intensity, the number of notifications and alerts and articles and posts promising to tell us what’s going on has reached crazy-making levels.Īnd so I retreated to books. I’m not confident that anyone - least of all me - truly understands what’s happening in American or global politics right now.
This was a year when the volume of instant information was at its highest, but the quality of that information was, I think, unusually low. I needed to escape from the news cycle, from the social streams, from the shouting. I shifted my reading heavily toward books this year. Here, at the end of 2017, I thought I’d answer my own question, or at least a variant of it. On my podcast, I close each conversation by asking my guest to recommend three books.
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