There are seven books on a shelf in the room where I write. Each one has a marker in it. The marker is somewhere between page forty and page one-twenty. I have moved the marker forward, then back, then forward again. I have been doing this for years.
None of the books is the book’s fault. The fault, if it is a fault, is that I am not yet the reader the book was written for. The book is asking something of me I am still becoming. The architect in me keeps the books on the shelf for the same reason I keep fragments in the working folder. The books are evidence of who I am trying to read into being.
Here is the list. Fifteen books. None finished. All open. None of them on the shelf by accident. Each one a building I am still framing in my head, waiting for the right beam. Seven of them I will explain in full. Eight more belong on the same shelf and earn one paragraph each.
1. Carnage and Culture, Victor Davis Hanson#
Started three times. I stop somewhere around the chapter on Lepanto. The argument is one I want to hold. That certain civilizations produce certain kinds of soldier. That the consequence of that production is the shape of history.
The argument is also long. The example chapters are longer than they need to be. I would finish a one-hundred-page version of this book in an afternoon. The four-hundred-page version has me at Lepanto and not moving.
What stops me is not the writing. The writing is excellent. What stops me is that I want the conclusion without the third example. I want the architecture without the seven foundation tests. I am wrong to want that. The third example is the proof. I am still learning to sit through the proof.
2. A book of Senator John Kennedy’s interviews, the senator from Louisiana#
Not the president. The senator from Louisiana. Started twice. I stop when the wit lands too close together. The senator’s voice is a voice I love. He says the absurd thing plainly and then moves on. I have learned from him for years.
The problem is that a full book of him is too much of one voice in a row. I lose the contrast. The wit needs the silence around it. The book does not have the silence.
The book is also why I write the way I write. One Kennedy beat per essay. The full book taught me that more than one is more than the reader can hold. The unfinished book is a craft lesson the author did not know he was teaching.
3. Rich Dad Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki#
Started four times over the years. I stop around the middle, where the lessons begin to repeat. The book gave me a framework I have used for twenty years. It also taught me what I needed to know in the first hundred pages. The remaining two hundred pages are case studies of the same principle. I have been the principle in practice for two decades. I do not need the case studies.
I keep the book because the first hundred pages are the spec. Every time I open it, I read the first hundred pages again and remember the discipline. The case studies are for a reader I am not. I will not be that reader. The book and I have an arrangement.
4. The E-Myth Revisited, Michael Gerber#
Started three times. I stop around the section where the technician becomes the entrepreneur. The book is right about almost everything. The book is also a sermon, and I am not the congregation the sermon was written for. I have already done the work the sermon is trying to get the reader to do.
What I keep coming back for is the spec language. The book is the cleanest description of why most small businesses fail. Most small businesses are run by people who built a job for themselves and called it a company. I have used that distinction in my work for years. The unfinished book is a sentence I have not stopped using.
5. Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman#
Started three times. I stop somewhere in the second half. The first half is the spec for how the mind works. I have absorbed it and used it in the architecture of every system I have built since. The second half is the experiments that prove the first half. I trust the experiments. I do not need to read them.
The book is what I would call a one-and-a-half-book. The first half is the book. The second half is the citations. The author needed to write both halves. The reader does not need to read both halves to use either.
This is a craft lesson too. Most non-fiction books are one-and-a-half-books. The discipline of reading is knowing which half you are in.
6. The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen#
Started twice. I stop somewhere in the middle of the second act. The book is brilliant. The book is also a book about my own country written in a voice that is closer to my own than I am yet able to hear. I put it down because I do not yet have the body for the next chapter. I will be able to read it. I do not yet know when.
This is the book that taught me that some books need the reader to age into them. The book is not waiting for me to be smarter. The book is waiting for me to have lived more of what it is about. The book is patient. I am the one who needs the time.
7. A book I will not name, the one that is waiting#
Started more times than I can count. I stop on a page I cannot quote because I have not let myself read past it. The book is about a person I am living next to right now. The book asks me to look at a future I have not yet agreed to. I am not ready.
I read the first chapter once a year. I close the book. I sit with it on my lap for an hour. I put it back on the shelf.
The book is the one piece of evidence I have that there is a part of me the architect cannot yet design for. I am working on it. The book is waiting.
8. Co-Intelligence, Ethan Mollick#
Started twice. The book is about working with AI in the way I have been writing about for two years. The book is right about most of it. I have not finished because I am still living the chapter the book is about. The book and the chapter are racing each other. I will finish the book when my chapter closes.
9. Human Compatible, Stuart Russell#
Started three times. The book is the foundation under the spec discipline I use with the model. I read the first third every time I am about to design a new AI workflow. The last two thirds are the mathematical proof. I trust the proof. I have not needed to read it to use the foundation.
10. Mindset, Carol Dweck#
Started twice. The book gave me a sentence I have repeated to my children for twenty years. The sentence is the spec. The rest of the book is the case study. I read the spec, leave the case study, and live the sentence.
11. Zero to One, Peter Thiel#
Started three times. The book is the cleanest framing of the difference between building a new thing and copying an old one. I have used the framing on every business decision I have made since. I stop reading where the book starts naming companies that no longer exist. The companies were the example. The framing was the book.
12. Atomic Habits, James Clear#
Started twice. The book teaches a discipline I had already built from twenty years of operating homes. I read the book to find the words for what I was doing. I found them in the first eighty pages. I closed the book. The eighty pages live in my workflow.
13. The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz#
Started twice. The book is the most honest account I have read of running a company through the things nobody warns you about. I stop reading around the chapter on layoffs because I have not had to do it and reading about it feels like rehearsing a play I am not in. I will finish it when the chapter arrives.
14. Power and Prediction, Ajay Agrawal and co-authors#
Started twice. The book is the cleanest economic frame I have read for what AI changes about decisions. I have used the frame in three of the AI verticals I have built. I stop in the middle because the frame is already in my hands and the rest is verification I do not need.
15. Life 3.0, Max Tegmark#
Started three times. The book is the most ambitious imagination of what AI becomes if we let it become anything it can become. I read for the imagination. I stop when the imagination becomes prediction. I trust an architect to design what is in front of her. I do not trust a futurist to predict what is in front of me.
What the shelf teaches, unfinished is a spec#
The shelf is full of books I have not finished. The shelf is also a map of the writer I am still becoming. Each book is a future I am trying to architect. Each book is a future the architect in me does not yet know how to build.
The unfinished reading is not a failure of attention. The unfinished reading is a record of attention paid to the work that is still ahead. The architect keeps the books open for the same reason she keeps the working folder open. The unfinished is where the next move lives.
I will finish some of these books. I will not finish others. The shelf is honest about both. The shelf is also a record of what reading is, in a life that has more to do than sit and read. Reading is the work of meeting a book where you are. Some books are waiting for me. I am waiting for some of them. Fifteen unfinished books is not fifteen failures. Fifteen unfinished books is fifteen specs I have not yet built the output for.
The decision before the sentence is also the decision before the next page. The reader who is honest about which decision she is ready to make is the reader who keeps the right books on the shelf.
Reading.
