A companion for every book I read. One is free and complete, so you can see exactly what you are getting before you spend anything.
I read one book at a time, psychology, philosophy, human nature, and I build the same apparatus for every one:
a briefing to read before I open it,
structured notes,
the connections to the other books in the same reading,
a seven-day behaviour test, and a set of two-tier flash cards.
I built these for myself ever since I decided to re-educate myself properly, and now I have decided to show them to the world. They are companions rather than summaries. Each assumes you have read the book, are reading it, are about to, or have been meaning to and keep not starting. None of them is a way to get the gist without reading it.
Free, and complete
The Doors of Perception, Huxley. Published here in full. Nothing is held back, and it is here so you can see the standard before spending anything.
Packs
Each is a download: the pack as a PDF, plus the cards as an importable Anki deck, a CSV, a printable self-test sheet, and a card sheet that prints double sided and cuts into physical flash cards.
Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman - 23 pages, 60 cards - £15
The Righteous Mind, Haidt - 19 pages, 38 cards - £12
The Status Game, Storr - 20 pages, 33 cards - £12
The Elephant in the Brain, Simler and Hanson - 18 pages, 35 cards - £12
The Laws of Human Nature, Greene - 18 pages, 39 cards - £12
Behave, 18pages, 42 cards - £12
The God Delusion and The Dawkins Delusion, 21 pages, 38 cards - £15
Read and written up, packs coming soon
The essays are free, and they are the argument rather than the apparatus.
Logic, Stephen Hicks — essay
Aristotle: From Logic to Life, James Orr — essay
Personality and Its Transformations, Peterson — the argument and what to do with it
How to Plan Your Life, Peterson — the argument and what to do with it
Reading now
The 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene.
Game Theory, Daniel Bonevac. Nearly finished.
What is coming, in order
No dates. I read for an hour a day and finish when I finish, so a date would be a guess dressed as a commitment. The order, though, is settled.
1. The Prince — Machiavelli. Read straight after the Greene, because The 48 Laws of Power is Machiavelli restaged. What he added, and what he lost.
2. The Republic — Plato. Read alongside the Plato course, which spends a lecture on it. Reading a hard classic while a competent lecturer walks through it is the right way to do it, and the opposite of how I read Aristotle, which was the course and no text. It also pairs with Machiavelli directly above: the ideal state and the anti-ideal, back to back. And Book I is an argument about what justice actually means, which is the problem I keep running into everywhere else.
3. The Enigma of Reason — Mercier and Sperber. The first real argument against my own shelf. It accepts Haidt’s evidence and reaches the opposite conclusion: reason did not evolve to find truth, it evolved to argue, which is why it works in groups and badly alone.
4. A Conflict of Visions — Sowell. Political disagreement as two competing assumptions about human nature, rather than as policy.
5. Eichmann in Jerusalem — Arendt. While Browning is still fresh. The two books are in direct conversation, and Arendt is contested, which is the point.
6. The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James. Everything I have written on religion so far has been the does-God-exist argument. James asks what actually happens to people.
7. Dominion — Tom Holland. Where Western moral intuitions came from, including in people certain they have left religion behind.
8. On Liberty — Mill. Short, primary, and a book about what a contested word actually means.
9. The WEIRDest People in the World — Henrich. Why the psychology I have been reading may describe one unusual population rather than human beings.
10. Essays — Montaigne. The origin of the form I am writing in. A man examining himself honestly in public, five centuries early.
11. The Brothers Karamazov — Dostoevsky. The book Peterson’s courses lean on hardest, and almost nobody writes about it from the psychology side.
Why the list looks like that
My shelf had a thesis and no antithesis. Kahneman, Haidt, Sapolsky, Simler and Hanson, Greene and Storr all argue broadly the same thing, and nothing on it argued back. Half of what is above is there to disagree with the other half.
The rest is there because I had been reading people explaining primary sources rather than the sources themselves.
Two honest differences between the free pack and the others. Huxley is a much shorter book, so that pack is shorter. And because it sits on a web page rather than in a download, it has no importable Anki deck and no printable sheets. Everything else is the same, built the same way, to the same standard.