Matthew McDowell-Sweet | In Motion

• Completed Mathematical Foundations I (Jan-May 2025)
• Gave daily love cards (Jan. 2020-Dec. 2020)
• Sent out 222 weekly email digests (summer 2020-Oct. 2024)
• Reacquianted myself with Git branching (Oct. 2024)
• Learned how to learn (Sept. 2024)
• Product at a B2B software marketplace startup (2020-2024)
• Yak Governance Studies Sequence contributor (May-June 2023)
• Told the tinker's tale within the Wanderverse (March 2023)
• Temporary Benevolent Dictator, YakCon (Jan. 2023)
• Contributor to a YC pop-up consulting project (Dec. 2022)
• [+20]

I read continuously and in parallel. I'm a moody reader and reading multiple texts simply increases the probability that there's always something I'm excited to read at a particular moment. I accomplish this by having defined tracks that act as attentional braces, and it's a stance that applies to both fiction and non-fiction.

The current tracks for non-fiction are:

• Motion: the study of motion as an abstract phenomena (flows, folds and fields) and as an applied concept (flows, folds and fields in different domains)
• Computing: the study of computing across the entire range of the technological stack, from the boring edge to the bleeding edge and from established paradigms to alternative, adjacent possible, truncated ones
• Intelligence: the study of how one (a person, an animal, an entity, a system, agents, sub-agents, or super-agents) situates themselves in the world, constructs realities, makes decisions and embodies actions

For fiction, I am splitting my reading like so (and with an emphasis on female and minority authors): one fantasy read, one sci-fi read and one read that is a classic or a fresh work (genre agnostic).

A "quake book" is a text that radically perturbs how one thinks about and acts within the world. The shift is experienced, individually and ideally societally, as positive (as opposed to the negative shifts associated with ideological or epistemological info hazards).

A quake book may make an existing belief, value or stance especially legible to oneself, or provide irrefutable evidence for something felt at a deep level. It may catalyse a novel perspective or insight, or provoke new questions because it's wrong in a particularly interesting or sacrilegious way. No matter how it happens, a quake book terraforms one's existence upon engagement.

I first heard of them via Ryan Holiday sometime in the mid-2010s. He heard of them via Tyler Cowen. These are mine:

• Never Let Go, Dan John
• Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Impro, Keith Johnstone
• Mindfulness in Plain English, Bhante Gunaratana
• The Complete Works of Primo Levi, Primo Levi
• Desire, Deceit and the Novel, Rene Girard
• Being and Motion, Thomas Nail
• The Protocol Kit, Summer of Protocols 2023 Cohort

Whereas "quake books" instantly and irrevocably alter one's inner landscape, "pilgrimages" are long and toilsome initiatives undertaken mostly on faith in the transformative power of the journey itself.

Below are the unreasonably long texts (or, more commonly, series of texts) that had a disproportionate impact on me, and that I will tirelessly shill given the opportunity.

• The Years of Lyndon Johnson and The Power Broker, Robert Caro
• The Malazan Book of the Fallen, Steven Erikson
• Hitler: Ascent and Hitler: Downfall, Volker Ullrich
• The Culture Series, Iain M. Banks
• The Matter with Things, Iain McGilchrist
• Civilisation and Capitalism, Fernand Braudel

All lists are based on the "Read" section of my 2024 annual review. A mega-thread of all of 2024's reads can be found here.

All lists are based on the "Read" section of my 2023 annual review. A mega-thread of all of 2023's reads can be found here.

All lists are based on the "Read" section of my 2022 annual review.

Both lists are based, in part, on the "Read" section of my 2021 annual review.