Books I read in 2025

These are the books I read in 2025.

Earn Your Bread Protocol - Crazy KPI improvements with new protocol

Lately I've been implementing a productivity system that has become incredibly successful. I've followed it for about eight years now, and they've been the most productive years of my life.

This might not be suitable for everyone, but it has definitely worked for me.

Morning Protocol

I get up at 05:00 every morning. To avoid losing my routine, I do it on weekends (except the two Sundays a month) and on holidays. Even on Christmas Day.

I check my core temperature every morning: if it's higher than 38°C I take a sick day. If it's lower than 38 and I'm feeling a bit under the weather, I still go to work.

Breakfast: 100–200 g of black rye bread and a good, hot soup. I spend a maximum of five minutes on it. Heating the body fast matters.

After breakfast I take a brisk walk for about 2.5 hours, whether it's warm or snowing. I need the walk to wake up.

I start work at 08:00 on the dot.

Lunch Protocol

I usually take lunch at noon (12:00 or 13:00 depending on the sun).

Lunch is medium-protein: porridge and a little lard. Because I get my vegetables at breakfast and dinner, I focus lunch on higher calorie and protein intake.

Peak Work Block

After lunch is when I do my best work. I aim for focus-intensive tasks that activate the body; that stimulation helps me drop into a flow-like state. This is my favourite time of day: I can fully immerse myself in work and still enjoy the sun's rays.

After lunch I usually put in another 5–6 hours of work, or until the sun sets. To properly disconnect and relax, I finish with roughly an hour's walk. It's good to be outside and wind down after a solid day's work.

Dinner Protocol

I eat dinner around 20:00. I prefer it light but hot soup, maybe some bread. Dinner is probably my favourite moment of the day, and I try to savour it as much as possible. Although food is essential, I never spend more than five minutes eating a meal. To keep things efficient, I've outsourced the cooking. That frees time for more productive activities.

Wind-Down Protocol

Everyone these days know that sleep is everyting. Without a good night sleep we can't be productive, we can't recharge the batteries. I have designed my wind-down protocol in order to ease the body into relaxation-time. After dinner I start my wind-down protocol. I might have a smoke, chat a bit with a friend, and then head to bed as early as possible to get at least eight hours of sleep.

At night I'm usually sketching plans to found an interior-decoration startup, which is my path to accumulating passive income. Several friends in the same scene have had strong results working in carpet painting, so I'm running the numbers.

Before falling asleep I usually try to do mental visualization to keep me motivated and focused.

Thoughts

All in all I usually manage to get in about 11 hours of work, of which I would say thet about 6-7 hours is high quality flow-state-like work. The remaining is usually taken up but organization and structure the work together with colleagues, it is not as productive, but it has to be done. As I mentioned before I have been doing this for the last eight years, and I has radically changed my life. I would really recommend everyone to try it out, test it for at least 90 days and you will see incredible changes in your life.

Cheers
Ivan Denisovich

Sweden's Extreme Political Inequality Before 1921

I read A Brief History of Equality by Thomas Piketty. It's packed with details and statistics that I often forget a second after reading them, but a section on the Swedish parliamentary system before the 20th century really caught my eye.

I think most Swedes don't realize the extent of the political inequality that existed here before the 1920s. We often talk about the widespread poverty in 19th-century Sweden, and how it led to the great migration waves to the United States. Everyone has heard the statistic that nearly a quarter of the population left. The narrative focuses on poverty, but we rarely discuss the details of the political system at the time, which was just as extreme.

So, a quick recap. From the 1520s until 1865, power was shared between the Swedish monarchy and the Riksdag of the Estates, which represented the four orders of society: the nobility, the clergy, the urban bourgeoisie, and the landowning peasants.

In 1865, this system was changed into a parliamentary system where each representative had voting power according to their wealth. It consisted of two chambers: the representatives from the upper chamber were chosen by the wealthiest (around 9,000 persons, less than one percent of the total male population in Sweden at the time), and the lower chamber. The lower chamber was elected according to wealth as well (so the richer you were, the more votes you had)—but it included up to 20% of the male population. But even among those 20%, votes were not equal between them.

On a local level, the power structure could be even more extreme. In rural municipalities, there was no upper limit to the number of votes a single landowner could hold. In many cases, one powerful individual controlled more than 50% of the votes. A striking example is Prime Minister Arvid Posse, who in the 1880s personally commanded the majority of votes in his home municipality. This was a system where the largest local landowner could also be the undisputed political ruler. This is a pretty extreme form of political system.

It was not until the reforms in 1909-1911 that expanded suffrage, and until 1919 when the wealth/ownership requirements were abandoned. So basically from 1909-1921, democracy was completely installed in Sweden (if we define democracy in the narrow sense of just voting power).

The redistribution of power during that single decade was staggering, yet we don't talk about it very much. It was a fundamental shift that happened in a remarkably short period. We don't even have a name for it.

When looking at comparisions between other european countries the transformation in sweden was radical.

Looking at the broader European context helps explain this rapid transformation:

This chart shows how Sweden's democratization was part of a broader European wave. While Britain had a gradual expansion from 1820-1920, France made a dramatic leap around 1880, and Sweden followed with its own rapid transformation around 1900-1920. The Swedish case wasn't unique—it was catching up with a continental trend toward universal male suffrage.

On sounds, bells and noise in the city

I have been reading Peter Englund collection of essays On the history of silence. In one of his essays he writes about the history of silence, but it is really more about the history of sounds.

In the pre-industrialist Europe the cities were filled with sounds, or noise as it might be called today. Streets were filled with workshops of different trades that all made their unique sounds. The hammersmith, the musicians, someone calling out news or announcements. Since the literacy was so low, if you lost a cat, a child, or someone else you would simply call out their name in a loud voice. News and announcements traveled by voice and not by text. The church clocks were the loudest, and they had intricate systems of communicating different information. How the different bells produced different "melodies" is called campanology, and through it it was possible to communicate warnings, calling to different church services, communicate the time of the day, funerals, opening and closing of markets or gates, different types of warning. In fact the bells rang so much during the day that people today would probably be pretty annoyed by it: the Gabriel Bell to wake you up in the morning, the Sermon Bell to announce that there would be a sermon, the Pardon Bell (before or after a sermon when people prayed for pardon), the Pudding Bell (to remind people to start making dinner), the Curfew Bell (to turn out the fires to decrease the risk of fire at night), the Fire Bell, the Storm Bell, the Harvest Bell, the Seeding Bell, the Gleaning Bell, the Fair Bell, the Oven Bell. My favorite bell announcement is the Pancake Bell.

Here is an excerpt from the book Bells by Satis N. Coleman:

The Pancake bell is associated with the curfew bell, for on Shrove Tuesday the curfew bell was the signal which stopped the eating of pancakes. Shrove Tuesday (the Tuesday which comes forty days before Easter Sunday) was the day for eating pancakes [...]. On Shrove Tuesday the church bell rang at four o'clock in the morning as a signal for the people to prepare for the feast of Lent.

"As a part of this preparation, they collected all the suet, lard and drippings in the house, and made it into pancakes, for this was the last day they might eat butter for forty days," and they wished to take full advantage of it. In some places the bell rang at midday as a signal to put the pancakes on the fire.

The city in northern Europe today is different. There is a lot of sound today, but a few things have happened. News and announcements are not communicated the same way. Workshops turned to factories, and then the factories moved first to the outskirts of the city, and then to other countries. The sounds of production is gone. In my neighborhood there is no churchbell in the morning, there is no one calling out news, there is no one on the street trying to sell me something, fortunately there are the occasional madmen that scream out their religious beliefs. Cities are not loud from human activities anymore. The loudest sound we hear on a daily basis are cars, and it is not even the sound of the combustion engine, most of the sound a car makes comes from the friction between the tyre and the asphalt. Cars are what makes a modern city loud. Instead the city today have different noises. Garbage truck emptying big containers of garbage, on some busy streets you have people talking in cafés.

In Mexico City there are a lot of sounds used for communication. For example the famous sounds of the trucks that buys stuff from you, for example old mattresses, microwaves, refrigerators, etc.

Se compran, colchones, tambores, refrigeradores, estufas, lavadoras, microondas, ¿o algo de fierro viejo que vendan?

But there are other distinct sounds, like the sounds of the tamale sellers, knife-sharpener, the whistle sounds produced by the steam from making sweet potatoes, the ringing of bells when the garbage truck is around.

This is your mind on plants and Voltaire's coffee consumption

This is Michael Pollan’s latest book. I don't know why I bought it, and I weren't expecting much, but in fact, it was a bit more entertaining than I had expected. The book is divided into three parts: opium, caffeine, and mescaline. Surprisingly, I enjoyed the chapters on caffeine and opium the most.

Michael Pollan suggests that rather than humans domesticating plants, plants may actually have domesticated (or influenced) humans. His book Psychedelic Renaissance is about how psychedelics have been criminalized in many parts of the world, and so on. That whole story. This story of caffeine is in a sense the opposite story, the success-story about how one drug has integrated itself completely into society, so deep that we don't even consider it a drug anymore. And it has happened farily recently as well. Caffeine has a pretty modern history. What we know is that coffee was cultivated and sold in Eastern Africa in the 1400s. The first coffeehouses started to appear in Venice in the 1600s, after which coffee quickly spread to London. So, unlike alcohol, which has been consumed for much longer, coffee is fairly new. So it is fascinating that in such a short period, it has taken over every part of society. It is a core commodity in the financial economy, with people following its price in detail. At least Swedish newspapers frequently report on increases and decreases in the cost of coffee. And in society its literally is everywhere. Every workplace has a coffee machine and coffee breaks, we have cafés, coffee makers in every home, and even our sodas contain caffeine. Caffeine is, as everyone knows, highly addictive. We have created an entire infrastructure around the fact that everyone is highly addicted to it. Society is constructed so that it must provide a daily fix for everyone. That's why we need it in our homes, at work, at every restaurant, café, hotel, and so on. It is really fascinating that we have built an entire society around one drug in just a few hundred years. The only other drug I can think of is alcohol. But due to the destructive nature of alcohol, the drug can't immerse itself as deeply into society today as coffee. In fact, coffee and caffeine addiction are so prevalent in society today that we don't even notice it anymore.

The book also mentions that brewed coffee was historically a safe way to consume water, since it has been boiled. When coffee was introduced, it provided a safe alternative to consuming water without the negative side effect of being slightly drunk, like alcohol. In that sense, coffee was superior to alcohol. Switching from beer to coffee must also have resulted in increased productivity at all levels of society.

Coffeehouses

One thing that stuck with me that I really liked was the early coffeehouses in London. They were thematically divided, so there was a coffeehouse for people interested in seafaring life (they met at Lloyd's coffeehouse). If you wanted to know which ship was coming in or going out, Lloyd's coffeehouse was the place to be. Jonathan's coffeehouse developed into the London Stock Exchange. Scientists and intellectuals met at The Grecian. Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley were patrons there. This is such a great idea, and it is kind of sad that these kinds of coffeehouses aren't fashionable anymore. It would be great to go to a coffeehouse and know that many people there share a specific interest. I suppose the modern equivalent is online forums.

Here is a fantastic quote by Honoré de Balzac about his special method of ingesting coffee. It feels like the last station of addiction, when you take your coffee as a batter och sludge in cold water:

I have devised a dreadful, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men in exceptionally good health. It involves using finely-ground coffee of high density, taken cold on an empty stomach. This coffee sinks down into the stomach, whose velvety interior is lined with papillae and folds. Finding nothing else in the sack, the coffee assails this delicate and luxurious lining ... sparks shoot all the way up to the brain.

Voltaire and his ever-increasing number of cups of coffee

The book mentions that Voltaire drank up to 72 cups of coffee each day. I wonder how much coffee a cup contained in those days. Okay, after reading this claim, I started questioning it and wanted to get as close to the original source as possible. It appears that Voltaire was good friends with Frederick II of Prussia. Frederick wrote a eulogy for Voltaire upon his death. In that eulogy, it says:

It was his custom to submit his plays to the most rigorous criticism before putting them before the public. True to his principles, he consulted in Paris everyone of cultivated taste whom he knew, sacrificing mere vanity to his wish that his work should be worthy of posterity. Heeding the enlightened advice he received, he set about revising this tragedy with exceptional zeal and ardor: he spent entire nights recasting the piece, and—whether to drive off sleep or to rouse his senses—he consumed coffee to excess; fifty cups a day were scarcely enough for him. That beverage, which threw his blood into the most violent turmoil, produced in him such extraordinary overheating that, to soothe this sort of burning fever, he turned to opiates. He took them in quantities so large that, far from easing his distress, they hastened his end. Shortly after taking this remedy with so little moderation, a kind of paralysis appeared, followed by the stroke of apoplexy that ended his life.

This was apparently disputed by Voltaire's personal secretary Jean-Louis Wagnière in the book Éloges de Voltaire. Here is an AI-translated quote.

The idea had come to him to urge the Académie française to redo its dictionary; he had great difficulty getting his opinion accepted. He grew very animated, which seemed to displease some of his colleagues a little. Perhaps that sort of ascendancy or superiority which, in the eyes of several of them, appeared to belong to him by reason of his age and genius, cast some shadow over others. During the session he took, in five separate swallows, two and a half cups of coffee. The King of Prussia has been misled on this point (and I had the honour of telling His Majesty so). In the eulogy he composed for that great man he said that M. de Voltaire, having taken fifty cups of coffee in a single day, overheated his blood and caused his death.

And here is the footnote:

Foot-note (7) Two-and-a-half cups taken in five sips could easily be taken for five whole cups by some spectators. One of them may have written that he had seen M. de Voltaire drink five cups of coffee one after another in the same sitting, and then some copyist turned five into fifty for the entire day.

Okay, so if we believe Voltaires assistant, he drank 2,5 cups of coffee. But he drank it in five sips. This turned into 5 cups of coffee. The author of the footnote then speculates that someone copying the text accidently turned five into fifty. Then that somehow turned into 50-72, which ended in Michael Pollans book as 72.

Year Cups per Day Source
1778 50 Frederick II of Prussia (Éloges de Voltaire)
1826 2.5 Memoires sur Voltaire
2013 80 Straight.com Article
2013 100 Stew Ross Blog Post
2013 30 Hacker News Discussion
2020 40 Keep Calm and Drink Coffee
2025 72 Michael Pollan - Your Mind on Plants

On Septologies

So what's going on with all these septologies, or authors just splitting one book into way too many tiny parts? I recently read Om uträkningen av omfång 1 by Solvej Balle. And last year I read the first book in another Danish septology, Scandinavian Star, by Asta Olivia Nordenhof. And then there’s Jon Fosse’s aptly named series Septologien, though I haven’t started it yet.

But seriously, having read the opening books of both Scandinavian Star and Om uträkningen av omfång, I have to wonder: what's the deal? Solvej Balle's first book is just 190 small-sized pages. Are authors promising their publishers septologies upfront and then scrambling to divide a regular-sized novel into seven bite-sized chunks? Why break up your novel into seven parts when each segment is short enough to be a long short story?

Is is a money issue? If you want the first five parts of Solvej Balle’s septology, it'll cost you 1,250 SEK! At that price per word, it's almost ridiculous. Why no just finish the book and call each section a "Part" instead of releasing them separately at premium hardcover prices? Split it into three books if you must, but selling 150-page installments as individual "novels" seems excessive.

Even Jon Fosse's first two volumes add up to only 300 pages combined. That’s 150 pages each. Why not just call these chapters or parts? Is this some new Nordic literary trend that I missed the memo on?

I guess I will wait 10 years for all the books to be out and the sold as a normal sized pocket-book that I can buy at a second hand bookstore for 25 sek. But until then, paying full book prices for chapter-sized books feels absurd.

I liked Om uträkningen av omfång 1. It has the classic groundhog-day premiss, with some twists. It is kind of fun to read a classic scifi-premiss but by a non-scifi author.

The Bezzle

I just read The Bezzle by Cory Doctorow. I haven’t read the first book in the Martin Hench series yet, but I think I might. It feels a bit like reading a Lee Child novel—except the main character gets beat up instead of doing the beating.

Two Things from It

1. A Good Quote

One of the characters says:

Shit flows downhill.

Simple. Accurate. Brutal.

2. The Bezzle Bliss

The bezzle is a term coined by economist J.K. Galbraith. It refers to the period during an embezzlement after the theft has started, but before it has been discovered. During this time, the victim is living in blissful ignorance—thinking they're making money, when in fact they’re being robbed.

The book leans pretty heavily into exposition, but I didn’t mind it. I’ve previously read Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World (2011), and The Spider Network: The Wild Story of a Math Genius, a Gang of Backstabbing Bankers, and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History. This feels like a kind of niche genre: financial corruption and embezzlement grounded in real-world systemic rot.

The Netanyahus

This book indeed has elements that I strongly dislike: chaotic families, chaotic scenes, and the feeling of being trapped in a social situation that you can't escape. At first, I wasn't sure if this was supposed to be a comedy or not, but as the story progressed, it became increasingly farcical. To be honest, my feelings about the book actually changed when I read the afterword. Now that I think about it, the afterword might have been the most entertaining part of the book. The real-life Blum character seemed far more interesting compared to the toned-down, timid, conflict-averse character portrayed in the narrative. But perhaps that portrayal was necessary to emphasize the terrible sense of clash between the two families, the Blums and the Netanyahus.

Wow, they've really botched the Swedish translation of the title. In English, it's called The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, which is pretty much a perfect title. In Swedish, they've translated it simply as Netanyahus.

Hemsöborna

I just read Hemsöborna, by August Strindberg. It was a great read, and I enjoyed every page of it. I really liked the decription of nature. One thing I didn’t quite understand was why they crammed five people into the kitchen to sleep when there was a perfectly good house standing empty — the same one they later rented out to the professor.

Quite fun to read something so old. Lot's of great words and expressions, like schangtil, chiffonjèklaffen, falka, slå en lov, lastgammal, att fjolla. Of course, the book is a romanticized portrayal of life in the archipelago—but it works. It makes that life feel incredibly enticing.

It is really fascinating how much alocohol they drank. Every event imaginable is accompanied with a shot (sup): getting in a boat, getting out of bed, going to bed, sneaking out from church, when it is cold, when trying to sleep, after hunting, before fishing.

Han kom som ett yrväder en aprilafton och hade ett höganäskrus i en svångrem om halsen

Books I read in 2024

These are the books I read in 2024.

Fiction

Non-Fiction

I haven't had any plans for what to read during this year. I have just read things that have come my way, that people have recommended, that I have heard about, or books I have found or just laying around. I see now that it is kind of evenly distributed between fiction and non-fiction.

20 authors are men, and 10 women.

Of these I would say that the most fun to read and the most impactful books were: The Dawn of Everything, The Dark Forest, Death's end and The Kingdom, The World of Yesterday, and Tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow. Remaining books that I would actually recommend is probably Maniac and The Last Good Kiss. It is not like the remaining were worthless reads, or that I regret reading them, they were just nothing special. Eight books that I would actually recommend, out of around 32, is an okay ratio I guess.

Nina Björk and Ayn Rand — The Fountainhead and Freedom

A few months ago, I found a copy of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead in the communal laundry room, placed in the exchange shelf. I’m not entirely sure why I picked it up. My perception of Ayn Rand has always been colored by her reputation: an extremely right-wing, neoliberal author taken seriously only by libertarians.

At the time, I was reading Nina Björk’s book Om man älskar frihet (If You Love Freedom). It’s only 3–4 years old, but it felt oddly dated, like reading something written 15–20 years ago. Perhaps it’s because Nina Björk’s pace of change is slow, or because Sweden’s political climate is changing rapidly. The book critiques foundational ideas about meritocracy, capitalism, and democracy—but these debates feel disconnected from today’s political realities.

Nina Björk: Meritocracy and Freedom

One of the most engaging chapters critiques meritocracy, arguing that it’s fundamentally impossible in a free society. Meritocracy assumes equality of opportunity, but Björk contends this is unattainable in a society divided by class. Swedish liberal politicians often claim that education can create equal opportunities, but Björk points out that the longer children spend outside formal schooling, the greater the disparities become. To address this, liberals argue for starting school earlier, thus reducing time spent with parents. Björk is not advocating for meritocracy; instead, she highlights that decreasing individual freedom is a prerequisite for the liberal idea of meritocracy—equality in opportunity—to work in practice.

While I don’t disagree with many of the book’s arguments, they feel unremarkable. Perhaps this is because contemporary discourse has moved beyond questions of economic and political justice to focus elsewhere. It’s not that these discussions are irrelevant, but engaging with them today feels futile.

Eventually, I grew bored. Björk’s book felt like a transcript of a dated ABF discussion group from 1999. So, I turned to its polar opposite: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.

Ayn Rand: From Radical to Mainstream

Surprisingly, The Fountainhead didn’t feel radical. First published in 1943, its central ideas—individualism, self-determination, and the pursuit of personal vision—are so embedded in contemporary society that they no longer shock. If anything, the book reads like a weak illustration of today’s mainstream thought. Listen to any self-help podcast, and you’ll encounter echoes of Rand’s philosophy.

On a personal note, I enjoyed the book’s architectural backdrop. Set in 1920s New York, during the height of Art Deco, it conjures a noir-like atmosphere of smoking rooms, speakeasies, and bold architectural ambition. At least in the beginning; after a few hundred pages, it loses its appeal a bit and becomes more and more farce-like.

Ennui and Spleen

A recurring theme in The Fountainhead is ennui. Dominique Francon, one of the main characters, embodies this fin de siècle boredom—a feeling reminiscent of The Great Gatsby. It also brings to mind Charles Baudelaire’s concept of spleen from Les Fleurs du mal, though Baudelaire’s version feels more profound.

What fascinates me is how ennui could become fashionable. Was it a material byproduct of societal changes, or a purely intellectual construct? Perhaps the concept of ennui made the feeling possible. Once an idea is named, it spreads, shaping emotional experiences in its wake.

Melodrama and Absurdity

The characters in The Fountainhead often act in exaggerated, melodramatic ways. Conversations unfold like this:

“I love you so much I can’t bear to look at you. Therefore, I’ll never see you again.”

“If that’s your will, I’ll bury my feelings in my work and continue as an empty shell.”

“I’ll marry your superficial enemy because I love you too much to be with you.”

The reader is left wondering: so, they love each other, there’s no real obstacle… where’s the conflict? Perhaps I lack the cultural or historical context to fully grasp these predicaments, or maybe the conflicts are just poorly constructed.

Where’s the Radicalism?

I expected The Fountainhead to be more politically radical. Instead, its ideological core is surprisingly tame. For instance, Ellsworth Toohey, one of the antagonists, critiques the protagonist as selfish for refusing to collaborate on an architectural design. While the novel portrays this refusal as a moral stand, it hardly feels like a groundbreaking act of rebellion.

That said, the book is undeniably entertaining. The first 500 pages flew by (the Swedish edition is 850 pages). But as the story dragged on, its absurd political viewpoints became increasingly in-your-face, making the latter sections a slog.

Reading Björk and Rand back-to-back was an exercise in contrast. Björk’s measured critique of societal structures felt outdated yet relevant in its insights, while Rand’s supposed radicalism now feels mainstream.

The Art of Travel

Why do we travel? Travel can't really be considered a trend, it is so fundamental to a modern lifestyle that it is like cleaning your clothes, or brushing your teeth. If you are on vacation, but don't travel, did you even have vacation? At the same time there is a small counter-trend. The counter-trend emanates from the negative side of modern traveling: increased carbon emissions (mostly from flying) and local communities changing as rents rise and space becomes limited.

I recently read The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton. It wasn’t great, but at least it had some original takes. It talks about the parts ot traveling but through different "guides" (mostly european painters, novelists, poets, philosophers). For example, Charles Baudelaire and Edward Hopper guides the reader through modes of transportation and places we encounter while traveling (the service station or airport). Flaubert and Humbolt guides us around the reasons for traveling - the exotic, discovering, research, or adventure.

There’s a interesting idea in Chapter VII, "On Eye-opening Art," where de Botton shows how Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings of Provence opened his eyes to the beauty of that landscape. He contrasts this with a quote by Blaise Pascal:

How useless is painting, which attracts admiration by the resemblance of things, the originals of which we do not admire!

The point is that art can help us notice peculiarities and interest in ordinary places. I think that’s true. A service station is just a service station—until Edward Hopper paints it and fills it with a certain mood that wasn’t visible before. van Gogh's sky or landscapes looks better than reality.

The book uses specific guides for different reasons we travel. For instance, the allure of the exotic gets examined through Gustave Flaubert’s trip to Egypt during Europe’s Orientalist craze. Personally, I’ve traveled for various reasons—adventure, curiosity—but today I’m not always sure why I do it. The only travel I understand now is the kind that demands physical effort, like cycling or hiking, where I enjoy moving my body through the landscape at my own pace.

One mention I found funny was Xavier de Maistre, who wrote two travelogues about journeys in his own room (Voyage Around My Room and Nocturnal Expedition Around My Room). He basically treated his immediate surroundings as foreign territory. Maybe an instagram account about the travels through my own apartment would be a modern equivalent.

When todays obsession with traveling, as a way to signal status, or just societal conformity (that is what we all do on vacation - if we don't travel we don't really have vacation) the book is at least presenting some other view-points for traveling. I guess it can be read together with other classical traveling literature like on Jack Kerouac or Birgitta Stenberg. Now that I think about it, I notice that quite a few books I have read recently are somehow connected to traveling. Murakami's books usually contains an element of traveling, usually in the form of escape or fleeing. I also read James Crumleys book The Last Good Kiss, which is kind of like a "modern" roadtrip bukowski-crime-noir.

This text was written by a human, and then enhanced by a machine. The reason for doing so is because sometimes I prefer to be able to conclude some thoughts without having to spend to much time on the actual writing process. It didn't work out so well, I didn't like the style of the AI that much, so I changed a lot of the text back to my chaotic style. Spelling mistakes and incorrect grammar is the new sign of human quality.

White Teeth and Intertextuality

I just finished reading White Teeth by Zadie Smith. The book was okay, but what really struck me was realizing it was published in 2000, with the story set in the early 90s - a quarter of a century ago. Despite its age, it still feels remarkably modern. I found the FutureMouse storyline particularly interesting, as it seems to parallel the Dolly sheep controversy, something I hadn't given much thought to before. But when googling it now I learned that people are cloning their dogs now.

While reading, I kept noticing references to other books, which got me thinking about an idea I've had for a while: creating an intertextuality map. Imagine a graph showing how books reference other books - kind of like a literary family tree. The main obstacle has always been practical: reading enough books, catching all the cultural references, and somehow organizing them into a coherent graph. Literary references tend to be more subtle and unstructured compared to academic citations in scientific papers or non-fiction works. Still, I thought it might be fun to try this out with White Teeth as a test case, using an automated approach.

Here's the method I developed: I started with an epub version of the book, which is essentially just a zip file containing XHTML files. Looking through the text, I noticed that references to other works are typically written in italics. By extracting these italicized sections, I managed to identify around 2000 potential references.

Of course, authors use italics for various purposes in literature: emphasis, quotations, references, artistic works, or really any other reason they see fit. But there's a helpful convention in English: titles of works are typically capitalized. For instance, it's White Teeth, not White teeth. Using this rule to filter the text significantly narrowed down the likely references.

This still left me with a challenge: many books share titles with movies, magazines, or other media. This creates potential false positives - take New Statesman, which could refer to either a magazine or a book. To solve this, I tried something interesting: I fed the surrounding context of each italicized title to an LLM (specifically Anthropic Haiku) to determine whether it was referring to a book or something else. To further validate these references and filter out fictional books invented for the story, I cross-referenced everything with OpenLibrary's API.

With the verified references in hand, I created a JSON file containing metadata for each referenced book. Then, using Vue Flow, I built an interactive graph visualization, which you can explore below:

The system isn't perfect - I've spotted some gaps. For instance, it missed Willesden Past by Len Snow, which is definitely referenced in the book. It also incorrectly flagged White Teeth itself as a reference, though that could be fixed by simply excluding the title page from the analysis. I suspect using a more sophisticated LLM (like Claude Sonnet) with broader context could improve the results, but I'm satisfied with proving the concept works.

The really exciting possibility would be applying this approach to millions of books and discovering which ones contain the most intertextual references. It's probably just a matter of time before LLMs become cost-effective enough to analyze entire books and generate structured outputs for creating even larger graphs. In fact, most of the coding work we're doing now might soon be obsolete - these kinds of tasks will likely be handled directly by LLMs in the near future. There really is something quite eerie about producing code and work that will soon be performed 100 times faster. It creates a kind of technical deflation. With regular deflation, we face the inevitable question: why buy a microwave today when the price will be lower tomorrow? With technical deflation, the question becomes: why spend 10 hours writing code today when the same task might take just 10 minutes six months from now? The microwave example might not be the perfect illustration since that's more about technological price decline, but the fundamental psychological mechanism - delaying current investment because of anticipated future savings - still seems to hold.

The Hoarding Museum

Are museums really just sophisticated hoarders? I listened to the episode Dragon Psychology 101 in Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast Revisionist History some time ago. In that episode he basically compares museums to dragons that hoard gold or just a DSM-5 pathological hoarder. Malcolm focuses on the paradox of owning millions of expensive objects, and at the same time not having enough money. Anyways, the idea of museum as a hoarder, or pathological collector, has really stuck with me.

There seems to be something deeply addictive about collecting. I think this notion of museums as hoarders is echoed in the life of Ian Wiséhn, the former chief of Kungliga Myntkabinettet (The Royal Coin Cabinet). His story is pretty interesting. When he started in 1979 he told his boss, the then chief Lars O. Lagerqvist, that he collected and sold stamps, which had earned him enough money to travel. Lars had then responded:

Museum people shouldn't collect, no matter what it is. You are exposed to temptations.

This was pretty insightful, alluding to the fact that collecting in your private life can negatively affect your collecting in your work life at a museum. Especially if it is the same type of objects. Ian Wiséhn went on to become the chief of The Royal Coin Cabinet, until his desire for collecting ultimately led him to start stealing stamps, and then later on coins from his own museum. The story is told in the three part documentary Guldfeber - Stölderna på Kungliga Myntkabinettet (Gold Fever - The Thefts at the Royal Coin Cabinet). Ian had written an essay, Samlandets Psykologi (The Psychology of Collecting), which was hanging in the office at the Royal Coin Cabinet, where he captures the dual nature of collecting:

Collectors can be described in many ways: knowledgeable, obsessed, devoted, foolish, or serious. What unites most of them is the hunt for new, exciting items for their collection. In most cases, this pursuit happens calmly and methodically. But sometimes collecting takes over and becomes more important than family and work.

Ironically, Ian himself succumbed to the very pitfalls he warned about. In the end he was charged with theft and sentenced to prison.

Although obviously very different, there is something that relates the compulsive collector on an individual level with the compulsory collection by museums. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has over two million objects, Nationalmuseum in Sweden has 700,000 art pieces. The nearly pathological collecting behavior of museums raises the question: What is art really for? Is it reasonable to store vast quantities of art in warehouses, where it remains largely inaccessible to the public — the very people who, through publicly owned museums, are the rightful owners of these works? What would the artist want, that the art is admired by someone or locked in a warehouse, likely to never be seen by generations?

Perhaps a better approach would be to bring art into everyday spaces — schools, universities, hospitals, offices, train stations, bus stations — where it can be experienced and appreciated by many. If art exists to be appreciated, then perhaps it shouldn't be locked away, hoarded like a dragon's treasure.

Towards a leftist populism

I recently listened to an episode of the Ezra Klein show regarding the view of institutions. Ezra argues that the Democratic Party has become the party of institutions. The party wants to defend the institutions, instead of actually asking if the institutions work or not. Are all institutions really worth defending? The party of institutions is exemplified by the alliance between Liz Cheney and Kamala Harris. The fact that such different points of view can work together indicates the complete lack of vision. The only vision they have is to maintain the current order, the current institutions.

Historically, the left has been the loudest critic of institutions. There used to be a time when the left actually criticized the institutions. But it has been a long time now since the left actually came from a position of opposition.

The right is having fun. They are mocking the current system, they are making fun of it, and they have a sincere drive to upset it, transform it, change it. When you are tired of something, change is fun. Change is an opportunity. The left, on the other hand, is stuck being worried about the future of institutions.

It feels like politics in Sweden are resembling this. The Social Democrats do not represent any kind of change, I mean how could they? With their dominant position in Swedish politics, it really is impossible to have any kind of air of newness. Instead, they have become the maintainers of the institutions.

The experience that politics have power

I think many people today don't care about politics because politics doesn't seem like an avenue for real and practical change in our lives. When a politician promises something, most people don't even believe in the promise. And those that believe in the promise know that they will never see any actual effects and consequences of it, even if it is correctly implemented. Implementation takes time, promises are reduced during the process, they are changed, and it is often difficult to see the relation between a political promise and an impact in my life.
When this goes on long enough, politics becomes an institution that just processes and administers the system, not a vehicle of change.
The Swedish left is stuck in old paradigms of class belonging, of big and impactful promises for reform that will never materialize. They are stuck in positions out of tradition rather than critical analysis.

What I think we need is a practical left. Not with big reforms that never materialize. But instead with small reforms that are easy and fast to implement and can deliver change to peoples lives.

Experiment 2 - Some pushups

Time for experiment duration: 30 days.
Start: 2024-11-11 End: 2024-12-11

Rules:

Expectations:

Improve strength. Something that I hope will be felt when doing bouldering.

Evaluation:

The improvements will mostly be measured in how many max-repetitions I can do.

Max-repetition before starting: 20

Comment:

May seem like few, only doing 100. But the important part is to get started with a working routine.

Results:

Conclusion
I have done at least 100 push-ups each week now for 4 weeks. In total I did 489.
One thing I noticed was that I have been cheating in terms of form. I have not gone fully down on the push-up so that the chest touches the ground. I have had my head forward too much, so that the head touches the ground, but not the chest. When I started I didn't think too much about the form.

Therefore I have decided to continue, and do 30 days more. But this time focusing on proper form. I'm not going to increase the number of pushups each day, since just performing them with better form will be sufficient improvement.

During this month I did the pushups on the same day as I did my normal climbing-training. This allowed be to have rest-days. This also created a good schedule that I was able to follow.

Update: 2025-01-17
I have continued with this another month. It's been going quite well. So I have decided to continue doing 100 push-ups each week the remaining year.

Experiments: No Doom-Scrolling

Experiment 1 - No doom-scrolling 2024-11

I'm starting a 30-day experiment to eliminate doom-scrolling and streaming services from my daily life.

Duration

Rules

Banned

Permitted

Previous Experience

I have conducted similar experiments before. Based on these experiences, I expect:

Evaluation Methods

For now, I'll conduct a quantitative analysis during and after the experiment.

Potential metrics for future experiments:

Update: 2024-12-05

So I have been doing this for about 2 weeks now. I should say that this is not the first time I've done this kind of experiment. I have done 30 days without doom-scrolling before, multiple times.
So far the experiment has been going great. The first thing I notice is that there is an initial energy boost on the first days. Energy levels are high on all the time that has been released, however the energy levels progressively goes down.

One thing I have noticed more clearly this time is how much doom-scrolling is actually about handling anxiety. I have noticed this tendency for years, but I had previously mostly felt it in connection with deep-thinking. When I say deep thinking, I just mean when trying to solve somewhat complex problem where a lot of variables/perspectives needs to be taken into account - or just technical problem that at first seem overwhelming. Whenever I need to really think about something another part of the mind directs me to the doom-scroll, I guess it is in order to avoid having to work on that problem. There is probably some evolutionary explanation for it, something to do with reducing energy or something. Anyways, distraction to avoid uncomfortable deep-thinking I had noticed before, but this time I started also notice how doom-scrolling works as an escape from anxiety. Intrusive thoughts or just anxiety-ridden thoughts can be hampered by social media, obviously it doesn't work since the reasons for the anxiety remains after the doom-scrolling-session is finished.

I have become significantly more "productive". But let me clarify, I don't consider productivity as something inherently valuable. There is nothing noble is production. But what I have noticed is that the satisfaction creating produces is really worth pursuing. It is a great feeling to have thought about something, and the transformed the thought into something practical and real.

Another thing I noticed that the brain will work hard to find alternatives to doom-scrolling: "The sum of all vices are constant".

I have failed two days, to different degrees. That's part of it.
Have i Cheated and failed? Yes, quite a few days. The fails started happening around 2 weeks in. However,

By 2024-12-10, I was completely back. So around 17 days. Those were some really productive days.

Conclusion

Quite good result. I ended up slowly going back to the status quo, just standard levels of doom scrolling.

Experiment 1 - No doom-scrolling 2024-11

Okay, so the first try was somewhat a success. I learned a few things about myself and the usage of doom-scrolling. I'm going to reboot the experiment, but with some tweaks. For example, allowing an hour of doom-scrolling every day. Just for relaxation.

Duration

Rules

Banned

Permitted