books
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Three worthwhile modes of note-making (and one not-so-worthwhile).
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Making notes will aid your short-term memory, even when you haven’t got one.
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“Small pieces loosely joined”. — From fragments you can build a greater whole.
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“Everything is miscellaneous”. — What does it mean to write from the bottom up instead of from the top down?
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“The smartest person in the room is the room”. — The mastery of knowledge is an illusion.
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“The Internet is not made out of content”. — What comes after content?
- A video interview with the author.
- A summary of the argument, adapted from the introduction: The Surprising New Significance of Shu Ha Ri in Postwar Karatedo.
- A 1983 BBC documentary about Okinawan karate: The Way of the Warrior: Karate, the Way of the Empty Hand. This is extraordinary and a real classic! (mentioned in a footnote on p.97).
Memory isn’t a static recording but a constant act of reconstruction. Every time we revisit a note or a book, we are weaving together the original content with our current environment and past self.
“We construct and reconstruct our memories every time we attempt to recall them.”
So how do we decide what’s worth preserving and what we must allow ourselves to forget? Explore the “differential allocation of attentional resources” in this look at the fallibility of memory.
Link: writingslowly.com/2026/05/1…
#CognitiveScience #Philosophy #Memory
There’s a unique magic in the physical bookshelf. It acts as a spatial memory palace where a spine or a colour can trigger a flood of recollection. ‘Remembering What you Read’ looks at why reorganising a library feels like reorganising a mind, and what it really means to be “well-read” in this time of digital summaries and ephemeral content.
“The book shelves are a kind of ‘memory palace’ for the books themselves. In fact this realisation is quite important to me.”
#Bookstodon #HomeLibrary #ReadingLife
Remembering what you read
One of the chief uses of note-making is to help you to remember what you read.
But it’s not as simple as imagining your notes are just an ‘aide memoire’.
When you make notes you forget your reading and replace it with the future opportunity to read again not the original book but your own notes on it. So making notes is inevitably a process of interpretation, which involves the occlusion of the original work, albeit in the name of preserving it.
Psychologists, including Ciara Greene and Gillian Murphy, authors of Memory Lane: The perfectly imperfect ways we remember (Princeton UP, 2025) believe “we construct and reconstruct our memories every time we attempt to recall them”.
So when we re-read our notes, does that mean we’re reconstructing our memories of the book, or just the memories of our notes? These elements in time are all intertwined: the content of the book itself, the environment in which we read it in the first place, the environment of the place where the notes were made, the notes themselves, and the circumstances in which, later, perhaps much later, we recollect all these factors by re-reading the notes in a new context.
And you do actually remember at least some of what you’ve read. Your reading, or a part of it anyway, sticks in your memory in ineffable ways. Without thinking about it, you have been engaging in what literary scholar Andrew Elfenbein calls ’the differential allocation of attentional resources.’ But how?
This cat has allocated his attentional resources, differentially.
Yesterday I spent a little while looking over the bookshelves in our house, reminding myself of some the books I’ve read and noticing what I haven’t read yet. It was an odd experience because what I remembered of each book varied widely.
I remembered many of the titles, and seeing their spines was a prompt to remember their contents. A surprising number of books I’d forgotten I had ever read, but seeing them again enabled my memories of their contents to come flooding back. A few books I had no memory of having read, even though I’m pretty sure I must have done. And a few more books I was convinced I had never actually owned and vaguely remember thinking I ought to buy a copy.
I suspect the memory-aiding features of the bookshelf itself are qualitatively different from those of a plain list of the books in that bookshelf. The book shelves are a kind of ‘memory palace’ for the books themselves. In fact this realisation is quite important to me. It might explain why I get frustrated when someone reorganises these books: they’re literally reorganising my memory.
Now I’m minded to take photos of these shelves, so that as I dispose of my books (it’s a working library after all) I can at least look back on how they used to be.
All this got me wondering: what does it mean to be ‘well-read’ when you can only partially remember what you’ve read?
Perhaps being well-read is really only something that can emerge in your writing, not as something you carry around with you in your memory. Or is it about the way you weave your reading into your conversation? These days it seems as though being well-read might just be a mark of someone washed up from a previous era, before there were mobile phones and AI summaries of everything.
Scan your own shelves today. Is there a book staring back at you that you have no memory of reading? Or one where the spine alone brings the whole story back? I’d love to hear about the books that have stayed with you, or about the ones that vanished entirely.
If our notes eventually replace the books themselves, we are essentially building a library of our own interpretations. Does this feel like a loss of the original work to you, or a necessary step in making the ideas your own? How do you decide what is worth ‘preserving’ in your notes, and what do you allow yourself to forget?
In an age of instant AI summaries, the slow act of reading and note-making feels almost counter-cultural. Do you find that digital tools change how you remember what you read? Or do you still find that the physical presence of a book, its size and colour, its place on a shelf, is what makes the memory stick? I’d like to know about your own ‘memory-aiding’ systems in the comments.
Meanwhile, here’s a podcast about what we remember, having first read:
What we remember after reading, with Andrew Elfenbein | How To Read Podcast
And here’s a podcast about the fallibility of memory, and why that might actually be a good thing:
Memory Lane | Princeton UP Ideas Podcast
I’ve written a lot on making notes, including:
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And you can also buy my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters.
‘Beginner's mind’ keeps you young — even in your 80s
Stewart Brand was on the Ezra Klein Show, talking about his new book Maintenance: Of Everything. He’s well into his eighties, and he said:
“Looking into the things that you’re not good at, especially intellectually, is one way to stay young, because you’ve got a beginner’s mind.”
Well now, it was Shunryu Suzuki, the Japanese monk who brought Zen to Northern California, who famously spoke of ‘beginner’s mind’. He said:
“When we have no thought of achievement, no thought of self, we are true beginners. Then we can learn something. The beginner’s mind is the mind of compassion. When our mind is compassionate, it is boundless… The most difficult thing is always to keep your beginner’s mind. … This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner” – Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginners Mind: Prologue.
Brand’s mention of beginner’s mind isn’t the only Japanese concept he references. The cover of Maintenance: Of Everything alludes to kintsugi, the art of repairing broken pottery by means of gold lacquer. With kintsugi, instead of hiding the cracks, you honour them.
You can read the interview’s transcript, or just listen.
My source for this little nugget was Austin Kleon, who also has a new book out in September 2026: Don’t Call it Art.
Meanwhile, I’ve written more about beginner’s mind, and why the greatest experts are serial beginners.
In Influence is everything I’ve mentioned Stewart Brand’s idea of ‘pace layering’.
“Pace layers is an idea Stewart Brand first developed in the 1990s. Civilization, he argued, works as a set of nested layers, each moving at a different speed: fashion changes fastest, then commerce, then infrastructure, governance, culture, and finally nature, which changes slowest of all. The fast layers are where novelty happens, but the slow layers provide stability. Healthy societies need both.
Each layer also requires its own kind of maintenance—and when any of them gets neglected, the whole system suffers.”
And I’ve also reflected on Austin Kleon’s advice about Sharing what you know.
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I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
And if you found this article interesting you might like to sign up to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest. You’ll receive all the week’s posts in the classic email format that never gets old and never goes out of fashion.
Notes about notebooks?
Ulkar Aghayeva writes about the history of laboratory notebooks.
Aghayeva, U. “A Brief History of Lab Notebooks.” Asimov Press (2026). DOI: 10.62211/52wg-76ye
Source: Scott Nesbitt’s The Monday Kickoff - well worth subscribing to.
#notetaking #notebooks #historyofscience
Holy mother of cheeses, the Internet is not made out of content
Holy mother of cheeses, the Internet is not made out of content.
💬 “The Net is not content.
There is great content on the Internet. But holy mother of cheeses, the Internet is not made out of content.
A teenager’s first poem, the blissful release of a long-kept secret, a fine sketch drawn by a palsied hand, a blog post in a regime that hates the sound of its people’s voices — none of these people sat down to write content.
Did we use the word “content” without quotes? We feel so dirty.” — Doc Searles and David Weinberger, New Clues
Plenty of my thoughts about writing, and writing for the Web, are really just paraphrases of something David Weinberger has already said with far greater eloquence and perspicacity.
And what do you know? the author has a new book out in October 2026:
No doubt Beautiful Particulars will also help reshape my brain, and maybe yours too.
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
And if this article piqued your interest you might like to sign up to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest, where you’ll find yourself in an exclusive club whose privileged members just get a weekly email.
The real science behind Project Hail Mary
Yes, there is some real science behind 📚 Project Hail Mary.
It’s an enjoyable and successful sci-fi novel and film, but the science fiction is frankly quite a bit more fiction than science.
It would hardly give away the plot of Project Hail Mary to mention that it has a lot to do with the microbial contamination of experimental research. I mean, that’s what the story is about – in the same way Andy Weir’s previous novel, The Martian, was all about potato farming.
If this floats your spaceship (microbes I mean, not potatoes), you might enjoy a fascinating article about the real science of microbial contamination in experimental contexts. Apparently there’s a bacteriophage called Φ80 and it’s running amok.
How Φ80 infiltrates research labs.
Scary stuff! Perhaps someone will turn it into a movie.
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
And if you found this article interesting you might like to sign up to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest. You’ll receive all the week’s posts in that handy email format you know and love.
Finished reading Trip to the Moon by John Yorke
Trip to the Moon by John Yorke 📚 sets out the author’s deeply-considered views on the nature of story and goes further than his previous work on the same theme, Into the Woods.
John Yorke is a highly experienced writer and producer for British TV, and here he presents invaluable insights into how stories really work, from the perspective of someone who absolutely knows what he’s talking about. I found the section on non-western story-forms very interesting, and though I wasn’t convinced by the claim that stories in all cultures are basically fueled by ‘some bastardization of the hero’s journey’, just hearing the argument made by a true expert was very helpful.
More convincing - and worrying - was the claim that effective storytellers ‘unshackle us from empirical observation by drugging us with rage or anger or pleasure.’ Indeed, if this book has a single key theme, it might be that telling stories is a uniquely dangerous skill, whose seductive power we’d do well to understand much better than we do.
The insights of Trip to the Moon are profound, though a more rigorous edit would have served the work well. In places the text feels unbalanced. Crucial developments are often truncated in the main chapters only to resurface in the lengthy commentary at the back. Despite this imbalance, the author’s body of work remains vital for any aspiring writer. Start with Into the Woods before tackling this more fragmented sequel.
Leonard Koren on Life as an Aesthetic Experience
I’ve never been much of a bathing person. Perhaps that’s due to unpleasantly lingering memories of luke warm water in freezing cold bathrooms in the UK when I was a child. The bath was fine enough, but getting out would be a real test. Even bathing, as an adult, in natural hot springs on Orcas Island in the US Pacific Northwest didn’t really do it for me. That was a little ‘rustic’, and not in a good way.
True, swimming here in Sydney where I live is fabulous, especially in the Summer, when the cool refreshment of the ocean waves is totally restorative. But bathing? Not so much. Until a few months ago, that is, when I visited Japan.
📚Tsundoku emergency temporarily averted.
Some books I read before visiting Japan.
#reading #Japantravel #shuhari
After launching my book on the Japanese concept of Shu Ha Ri I’m visiting Japan itself soon to research another concept that’s become a minor obsession.
I’m particularly interested in traditional Japanese gardens and in traditional crafts, so where should go? If you know Japan, what tips have you got to share?
#Japan #shuhari #Japantravel #Japanesegardens
Mastering Any Skill, the Japanese Way
📚 A review of Analysis of Shu Ha Ri in Karate-Do: When a Martial Art Becomes a Fine Art by Hermann Bayer, Ph.D.
Most people believe that mastery of a skill comes from practicing harder and longer. ‘10,000 hours of deliberate practice’ has achieved a level of imperative unwarranted by the actual evidence (Epstein, 2021). Yet countless learners, whether in business, the arts, or sport, hit a plateau they can’t break through. The problem isn’t effort. It’s that they’re missing a hidden progression that separates the true experts from the merely experienced.
For centuries, Japanese masters have understood this journey. It has three distinct phases, Shu, Ha, Ri, and each demands a different mindset and approach. Skip one, and your growth stalls. Get them right, and you move beyond imitation into competence and ultimately mastery. Unlike many Western theories of learning, it’s not a linear set of stages to be climbed like the rungs of a ladder: instead it’s a cycle, a spiral of increasing competence where the earliest phase is never forgotten.
Hermann Bayer’s Analysis of Shu Ha Ri in Karate-Do is one of the clearest and most extensive explanations of this progression I’ve encountered. While his examples come from Okinawan karate, his real subject is the universal process of moving from novice to master, potentially in any discipline.
Bayer brings to his writing both deep scholarship and decades of martial arts expertise. This shows, but the book remains reasonably accessible for general readers. He unpacks philosophical ideas without jargon, showing exactly how they play out in practice. One of his most important clarifications is effectively a major theme of the book: Shu Ha Ri is not an Okinawan tradition. Despite its frequent modern association with karate, Bayer shows that the concept comes from Japanese fine arts, especially from the tea ceremony, and only entered karate after karate’s fairly recent introduction to mainland Japan, in 1922. This detail is more than just historical trivia; it changes how you see the concept. Shu Ha Ri is not tied to a single fighting style, and certainly not to karate. It’s potentially a transferable blueprint for mastering any complex skill.
Although Shu Ha Ri has wide applicability and has been adopted in many different disciplines, Bayer does focus heavily on karate, and on its Okinawan origins. This is the author’s specialist field. He is, after all the author of the two-volume Analysis of Genuine Karate, which explores Okinawa as the cradle of true karate. So readers curious about Shu Ha Ri, but with limited interest in karate and Okinawan history may wish for more examples from other disciplines. But the underlying framework is so universal that the author’s examples still work. You don’t need to know a kata from a kumite to apply what you learn.
If you are a practitioner of Karate, I suspect after reading this book you’ll never see it in quite the same way. But what makes the concept of Shu Ha Ri valuable beyond martial arts is its potential application to any field where performance and creativity matter. For instance, writers might see how to move from imitating their influences to developing a unique voice. Leaders might understand when to enforce process and when to encourage innovation. Artists, athletes, and entrepreneurs might recognise the moment to step beyond rules without losing their foundation.
If you care about personal growth and continuous improvement, or want a proven roadmap to mastery, this book will give you both the theory and the practical insight to get there. By the time you finish it, you won’t just understand Shu Ha Ri, you’ll be inspired to integrate this learning philosophy into your own life. And in case you were tempted, you will never again confuse Shu Ha Ri with the historical traditions of Okinawan karate.
Details
Analysis of Shu Ha Ri in Karate-Do: When a Martial Art Becomes a Fine Art by Hermann Bayer, Ph.D. (June 2025, ISBN: 9781594399954)
Purchase directly from the publisher, YMAA.
Resources
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters. It’s a short and accessible introduction to the concept, available now.
And if you enjoyed this review, you may like to subscribe to the weekly Writing Slowly email digest.
The cat is characteristically ecstatic to see that the proofs of the new book have arrived. Not long now before it’s published!
Update: I did it. Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters is now available. I hope you enjoy it!
#amwriting #booklaunch #comingsoon #nonfiction
As Alan Jacobs says, reading more books and reading books more - they’re not the same thing.
I designed a book in three and a half hours
A while ago, well, quite a long while ago, I designed a book in three and a half hours. Fun, yes, but it wasn’t very publishable.
Now, years later, I’ve finally got round to updating and redesigning the whole thing.
Yes, I’m still writing slowly but I’m excited to say it will soon be available for sale - so watch this space for more information.
Worth repeating and re-repeating:
“the evidence shows that regularising migration is a positive-sum game, in economic, social and security terms.”
A definitive study of a hotly debated phenomenon: migration into Europe and America, its socioeconomic impacts, and the eternal policy efforts to stop the inevitable.
#migration
A search for meaning in the palace of lost memories: Thoughts on Piranesi, a novel by Susanna Clarke
Susanna Clarke’s novel Piranesi has got me thinking about memory, identity, the fallibility of writing, and the paradox that intrinsic value might be created rather than found
Finished reading: This Is Happiness by Niall Williams 📚
A shaggy dog story in the best possible sense. I re-read several passages to try to work out how the author achieved his almost magical prose. Friends who read it said they felt not much happened. I felt not much happened, miraculously.
Daniel Wisser’s notecards as art and archive
Daniel Wisser’s exhibition in Vienna features 60 index cards with sketches of stories displayed in a note box (Zettelkasten).