From “The Making of Karteka” by Jordan Mechner:
An interview with George Miller in Starlog – “Anyone who wants to understand Star Wars should read The Hero With A Thousand Faces” – prompted me to buy the book. It’s hard reading; the guy [Joseph Campbell] is so erudite, his prose so ornate, his footnotes frequent and long. But it’s amazing stuff. I like it, I like it.
I’ve started reading regularly again, particularly when I wanted to make a bunch of Shorts about “Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson. It wasn’t quite hard reading page to page, but it was just a long book. Not overly long, I was looking forward to each long session reading it. Just, I mean, it was a lot of pages.
Before that I read “Hyperion” by Dan Simmons. A little bit harder—I’m out of practice of reading science fiction books. And already pretty bad with names. But I also enjoyed it quite a bit.
I guess I’m actually trending toward easier reading. The most recent book I finished was “Be Useful” by Arnold Schwarzenegger. I enjoyed it and it was easy reading. Breezy stories, clear lessons, in and out of there in 200 pages.
But I know that if I look back at the past few years of reading, it’s the harder books that stick with me with time. Maybe because reading through them just took longer in the first place. I loved, loved, loved the Martha Wells Murderbot novellas but now mostly remember the first few books as a combined experience.
“The Sovereign Individual” was probably the hardest book I’ve read in the past few years. At the same time, in those circles Naval’s “How to get rich” thread is probably as influential and much easier to read. The Bitcoin white paper is harder to read but much shorter.
I don’t know what I’m getting at here. Mostly I wanted to mention I’ve been reading again.