The Joys of a Good Readtreat
It’s a retreat—for reading!
“What are you doing for the New Year? Any plans?” My grandboss asked me a couple days after Christmas.
“Eh, I’m going to spend 4 days in a cabin in the woods with my best friend. Just reading. It’s a Readtreat!”
“You realize that sounds like the beginning of a horror film, right? Don’t read any Latin aloud or anything!”
Over the past few months, I’ve been more or less only reading books and articles that were directly related to product management, which narrowed my focus month over month. I didn’t want to continue on this one-dimensional direction, and a long holiday weekend felt like a great opportunity to reset!
Setting: An airbnb in Sonoma.
Cast: Sandi MacPherson & Anna Marie Clifton, two product people in the bay.
Props: 327 pages apiece. Articles ranging from issues in modern IPOs & AI-driven job automation to conversations around race, gender, and education.
Internet? Nope. 😳
We drove up on a blissful Friday afternoon and parked in the shaded driveway of our airbnb hosts, Emilie and Chris. We toured the area, let the puppy run around a bit, and then set to an unpacking frenzy to feed our nesting desires.
10 minutes and 10 bags later, we were ready to settle into our articles.
Step 1: Open a bottle of wine.
Step 2: Begin The White House Report on Artificial Intelligence
Step 3: Read 8 pages and then fall fast asleep!
Sandi threw a pillow at me when she noticed a half hour later, and for the rest of the trip she kept a tight watch on me. I must confess—as much as I love it, reading makes me drowsy. Wine, doubly so!
We read on for a few hours, but decided to wait till the morning for discussion, with fresher minds and brighter spirits.
Good thing! Who knew 3 short hours of reading would give us fodder for 2 non-stop hours of discussion!
While we had differing opinions on the overall value of the White House reports, the ideas presented sparked a number jumping off points, and dang—did we ever jump!
(We recorded the conversation, and after some investment in audio editing I’ll split the conversation up and publish as episodes of our podcast: Clearly Product.)
We followed that pattern for the next 4 days: read, discuss, rinse & repeat. Sometimes turning on the microphone to capture our banter, most times not. The hours between talking punctuated by popping LaCroixs, rustling crisp pages, and the nervous tick in my mind trying to deal without internet.
In our time we covered a good deal:
- Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence from The White House
- Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy from The White House
- Once More to the Lake by E. B. White
- Attitude by Margaret Atwood
- An Interview with Miranda July from The Believer
- A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart
- White Album by Joan Didion
- Against Joie de Vive by Phillip Lopate
- After life by Joan Didion
- Making House: Notes on Domesticity by Rachel Cusk
- The Bad Side of a Good Idea by The Collaborative Fund
(We also took a full day hiatus to plan goals for 2017, but more on that in a separate article.)
I fully expected to have a wonderful time discussing these treasures, and assumed (correctly) that these selections would challenge me emotionally and intellectually, but I wasn’t at all prepared for the raw improvement to my ability to read.
Learning is made of feedback loops, and after 11 rounds of this, I’m happy to report that my reading muscles have gotten significantly stronger.
And I’m not talking about the speed at which I consume letters on the page, or the fecundity of my vocabulary. I’m talking about my ability to stretch my mind around the author’s meaning, to address those ideas with critical exploration, and to fully absorb this new information into my general understanding of the world.
In short, all the modes of reading from Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book. All the reasons Sandi and I have a podcast about book reading!
Want to improve your general reading skills? Go on a Readtreat! Challenge your mind with a friend or five and the ideas of some strangers. You won’t regret it.
Great thanks to Diana Kimball, who continues to inspire me with ideas on reading, writing, and thinking. The original idea for Reatreat came from her article: Go on a Readtreat.
