We spent the tail end of 2022 reading Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium, which is a set of Norton Lectures Calvino was preparing to give at Harvard in 1985-1986. He died before he could deliver them, and only five of the six memos were finished. The published book contains those five: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity.

The book is short. It is also incredibly dense. These are lectures about what Calvino thought literature needed to carry into the next thousand years, and they read less like a set of essays and more like an attempt to …

Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers by Peter Golenbock is exactly what it says on the tin. It is an oral history, which means the book is stitched together mostly out of firsthand accounts - players, managers, executives, sportswriters, and fans - with Golenbock providing just enough connective tissue to keep the timeline moving.

We read it in the fall of 2022 and it turned out to be one of the better baseball books we have picked up. Below are our notes, chapter by chapter.

The Setup

The Brooklyn Dodgers were, until 1957, one of the two National League teams …

This is a quick hack, but a useful one.

Here's the hack:

• Create a new and separate Gmail address, whose purpose is to be a "reading material" email address. The purpose of this email address is to sign up for mailing lists and reading material - that's it.

• Once you have done that, log in to your primary email address. Find every mailing list you're subscribed to, and unsubscribe. This will give you a massive feeling of relief.

• Sign up for the mailing lists you wish to keep on your reading list, but this time do it using the new mailing …