July 24. We only make it outside for a few minutes. It’s just too hot, ninety-five degrees. In the half hour before sunrise I ran six hill repeats, at still only seventy-five degrees. The steady hum of the air conditioners.

I’ve always thought one of the advantages of electronic reading was that you could mark passages, but hide those marks as needed. In fact, that option is nowhere, on any of my devices, any of my apps. I don’t want to read a book that is full of markings anymore, it seems unbearably distorted to me. At least I can just delete the marks completely again, then the book is like new. From the good reader I want to be, I would expect not to need markings, but to enter into conversation with the book as with a human being.

At the same time, I urgently need to deal with my books much more intensively. The vast majority of what I have read by Susan Sontag I cannot reproduce argumentatively.

I put about five of Bill Gates’ annual recommendations on my reading list. I shudder at them. These books give me arguments, but they leave me so empty inside that I almost suffocate. You wouldn’t think someone my age would be so clueless about what reading material they need to survive.