By many peoples’ standards, I don’t actually actually own a lot of books. But, of the books I do own, I’ve probably read only about 70% of them. And of that 70%, I can’t even admit to reading each book in its entirety. This is intentional. I like cultivating a “home library,” which I believe must include an inventory of unread books awaiting future serendipitous re-discovery. I’m not alone in this. In Reading Well, Simon Sarris describes a similar personal philosophy:

You should buy books on a whim, whenever possible, enough that you start to forget about them. You shouldn’t know the whole contents of your own shelves. If you create a home library it should act as one: It is there for you to discover and rediscover, to get lost in.

For me, it’s a library, but for music.

I was thinking today about how I feel like I’m in a rut with my music library. I’ve spent an hour or two every day for weeks now cultivating my collection of music that has followed me for decades.

And I’m tired. All that weeding is hard work, even if it’s “just” carefully adding ID3 tags and the highest album art you can possibly find for each piece of music you have.

But the payoff is that I have an amazing garden, a well curated selection of tunes that provide answers to many of the questions I ask that can’t be specifically answered by books.

I also enjoy the Whim concept that Sean describes here. As I’m finding my attention being drawn away from the music (or, if I find my attention is drawn back into the music in a non-harmonious way), I pull it from the garden.

After all: if an album was meant to fit into my life somehow, it’ll find its way back in there.

I was listening to a podcast episode the other day while I was driving and in there there was a thought that stuck with me: the idea that the web is moving from a creator economy to a curator economy. With a web flooded with AI generated slop and the platforms themselves encouraging it, the role of curators is gonna become more and more important. Who knows, maybe with a digital world filled with low-quality garbage we’ll find refuge in old-school printed magazines.

I would love that!

I recently watched the Dogtown and Z-Boys documentary, and one point they made clear was that so much of early skateboarding culture was shaped by misfits around the country reading the same skateboarding magazines and being inspired by the same people.

Shared culture is something I find myself missing these days. Unless you and your friends are watching the same stuff, you quickly run out of things to talk about.

It’s great I have a place to talk with people about the indie web or large language models or The Simpsons, but I miss the larger, more generic topics that we can all bond over more easily together.