A Self-Taught Education
The Apprenticeship
Teaching myself to read like a critic
I was the first person in my family to go to college. A literature degree was never really in the cards — there wasn't the time or the money to go chase one for its own sake. But the reading never let up, and neither did the itch to say something sharp about what I'd just read.
So this is me doing it myself, the long way. No degree, no MFA, no committee to please. Just a method, a reading list, and the nerve to publish what I find and be wrong in public. Giving myself the education out loud, and getting a little better with each book.
One rule runs the whole thing: a review is an argument, not a summary. Every book here, I'm trying to prove one thing about it. Everything below is how I get to that claim with the evidence already in hand.
The Program
One lens, run on everything
I read through a single question: how does each character relate to the system above them, and what does the story reveal about how power actually runs? I call it the parapolitical lens. Fiction as a model of the deep state. It works on a border cartel and it works just as well on King Arthur, where the Round Table stops being chivalry and turns into a protection racket.
Every book gets the same treatment, so the reps compound. Read it, mark it up with a purpose (not just underline the good line, write down why I underlined it), log the moments that matter with the page, then build those notes into a claim.
Annotating is a conversation, not a highlighter. A note that says "why did I mark this?" a week later is a dead note.
Seasons, not a random pile
The hard reading is structured. Three or four heavy books through one lens, in order, section by section. That's The Deep Reads — Gnostic villains, engineered conspiracies, the tradition Lovecraft came out of, Bolaño's border, and more.
In between the seasons I read my trash and review that too. You don't get sharper by only reviewing the canon. You get sharper by reviewing everything, and the throwaway thriller often teaches the method faster than the masterpiece.
The loop that does the work
Read a stretch. Annotate it as I go. Write it up into an argument. Publish the dispatch on the Substack, put the video on the channel. Then do it again next week.
The point isn't the hot take. It's the loop. Fifty books read properly and written up honestly, and you back into knowing something real. That's not a metaphor. That's just how it gets built.
The essays are the transcript
There's no degree waiting at the end of this, so the work has to be the credential. Every review is a page of the transcript. If the method is any good, the writing gets sharper over time, and the whole point of doing it in public is that you get to watch that happen — the misses included.
That's the deal I'm making with anyone reading along: I learn in the open, I show my work, and I don't pretend I arrived already knowing.