The Power of the Mental Workout
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
Some people view reading as though it’s homework, making a list of the books they intend to get through in a given month or year. But perhaps a better approach is to view reading as a mental workout. As Ilana Masad wrote recently, “There are many ways to advance your skill and capacity as a reader: Some of us are naturally drawn to detailed nonfiction, and others must learn to love it; some may have a taste for meandering, multigenerational epics, while their friends must train to build up the attention span they need.”
Instead of deciding how many books you’d like to read this year, it might be worth considering which “muscles” you’d like to strengthen in your brain. Today’s newsletter explores reading, puzzles, and other forms of exercise for the brain—including the physical kind.
On Mental Workouts
The Most Controversial Game on the Internet
By Elaine Godfrey
Wyna Liu, the editor of the New York Times game Connections, discusses her process and the particular ire her puzzles inspire.
Five Books That Offer Readers Intellectual Exercise
By Ilana Masad
Each of these titles exercises a different kind of reading muscle, so that you can choose the one that will push you most.
Six Books That Feel Like Puzzles
By Ilana Masad
These titles represent an eclectic mix of various styles and moods, but any one of them will be exactly right if you want a brainteaser.
Still Curious?
- Why one neuroscientist started blasting his core: A new anatomical understanding of how movement controls the body’s stress-response system (from 2016)
- Walking for a better brain: When a 70-year-old man walked the length of the United States in 1909, he sparked a conversation that ultimately changed medicine’s ideas about the value of exercise in old age. (From 2014)
Other Diversions
- Doomed to be a tradwife
- Invisible habits are driving your life.
- What Taylor Swift understands about love
P.S.
I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “I attached a macro lens to my phone and a world opened up that I had never seen before,” Robin H, 73, from Orinda, California, writes. “I took this photo while admiring the beautiful symmetry of this cactus at the UC Botanical Garden. When I got home and looked at my pictures I saw there was a tiny aphid on the plant which had been invisible to the naked eye. It reminds me of the beauty and fragility of our world.”
I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.