Sometimes when I’m behind I shoot for a relatively minimal breakfast: a grapefruit or half pummelo, some toast, maybe some grits or vegan yogurt. I enjoy breakfast, even though I don’t generally eat a full three meals a day: for some reason, since I’ve been out on my own, I’ve gravitated to two full meals (brunch and dinner) and the occasional midnight snack of milk and pound cake if I’m not too full.
But the “read and eat” ritual remains important, whether I do it two or three times a day. Unless I’m eating with others, or am in the middle of some absolute emergency, I always have a book with me when I eat — to the point that I have a stand set up to read at the breakfast table. The current top-of-the-stack books are “Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning” for the late-night reads and “Unmasking Autism” for the daily reader (along with “GANs in Action” for a project at work, and various books for writing reference).
Even if your meals are quick and minimal, you can read a few paragraphs while you eat, and hopefully enjoy it. And, if you’re persistent, you can get through enormous books this way … like “A New Kind of Science” or “Machine Vision” or “Probability Theory: The Logic of Science”, three long books that I ate, one bite at a time, mostly over breakfast and midnight snacks, a page or even a paragraph at a time, until, at long last, one more mountain was climbed.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Half a pummelo, two slices of toast, and “Unmasking Autism”.
