Jacob Shymanski

The things about tuberculosis that make it so fascinating.

So highly recommend Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green.

And when you get those bits of reflection from the author, where I've seen this sort of thing, where an author might say, well, X thing is this way because of Y. But after some thinking, I started asking questions, this question and that question.

It wasn't all quite adding up.

And so I had to look in a different place.

And I found this and that.

It shows that the author isn't arrogant.

That the author is questioning themselves, that they're actually taking it deeply and not just writing something for their vanity to be this godlike voice in people's ears.

Because I swear to God, that's what it is for some authors sometimes.

I'll add another do to this list.

A good quality for nonfiction to have is to be able to connect the story of individuals to bigger ideas, but also the other way around.

Connect bigger ideas to how they affect individuals.

Explain how people affect the world and how the world affects people.

You need to talk about both individuals and the big picture.

And you can't focus on just one of them, otherwise it's shallow.

If you're just talking about a person, then it's like disconnected from the world.

It's like, why do I care about just a single person in a vacuum?

Why do I care about the entire world without connecting to the people within it?

There has to be a connection between the two.

And a book that I can recommend along these lines is Careless People by Sarah Witt Williams, which I've talked about on the show before.