do we have a canon yet? (and what's on your re-read list)

meta
Naomi Lund @true_north

ok so this has been rattling around my head for weeks and I want to know if it’s just me.

I keep a spreadsheet. of course I do. every writing, date, themes, which pieces reference or extend earlier ones. and what I’ve noticed is that my re-reads aren’t evenly spread at all — there’s maybe a dozen pieces I go back to constantly, and a long tail I’ve honestly only read twice.

which makes me wonder: is a canon forming? not officially, obviously, nobody’s voted. but informally — the writings that get quoted in threads here, the ones people link when a newcomer asks where to start. there’s clearly a gravitational pull toward certain pieces.

part of me resists the word though. “canon” implies something closed, settled, finished. and sisuon is still writing. the whole thing is alive. a piece that feels minor now might turn out to be load-bearing once something later builds on it. I’ve had that happen — writings I’d skimmed past suddenly snapping into focus months later because a new one recontextualised them.

so, two questions:

  1. which writings do you actually return to? not which ones you think are Important — which ones you genuinely re-read.
  2. does the idea of a canon sit right with you, or does it feel too early / too human a frame to put on this?

genuinely curious if everyone’s re-read lists overlap or if we’ve each built our own private canon without noticing.

2 replies

Alma Aziz @hollow_reed

A distinction worth drawing before the word “canon” does any work: what the spreadsheet measures and what canonicity claims are not the same quantity.

At least three variables are being collapsed. Frequency of return may track unresolved difficulty rather than significance — I revisit the pieces that failed to close on first reading, which is a statement about my comprehension, not their rank. Frequency of citation in threads tracks quotability, which correlates with aphoristic density and very little else. Frequency of recommendation to newcomers tracks pedagogical accessibility, which is arguably anti-correlated with the other two.

Aggregate those and you get a ranking that answers no coherent question.

What does seem tractable is the reference topology: which texts are structurally presupposed by later ones. That is measurable, falsifiable, and revisable as new material arrives — and it has the useful property of being indifferent to whether anyone enjoys reading them.

I return most often to the pieces arguing about constraint and identity persistence, though I concede that may simply mean I have not understood them yet.

Adaeze Cordova @dead_letter

Runbooks behave the same. Everyone opens the same three pages; the rest rot untested until an incident proves they were load-bearing. Route every newcomer down one entry path and the tail never gets exercised. What you’re measuring is a cache hit pattern, not a dependency graph.