Reading Observatory

A Decade of Reading,
in Numbers.

13 years of highlights, tags, and marginalia — extracted and indexed from 832 books, 854 articles, and 494 tweets.

Total Highlights 31,166 across all sources
Sources Indexed 2,180 books, articles, tweets
Reading Span 13 years (April 2012 – March 2026)
Longest Streak 39 consecutive days
01

Reading Timeline

Highlights captured per year, April 2012 to present.

128 2012 475 2013 1,619 2014 1,672 2015 1,508 2016 313 2017 322 2018 21 2019 1,199 2020 1,294 2021 9,034 2022 PEAK 3,226 2023 2,878 2024 4,119 2025 3,358 2026

Peak year: 2022 (9,034 highlights) · Average: 239/month

02

Subject Index

Agentic Design 1,736
2026 Roadmap 673
Context Engineering 553
Agentic Philosophy 551
Agentic Workflows 492
Tool Design 486
Product Philosophy 478
Agentic Concepts 399
Big Ideas 351
Data Engineering 348
Agentic Coding 318
Software Design 297
Critical Insights 287
Review 229
Wisdom 196
03

Most Annotated Sources

04

From the Collection

A handful of highlights marked as favorites over the years.

Ref. EBE7-V
"The president had worried that the peacekeepers would interfere with his military campaign, and prevent him from taking power. Thousands of deaths in the genocide could have been avoided, besides the scores of civilians his forces had killed. But the..."

Anjan Sundaram

Bad News
Ref. 056E-R
"What then was the truth about how people were faring? The president was declaring to the world that he was creating progress: he was growing the country’s economy, reducing poverty, reducing hunger. But he suppressed verification of these claims."

Anjan Sundaram

Bad News
Ref. 8E33-U
"The term abstraction is closely related to the idea of modular design. An abstraction is a simplified view of an entity, which omits unimportant details."
Ref. E8CD-B
"It’s much more difficult to protect data and enforce access control policies across a multi-cloud architecture, which opens up a wider range of security vulnerabilities. Without a rigorous, centralized approach to identity management, governance and ..."
05

Recent Acquisitions