Each week, the Sunday Post highlights just a few things we loved reading and want to share with you. Settle in with a cup of coffee, or tea, if that's your pleasure — we saved you a seat! Read an essay or an article online that you loved? Let us know at submissions@seattlereviewofbooks.com. Need more browse? You can also look through the archives.

What I thought was going to be a relaxed work week turned out to be full of big, amorphous projects. It felt very overwhelming. I would come home and stew with my eyes glazed over, scrolling through the never-ending content engine of the Internet. Strangely (or perhaps not strangely at all—eek!), the algorithms of Twitter and Youtube guided me to these three pieces. Though disparate and not exactly fresh off the presses, they are all about how little things build up to big, complex, and magnificent ends. They are about the craft of writing and research, the way the mechanics of music turns a sonata into storytelling, and how amateurs build the collective knowledge of the internet. They reminded me of the value of incremental work when things felt hard and mediocre and small, when my brain couldn’t work hard enough or fingers fast enough.

Robert Caro, The Art of Biography No. 5

Writing is hard. It’s marketed as an art form, but that’s only the final product. Most of the time it’s sawing and whittling. I have to massage the tailless thoughts in my head into coherent sentences, move paragraphs around over and over again until they form an internal logic. Here’s one of my favorite pieces from _The Paris Review_ that I reread this week: the biographer Robert Caro’s interview, where he shares his rigorous, intensive process to even begin to write.

Before I start writing, I boil the book down to three paragraphs, or two or one—that’s when it comes into view. That process might take weeks. And then I turn those paragraphs into an outline of the whole book. That’s what you see up on here on my wall now—twenty-seven typewritten pages…. Then with the whole book in mind, I go chapter by chapter. I sit down at the typewriter and type an outline of that chapter, let's say if it's a long chapter, seven pages—it's really the chapter in brief, without any of the supporting evidence. Then, each chapter gets a notebook, which I fill with all the materials I want to use—quotations and facts pulled from all of the research I've done.

Beethoven’s Spring Sonata: Interpretation Classes, Boston Philharmonic Orchestra

Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic and music teacher, is one of the most charismatic people on the internet (see this TED talk), and he hosts interpretation classes for students and audiences in the Boston Public Library. Zander brings his interpretation of the composer’s intention to the mechanics of the music: the tempo, the key signature, the specifics of the collaboration between soloist and accompanist. Watching any of these classes is a joyful experience as you witness an already excellent musician transform into an artist and storyteller. You can watch the whole series here.

Wikipedia is the Last Best Place on the Internet

I love Wikipedia, so I’m so glad to have found an ode to it. Sure, the online encyclopedia’s pages are not a valid citation, but on the whole it’s a great resource to find the basics of anything you care about: Japanese dwarf flying squirrels, the GDP per capita of Mozambique, Sophie Turner’s birthday, game theory. In this ghastly season of the Internet, it’s nice to know there are throngs of amateur pedants correcting each other to create a pretty damn good encyclopedia, the most comprehensive one in existence:

Wikipedia, in other words, isn't raised up wholesale, like a barn; it's assembled grain by grain, like a termite mound. The smallness of the grains, and of the workers carrying them, makes the project's scale seem impossible. But it is exactly this incrementalism that puts immensity within reach.