SearchResearch (10/29/25): The 1 trick you need to know to use AI for deeper, better reading
Dan Russell
Wednesday, October 29, 2025
SearchResearch (10/29/25): The 1 trick you need to know to use AI for deeper, better reading
I absolutely adore...
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| P.G. Wodehouse. P/C Wikimedia |
... the writings of P. G. Wodehouse. Whenever I need a lift in the old spirits, I pluck a volume from the bookshelf of Wooster and Jeeves, I read a bit, and in the blink of an eye, all is right with the world. As Wodehouse might say, God is in His heaven and the celestial choirs sing again.
If you don't know Wodehouse, drop what you're doing and read a short story or two. Better yet, pick up a Wodehouse novel and dive in.
I'd recommend Right Ho, Jeeves, which is an excellent place to start.
The writing is droll and the language--especially the language--just tickle my humorous bones.
BUT, Wodehouse is satirizing the language and behaviors of the early 1900s upper class. They are a rich vein to mine, but roughly once each page, there is a phrase or word that escapes my understanding or offers up a nuance that completely misses my brain.
For instance:
Butter-and-egg man (An investor with a lot of money)
Absquatulate (To depart suddenly or abscond)
Cattywampus (Used to mean something that was directly across from something else, as opposed to its modern meaning of being askew or in disarray)
Those are fairly easy to look up. But the more tricky phrases are things like:
"Only that she’s a blister.”
Or...
"Deprived of Anatole’s services, all he was likely to give the wife of his b. was a dirty look."
I know what a blister is, but the obvious definition makes no sense here. And what is "...the wife of his b."? That's clearly not the end of a sentence, but feels like an abbreviation for something--but what?
Here's where your friendly, local LLM comes in handy. Here's what I did to figure out each expression: I asked an LLM (Gemini in this case) to explain it to me in the context of the book...
This is a brilliant use of an AI to augment your ability to deeply read a text.
On the other hand, use caution: AI still makes mistakes, and they can be subtle.
Here I asked a question about the mention of a device in a book written about the same time as Wodehouse:
This completely checks out. (Of course I double check everything. Don't you?) The Veeder box is indeed a type of odometer made at the time.
However... see this next part of the explanation:
That mention of "By the time Evelyn Gibb and her husband were bicycling the West Coast in 1909..." is completely made up. The book is NOT about Evelyn Gibb and her husband, but is about Vic McDaniel and Ray Francisco, friends who cycled 1,000 miles from Santa Rosa, California, to Seattle, Washington, for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. The author (Evelyn Gibb) is Vic's daughter, not his wife.
SearchResearch Lessons
1. Using an AI to give insights into obscure texts can be incredibly handy. By virtue of having ingested so much text, an AI can often give you a perspective about a fragment of text that you don't understand.
2. CAUTION: Check everything--there are still hallucinations about! Double check everything!
Hope you find this useful SRS method!
Keep searching.
