💡 WiseUp! Vol. 89 — An abundance of book recs, reading themes, and more

📍 Let's start with a reading recommendation

12 Books That Will Make You Dangerously Well-Read

Something about fall and the back-to-school season makes Wisereads editor Abi yearn for serious reads. This list of recs from Thee Book Club delivers. "A well-read person is a dangerous person. They're harder to mislead, harder to impress, and harder to control. They understand what's being said and what's being hidden, their mind is alive, questioning weak ideas, and moving through life with a confidence that money can never buy."

From the support inbox

Have questions about using Readwise or Reader in your workflow? We'd love to be your guide! Reply to this email with your question and you might be featured in an upcoming issue. Even if your question isn’t featured, we’ll respond to every message.

❓ A Readwise question from Jay J:

Is there an easy way to check my Readwise highlights on my phone, other than through email?

Keep your favorite book quotes and insights close all day long, right on your iPhone home screen. The iOS Readwise widget rotates highlights from your library every few minutes, offering little reminders of the ideas that matter most. It’s a thoughtful way to stay inspired and get a nudge to keep up your Daily Review streak.

❓ A Reader question from Nikki F:

ICYMI: Can Reader’s text-to-speech voices sound more lifelike and natural?

Reader now has 16 new lifelike American and British English voices on web and mobile. While TTS is playing, select the waveform to open the voice picker, where you can preview each voice with the play button before choosing one. Which is your favorite? We'd love to know!

📖 New help doc of the week

ICYMI: Sweater weather, meet Sepia

We're not sure you all got the memo last week, and it's huge news in our world: READING THEMES HAVE ARRIVED! 🚨

Check out Cayla's doc to learn to enable Reader's new reading themes on mobile. Fall fans might spot a festive extra at the end of the list. (hint: it's warm, cozy, and inspired by the flagship fall drink.)

🎬 New video of the week

I read 20 books in a month to cure my stupidity

Twenty books in a month is ambitious, but kodekai's list is full of great reads, even if you just choose one.

📰 Oct 3 - Oct 9 updates

What's new in Reader and Readwise

🎙️ Improved Lifelike Pacing — Listening with a Lifelike voice in Reader could clip the start of the first word, drag out short lines like a single line of dialogue, and speed up or slow down from one paragraph to the next. Artem retuned how each passage is timed and where the pauses go, so the voices keep a steady, natural pace and every first word comes through whole.

⏯️ Fixed Text-to-Speech Stalls — Text-to-speech in Reader could stop partway through an article that used stylized letters (the kind some sites use for math or fancy headings), and some RSS articles took 20 seconds or more to start because Reader read the whole article as one giant paragraph. Tristan fixed both, so these articles start promptly and play through to the end.

👆 Improved Reading Menus — In the Reader app on mobile, a small scroll back up while reading could pop the menus open, and some taps meant to show them did nothing. Artem made revealing the menus take a deliberate pull, stopped the end of a scroll from counting as a tap, and let a tap with a tiny wobble still count, so the menus stay out of the way until you actually want them.

📄 Improved Paginated Mode — In the Reader app's paginated mode, the bottom of the previous page could peek in at the top of the screen, and switching a document from scrolling to pages could leave the last line of each page hidden under the footer. Artem fixed both and tightened how page breaks are measured, so each page starts and ends cleanly.

🔉 Fixed Volume Button Page Turns — On Android, the Reader app's option to turn pages with the volume buttons did nothing in the two-column Horizontal Pagination mode. Thanks to Artem, the volume buttons now turn pages in every paginated mode.

🖍️ Fixed Highlighting on iOS 27 — On iOS 27 with auto-highlighting turned off, dragging a selection handle in the Reader app to extend your selection and then tapping Highlight only saved the first word. Adam pointed the button at your current selection, so the whole passage gets highlighted.

🌙 Fixed Dark Mode PDFs — In the Reader app on iOS, a PDF you'd opened in dark mode could turn light after you locked your phone or pulled down Notification Center. Ibai made Reader reapply the dark theme when you come back, so PDFs stay dark.

✍️ Fixed Document Note Typing — Typing a document note in the Reader app on iOS made the newest word flash onto a second line with each keystroke, which looked like a duplicate line of text. Ibai fixed the note field's width, so your words stay put while you type.

📨 Fixed Newsletter Fonts — Substack and other newsletters opened in the original layout in the Reader app on iPhone and iPad showed their text in an old-fashioned Times font instead of the clean sans-serif you'd see in your inbox. Rasul gave those emails Reader's sans-serif as a fallback, and newly saved emails now keep their own body styles, so newsletters look the way their senders intended.

🪟 Fixed Right Panel on Narrow Windows — In Reader on the web, a window narrower than 1080px reopened the right panel over your document list every time you came back from a document, even after you'd closed it. Ibai made Reader remember your choice, so the panel stays closed.

✉️ Fixed Spark Mail Links — Saving a Spark Mail share link to Reader produced an empty document after Spark rebuilt its share pages. Ibai taught Reader to fetch the email itself, so shared Spark threads come through in full.

🧩 Improved Article Extraction — When Reader's usual parser came back with only a few words of an article, that's all you got, even when the full text was on the page. Krzys added a fallback, so Reader now tries its own extraction and keeps it whenever it finds substantially more of the article.

🍏 Fixed Sign in with Apple — Signing in with Apple could land you on a "page not found" error when you were signing in to connect something else, like the Reader desktop app, an AI assistant through the Readwise MCP connector, or a plugin. Ibai fixed how sign-in passes you along, so you end up where you were headed.

📚 Improved Apple Books Import — On macOS 27, the Readwise Mac tool for importing Apple Books highlights often couldn't read your Books library, then sat on the syncing page forever with Resync greyed out. Rasul updated the tool so it checks for access before anything else and, if it's missing, shows an alert with a button to the right Settings page. Big libraries also upload more reliably, and from this version on the tool keeps itself up to date. You can download the latest version here.

📤 Fixed Large Reflect Exports — A book with lots of highlights never made it to Reflect, because Reflect turns away any single request over 1 MB and Readwise sent each book's highlights all at once. Rasul split big books into smaller batches, so even your most-highlighted books export to Reflect.

🖼️ Fixed Quoteshot Titles — When you shared a short highlight as an image from Readwise using the Pretty theme, a long book title could run underneath the book cover. Tristan made the image widen to fit the title and author, so they stay clear of the cover.

📧 Improved Email Unsubscribe — The unsubscribe link in Readwise emails only let you change your Daily Review frequency, and unsubscribing from a Themed Review email asked you to log in first. Ibai rebuilt that page so it lists every email we send you (Daily Review, each Themed Review, Themed Connections, product updates and tips, and reminders) along with an option to unsubscribe from everything. Each choice saves right away, no login needed.

🔧 Improved API Docs — The Readwise API could already change a book's title, author, category, and cover, but the API docs didn’t mention it. Rasul added a Book UPDATE section with examples, including how to set or remove a custom cover.

🛜 Parsing Updates — Krzys improved how Reader handles documents from xkcd, LessWrong, Lifehacker, SparkNotes, Real Python, 9to5Google, Reuters, Financial Times, HackerNoon, wallstreetcn.com, ruanyifeng.com, blognot.co, docs.readwise.io, and newsletters from Kill the Newsletter.

👍 Three recommendations from our team

From writer Abi

Something to read 📖
Abi is still making her way through Anna Karenina, but with the end in sight, her TBR is top of mind. She's eyeing Ariel Lawhon's The Pirate Queen, a new historical novel about Irish chieftain Grace O’Malley and Beth Brower's The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, a spirited and witty diary series set in Victorian London.

Something to focus 💧
She does her best work hydrated, so she was delighted to find an insulated tumbler whose straw is, crucially, not plastic: her BrüMate Era Flip.

Something to unwind 🎨
When brainrot calls, Abi has been turning instead to her guided watercolor sketchbook from Emily Lex Studio. It lowers the bar for mindful creativity but still leaves her with a beautiful finished piece. She especially recommends the bird workbook.

💬 From the Readwise group chat

Thinking, live

Every other Friday, our team demos its “wins,” which gives us front-row seats to our coworkers’ gradual construction of thoughts, coherent and... still under consideration. Speaking of, Tadek shared a fitting read from Heinrich von Kleist.