books
Finished reading: The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown 📚
Another outstanding book by Daniel Brown; the man can write. I know I’m late to the party on this one, but after reading The Indifferent Stars Above, I knew I had to read more by Mr. Brown.
Custom Book Pages in Micro.blog
Spent the afternoon sorting out the custom book pages and how I want to use it.
Finished reading: Train Dreams by Denis Johnson 📚
It’s slow-paced, sad, and atmospheric. Every page has a sentence that stops you, makes you reread it, highlight it, or look away from the page to ponder and let your mind build the scene and absorb the meaning. A really gifted writer. Time is compressed in this Novella that covers the protagonist’s full life.
Finished reading: The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel James Brown 📚
This was an outstanding book, well written with lots of history and side stories. I don’t give out five-star reviews very easily, but this earns its place.
Finished reading: Tambora by Gillen D'Arcy Wood 📚
I can’t recommend this book to the casual reader, but if you read Krakatoa and enjoyed it, and you are a history buff who wants to understand the effects of the Tambora volcanic eruption which was far worse than the better-known 1883 explosion of Krakatoa you will enjoy this book.
Finished reading: The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster 📚
Dark, strange, mysterious, interconnected, very unsatisfying endings. Three interconnected stories, excellent writing. Some of it doesn’t make sense or cohere. A lot is left to the imagination.
Update to Calibre-Web: Worth it?
Out on the road, I’ve had time to fully investigate my Calibre-Web setup. I wrote a short post about it, but this is an update on using it and whether it’s worth the setup time.
Finished reading: Every Day I Read: 53 Ways to Get Closer to Books by Hwang Bo-Reum 📚
This is a quick read: 53 short meditations on reading. If you are an avid reader, you will not find much new here, but it’s still nice to read about reading and how a fellow avid reader feels about books. This one gave me some new book ideas and made me think about going deeper with my reading.
Finished reading: Biological War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen 📚
Sobering. Frightening. A very informative book that I think everyone should read. We all need to understand where the world is at in reference to biological warfare.
Calibre-Web
I’ve been a Calibre user for years now. It’s great for managing your ebook collection.
Finished reading: Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan 📚
This was Claire’s second collection of short stories, following Antarctica. Seven stories in all (in this edition that I read, some say there can be eight). I liked five of them and loved two. Worth buying the book just for the two alone.
📚 Great British Bake Off - Of Books
Wry Writer wrote on her blog about the Great British Bake Off Book Challenge. Here is mine.
Finished reading: Passing of the Dragon by Ken Liu 📚
A wonderful short story about a woman who fears she’s failing as a painter and as an artist seeks inspiration from one of her favorite poets, finding something even more wondrous, but also more impossible to capture in her art.
Finished reading: A World Appears by Michael Pollan 📚
What can I say, any book by Michael Pollan is sure to be gold, and this one does not disappoint. If you have any interest at all, or even if you don’t, you’ll understand what all this hubbub about consciousness is […]
Want to read: Everything Is Photograph by Patricia Albers 📚
Want to read: Everything Is Photograph by Patricia Albers 📚 I don’t usually post about books in the queue, but I just found this one, and wanted any other photographers interested to see it. Kertész took over 100,000 photographs, exhibited worldwide, and was the first major photographer to embrace the Leica.
Finished reading: So Late in the Day Stories of Women and Men by Claire Keegan 📚
Finished reading: So Late in the Day Stories of Women and Men by Claire Keegan 📚
Beautiful short stories. These stories leave a lot to your imagination. They are certainly different than her other work. I liked them, but of all her books, it was my least favorite.
Not a lot to say on this one. If you’ve never read Claire Keegan, you are missing out. Get reading.
I would say start out with Foster and Small Things Like These, first, then move on to her other work.
Finished reading: Go Computer Now! by Ben Zotto 📚
Finished reading: Go Computer Now! by Ben Zotto 📚 Delightful book about the start of the personal computer, and Sphere Corporation […]
Currently reading: Go Computer Now! by Ben Zotto 📚
About halfway through, what a great book. Tons of history that I knew nothing about.
Finished reading: Traversal by Maria Popova 📚
How do you get from Captain Cook’s 1769 voyage to document the transit of Venus to Mary Shelley’s parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and their books Vindication and An Enquiry Concerning the Nature of Political Justice; to Margaret Fuller in America; to frog legs; to Aaron Burr as a destitute boarder; to the world’s first chemical equation–“grape must = carbonic acid + alcohol”; to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror; to Jane Marcet; to Michael Faraday; Ralph Wedgwood, the inventor of the noctograph; to the catastrophic eruption of Mount Tambora and its devastating global weather effects; to a doctor who wrote the first vampire-themed book, then later took his own life after being unable to convince the public of his true authorship; to phrenology; to Walt Whitman and his lost true love; to Henry David Thoreau, Fanny Wright, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Frederick Douglass? Maria Popova, that’s how.