Gah!

Yesterday was the first time in the year that I read a percentage point of a book just so I don’t lose my streak. I was tired, needed to get some work done, am currently in between ebooks. So I just picked up a random fantasy novel from Libby and read a few pages of it. The worst part of this is that I’m not even sure I want to actually read the book. It’s one of those pulp fiction ones where in the sidebar itself there’s the main intrigue but also the stupid love affair which the protagonist must deal with.

But maybe it’ll be good for me. A light read that maybe, just maybe will be a fast one too. Let’s see.

DNR’d two books back into 2023

Not a 2023 roundup post.

Just wanted to note that I was trying to finish 2023 with two audiobooks – To Her Credit and Classic Women’s Short Stories. Could not finish either of them. To the point that these are the only books that I picked up in 2023 that I will not finish.

“Classic Women’s Short Stories” is just too dated to read. There are a few short stories in there by some famous authors – Katherine Mansfield, Kate Chopin, Virginia Woolf. But most of the stories were just too… boring… to read. Ultimately had to drop the entire book. Woolf’s story, A Mark on the Wall, and Mansfield’s The Garden Party and Daughters of the Late Colonel, were the only ones I finished. I would recommend you to read these stories individually instead of through this book.

I thought To Her Credit would be similar to Figuring by Maria Popova, the book that kick-started my love for Feminist Memoirs. Instead, it was just a series of “here’s a woman who did amazing things and here’s a man we want to put down through her”. We need more writing like Popova’s which celebrates women’s accomplishments (or non-accomplishments, like Three Women by Lisa Taddeo) without demeaning them with comparisons. I’m still looking for anything as well written as Figuring.

I’m starting 2024 with a wondering book named Berlin by Bea Setton. It’s very along the lines of A Year of Rest and Relaxation. I’m loving the inner monologue of the main character and the audio narration by Ell Potter.

Finished “Rousseau and Revolution: The Story of Civilization” audiobook

For the last six months, I’ve been on a journey. A journey through time. Specifically, from 1715 to 1789 AD. This journey has chiefly focused on one man – Jean-Jacques Rousseau and one country – France, as they both hurl towards the French revolution of 1789. However, surprisingly, the journey also touched almost everything else – it covered hundreds of artists, writers, essayists, satirists, scientists, inventors, enterprises, kings, queens, books, pamphlets, lies, then-hidden truths, and ideas. It talked primarily of France, but framed its history by talking about every force outside of it, including Russia, the Turks, the many travails of Poland, and so many other factors that ultimately led to the revolution which shook the foundations of the Western World.

It also revealed to me how amazingly France participated in the formation of the United States of America, if only to spite the UK in doing so, and in the process destroyed it’s own wealth and legacy. But the silver lining shines through – that revolution led to so much democracy and pushed the ideas of the Rights of people to the fore.

France, it’s history, and consequently, this book, are not without faults. The widespread support for slavery both within and without, the absurd conflict between Catholics and Protestants, which still boggles me, the constant wars with England, are all part of the history of France. The somewhat uneven-handed remarks and accolades to everything European being the “best” and the “greatest in the world”, the unnecessary descriptions of the visages of the persons described, and the somewhat abrupt ending, with only allusions to the excesses of the revolution, are all the faults of the book.

But I cannot thank the authors enough for giving me a springboard to leap off of. I have some semblance of an idea of where to start my next reading from, even though it’ll be a while before I come back to anything regarding history. For now, I’ve got quite a lineup of audiobooks to work through, from Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary to a collection of short stories by amazing authors as Kate Chopin, Virginia Woolf, and Mary Shelley. I think I’ll stay in the fiction lane for some time, till the call of history, philosophy, and the story of our civilization rises again.

Regarding the titular man – Rousseau – well, first of all, this book taught me how to write his name! It also told me of how terrible the person was in his personal life – how cruel to his own children (none of whom he raised himself or welcomed into his home), how callous towards his long time lover and wife, how immature and suspicious of his friends. But also, how brilliant in his writing, how influential in thought, and how deeply rooted our current world is in his ideas. Apparently, he affected everything from both our major systems of early childhood education – kindergarten and montessori, to innumerable philosophers, writers (Tolstoy, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Thoreau, Kant, Schopenhauer), and the Romantic movement. He even made it fashionable to climb mountains and explore the great outdoors in Europe as well as to have gardens that look more natural than manicured perfections. In an upcoming blog post, I argue that the writings matter, not the writer. As much as I’ve come to despise the man, this is true for Rousseau – he was an influential writer and thinker, even though he was a horrible little man.

Book timeline – Jul 22nd 2022 -> Jan 24th 2023

Format – audiobook

Length – 57 hours 22 minutes

Tonight’s iPhone wallpaper is the Pale Blue Dot, where everyone ever has lived and died, mostly unnoticed by the rest of the solar system, let alone the galaxy or the universe.

Year end reading review

There’s a beautiful blanket of snow outside, so it’s a good time to review how the year went.

I read thirteen books this year, though “read” is a loosely based concept now. A large part of my reading nowadays is graphic novels, audiobooks, and web novellas.

But I do consider all of this reading. It’s the transmission of ideas based on the written word, even if it’s accompanied by pictures (or largely based on them) or read by someone into my ear. So, I’ve read thirteen books this year.

Of these, only two were print – Earthlings, and Incredible Doom vol 1.

Nine were digital – The Missing Piece Meets the Big O, “Teen Titans: Raven”, Cyclopedia Exotica, Turtles All the Way Down, Wallace the Brave, Bloom, Big Mushy Happy Lump, The Tea Dragon Society, and The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse. Of these, The Tea Dragon Society was in webcomic form while the rest were eBooks from the Seattle Public Library.

I also got in two audiobooks – My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Figuring

Not bad considering this is also the year my Little One was born and who is right now scurrying across the floor of our apartment, looking for things to attack!

I read most of the graphic novels in the middle of the year and in Fall, when my reading seemed to have slowed down to a snails pace. Getting a few small or quick reads under my belt made me feel better and allowed me to begin reading some larger works, which I’m still working through.

Right now I’m reading the web novel Worm and listening to Rousseau and Revolution, and these are both long enough that I’ll not be done any time soon. I’m halfway through Rousseau… and Worm… well, by the author’s own admission, Worm is “roughly 1,680,000 words; roughly 26 typical novels in length (or 10-11 very thick novels)”, so I’m a ways away from closing that book. Perhaps these will be added to my finished list next year.

This year, I depended a lot on Seattle Public Library. I loved discovering audiobooks, graphic novels, and eBooks from them. Whatever I really wanted to read and wasn’t available immediately there, I found on audible or Thriftbooks.

I own a physical copy of Figuring. But the book is massive and the writing dense. It really gave itself to being an audiobook in a perfect way. The ideas that came from it though… I wish I could bookmark every page of the book! Figuring deals heavily with the Transcendentalists and women authors, philosophers, and scientists, and introduced me to the concept of Salons. The book wanes with the works of Rachel Carson, chiefly Silent Spring, and ends with the tragic death of Margaret Fuller in a shipwreck off the coast of New York.

From there, I tried to read Silent Spring, but lost interest very quickly. The writing is interesting, but I was already being pulled in other directions. I’ve learnt a new term this year – DNF – Did Not Finish. People seem to use it like “I DNF’d this book”.

So, here’s a list of books I DNF’d this year –

Silent Spring
Braiding Sweetgrass
All the Sad Young Literary Men
Under the Sea Wind
Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar
Philosophy – a Visual Encyclopedia
South
The World of Edena
Representative Men
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Thank You for Arguing
Enola Holmes Graphic Novel, Book 1
Accidentally Wes Anderson
The Map of Knowledge
Abstract City
Reality+
Irish Fairy Tales
All the Names They Used for God

Let me know if you, dear reader, would like links to any of the above. Since I didn’t finish them, I didn’t bother linking to them.

All of these were from Seattle Public Library, and more specifically, from the Overdrive/Libby catalog. There are yet others in my Kindle app and iBooks app which are waiting to be read, but I didn’t include them here as they’re just, sort of, suspended in animation, waiting to see if I pick them up again. Perhaps I will. There’s one of definite interest to me – Gödel, Escher, Bach : an eternal golden braid – but it’s very likely that I won’t read it, because it’s in a format that’s not easy to consume on my iPhone and there doesn’t seem to be an audiobook for it. So perhaps I’ll add it to next year’s DNF list. Let’s see.

So that was it – my year in reading. It was a good year. I peaked (in tracked reading) in 2017, (though I’m sure I read a lot more in my childhood, but who doesn’t?) and this year has come in second in number of books. Though, moving to graphic novels means that my overall page count is lower. But does it matter? I don’t think it does. It’s the quality of ideas that matters. I’ve got a lot more out of small books like A Room of One’s Own, Siddhartha, and The Last Question than any normal length novel. What I’ve got out of massive tomes like War and Peace and Figuring is a different thing, since it’s more of learning an entire way of life than one or two ideas. Graphic novels like Wallace The Brave, Bloom and Big Mushy Happy Lump are fun reads, and it’s important to just relax and enjoy a story too. Incredible Doom and Cyclopedia Exotica challenge your assumptions but in an easy way and I can’t thank the authors enough for the effort they’ve put into these worlds.

Data Courtesy TheStoryGraph

Chomp Chomp Chomp

A short status update on what’s going on in my life.

With the little one in tow, our days have sort of become more organized, if only by force of taking care of her every day. Her mealtimes, nap times, and bath time dictate what we are doing when. In our “free” time (her naps or after we put her in bed for the night) we focus either on cooking or cleaning or resting up so we can rise for when she needs us next.

In all of this, I’ve noticed that what’s flourishing is my consumption of books. I can’t say reading any more, since 2 out of the 4 books in my “Currently reading” are audiobooks.

I’m currently listening to “Rousseau and Revolution” by Will and Ariel Durant. This is Book 10 of “The Story of Civilization” series. I do not intend on reading the entire series. I picked up this one from the Seattle Public Library (through the Libby app) because I thought it’ll be about, well, Rousseau and the French Revolution. It is, but it encompasses so much more. That’s how I learnt that the series is sort of enmeshed and can be read as one long history. The book started about the life and times of Rousseau and then veered off to tell the contemporary history of every country in Europe. Then it expanded to Turkey and Iran and even went all the way up to Nadir Shah’s conquest of Delhi. So it didn’t really stick around Europe either. I love the extremely detailed descriptions of random things. How many theaters or guild workers or beggars a particular city had in its heyday during this era. How Catherine the Great is linked to her mother-in-law, in excruciating detail. What were the exact names of all the music composed by Mozart and what some of them sounded like. When coming to the Muslim world, the authors also verbatim print out some of their favorite poems by famous poets and the reader does a good job of reading them aloud. I’m also taking the book with a grain of salt. It does a fair job of describing every civilization and country it encounters as the greatest and the finest. But most of the book is written from the perspective of European countries being more advanced, if not superior, due to the Enlightenment.

I listen to this book during the time when I’m doing the dishes. It’s kinda cool to focus on that while getting my hands dirty. I can’t control the flow of the book other than playing and pausing, so I have to just listen. It’s somewhat meditative.

Before this, I was listening to “My year of Rest and Relaxation”. It’s a pretty raucous book, filled with the suicidal and petty inner monologue of the narrator and protagonist of the book. But I grew tired of it around 70% in. I’ve reached a point where I have a hint of what’s going to happen and I’m not looking forward to it. But I am. “Rousseau…” is pretty long. I’m half way in on the 60 hour book. So perhaps I’ll return to “My year of…” before I finish the former. Otherwise, it’ll end up in the “Not Finished” pile and I don’t want to do that to this book. It’s actually pretty funny and sad and grating and great. Highly recommend!

In the “Reading” section, I’ve been reading the web novel “Worm”. It’s about “parahumans” which are humans with some kind of super powers or the other. In a world that normalizes super powers and splits these people into Heroes and Villains (and almost all of them are teenagers), the story of how a teenage girl in High School gains her powers and what she does with them is fascinating. I got to the book via the LessWrong community, so it’s got a sort of hidden agenda too – to teach us readers how it would be if all our decisions are logical and based on thinking things through instead of emotions.

It’s a great contrast to Rousseau (the man and his writings, not the book above) since he was all anti-Enlightenment, Heart-not-Mind, “don’t teach a child about religion or science till they’re a teenage, just let them play”. I have thoughts there, but that may be a whole different rant.

Worm is pretty long. Again, I’m about midway through it and I read a chapter or two before bedtime. It feels a lot like when I read War and Peace – I would keep reading whenever I got even a moment free, and the book just wouldn’t end. Apparently, the follow up books in this “parahumans” series are even longer. So unless Worm ends with some major cliffhangers or unsolved questions, I won’t be pursuing the rest of the books. Besides, I started reading it as a sort of introduction to the thinking of the LessWrong community, so I’m going to use it as the primer it was meant to be and dive back into the community after I finish.

Since I am reading and listening to all these long books which will take me months to finish, I recently decided to pick up something simple and small. I had a copy of Earthlings by Sayaka Murata sitting around and I’ve just started reading it. ~~It’s a nice and easy read.~~ Edit: As I’ve progressed through the book, I’ve come to realize that it’s going to deal with some really heavy themes. But it’s very well written and I’m not going to put it down. I love the feel of the physical book when all I’ve been consuming are audiobooks and webpages. I love Japanese and Chinese authors (along with Russian and Eastern European authors) and I love the world that Murata is creating. I have Convenience Store Woman also sitting somewhere. Will unpack that if I absolutely love this book.

It’s not all books though. We’ve been working through the latest season of The Crown and have finished House of The Dragon (except for the last episode. I don’t think we will watch that till the next season comes along) and we didn’t really like it that much. We’ve also watched a string of movies recently – Fantastic Beasts being the latest one. I loved Grindelwald in it, though the dialog writer must have blacked out through much of the movie as a lot of characters just don’t have lines . Also drunk was the dialog writer of the movie Brahamastra. The dialogs in that one were somewhere between horrible, missing, and cringy.

I’m feeling that there aren’t a lot of great movies or TV out there right now and books and audiobooks are doing the perfect job of replacing them as media. Added bonus that book reading is so individualistic. I have essentially spent days in the number of hours working through these books alone.

Hmmm. This was supposed to be a short post. Oh well, this is why blogs are fun and Twitter is not. I get to write as much or as little as I want on here and you, dear reader, can choose to skip it or read till the end. If you’ve reached here, thanks!

Notes on The War against Printing

The war against printing

For many, printing was an overwhelmingly positive innovation. Almost as soon as the first presses were established in Italy, learned men rushed to sing its praises. To some, in fact, it seemed almost divine. In 1468, the bishop of Aleria, Giovanni Andrea de Bussi (1417–75), hailed it as a ‘holy art’ (sancta ars).

Does Ars Technica mean Art of Technology?Checked Wikipedia and yes! It does!

Previously, Filippo observed, the inaccessibility of the Bible and other devotional works helped keep the common people on the straight and narrow. Unable to understand the Latin language, they relied on priests to explain the meaning of scripture and the practices appropriate to a Christian life.

Oh no! Don’t challenge our monopoly!

But also, religious expertise is being challenged at this point by less educated fools who haven’t thought thoroughly about things but are overconfident. Exactly what’s happening to science right now around the world but specifically in the US.

However distasteful a character Filippo de Strata may seem, his polemics against printing hence serve to illustrate that, amid the fog of change, the line between progress and peril can appear blurred, even to the most keen-eyed observer. It is perhaps just as well that, in this case, wishful thinking prevailed over unpleasant, if not unjustified, fears

Final thought – not really a war but a battle that was quickly lost.

Quote

Because of the outsize weighting of new and exciting technologies, a typical developer could feel that their skills are out of date and the technologies they’re using are passé …even if those technologies are actually in wide use.

I don’t know about you, but I constantly feel like I’m behind the curve because I’m not currently using TypeScript or GraphQL or React.

Dev perception

2018 and 2019 in books

2018 has come and gone. I had a goal of reading 15 books in it, and I fell short – I read only 12. Though, considering that one of them was War and Peace, I’d say I’ve read enough books.

Very quickly, the highlights are as below. If you want the full list, it’s on Goodreads (no login required afaict).

I thoroughly enjoyed the Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu. It’s part 1 of a 3 book series and I hope to read the rest of it soon.

All Our Wrong Todays was a gut-wrenching time travel story. I reviewed it here. I also reviewed The Devourers here. It’s an epic tale that takes the history of India and weaves an excellent story into it. I believe I’m a fan of historical fiction now. From War and Peace and Poland (which are more fact) to Devourers and Three-Body Problem (which are more liberal with their facts), I love this form of writing that melds truth and fiction together.

My favorite non-prose was Woman World by Aminder Dhaliwal. It’s a beautiful look at a pseudo-post apocalyptic world that doesn’t have any men in it. Though, I must say – since there are no men in the world, it’s not really an apocalypse. It’s quite pleasant, in fact.

I also read a book I’ve long held on to – Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer. It’s pure YA, and perhaps aimed at an even younger audience. But it’s full of surprises and a very interesting take on fairies. It was a fun read!

Moving on, I hope to read a lot more in 2019. I’ve set myself up for even bigger failure – my new goal is 19 books for the year! (It’ll only increase with each passing year, maybe I’ll catch up with the goal one of these years)

I’ve already got a few books that I want to read lined up –

Today Will be Different by Maria Semple – I’ve read and loved “Where’d you go Bernadette?” and I have this one sitting in paperback at home. I’ve heard good things!
The Symposium by Plato – why the heck not? It’s a good story till now (I already started reading it in 2018). Loads to learn!
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K Le Giun – I wanted to read at least one Le Guin book this year and this one seems just as good as any to start off the author’s works. Is there any other you’d recommend instead?
V, Gravity’s Rainbow, and The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon – I want to read a lot of Pynchon this year. Let’s see how it goes. I read somewhere that I should read V before Gravity, because of something something. I have Lot 49 sitting in paperback at home. Maybe I’ll tackle that first.
The Dark Forest, and The Wandering Earth by Cixin Liu – these are the other books in the series I talk about above. The first book was really, really, really good!
Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce – I’ve wanted to read Joyce for some time now. I am going to read these in preparation for –
Ulysses by James Joyce – I’ll probably read this in eBook form, considering its supposed sheer size. War and Peace was conquered in a similar fashion!
Murder by Misrule by Anna Castle – I have the eBook burning a hole in my Kindle app. Will read it and mark it as done!
Young India by Lala Lajpat Rai – I’ve noticed this book around. It too is burning a hole in my Kindle app. But more importantly, it should be an interesting historical document.
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf – I read A Room of One’s Own in 2016 and it had a profound impact on my thinking about creativity and ‘own space’. I think I should read one Woolf book a year.
Bonus points – Walden by Thoreau and Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson – Will I be able to reach these? Let’s see!

That’s 16 books listed! Four more than I read in 2018. By simple math, I have to read approximately 2 books a month to accomplish my goal. That’s one book every 15 days! I shudder at the thought of that pace.

Wish me luck! Also, if you’ve got some suggestions or recommendations, or think I should read some book before reading one of the ones on the list here, do tell!

Relishing Failure

Last year, I read exactly one book. It took me three months to finish and I knew by the end of the year that this was a problem. So, I decided to give myself a goal for 2017 – read twenty books.

Of course, I failed. I read 13 books and 4 comics. Adding those comics brought my total to 17, bringing me closer to my goal, but that was such a shameful act that I didn’t add any other comics I read to my list. The goal, after all, was to read full-length books.

But it felt good. Not being able to beat the goal felt good for the first time, because it meant that I aspired to something, that I achieved something over what I had done last year. It took me about one month to read each book. I am a slow reader (basically because I’m a recovering one) and life, and other things often came in the way. ?

Somewhere on my blog is a draft of a list of all the books I’ve ever read. I keep it as a draft because it feels like something that should not be set in stone. It should be kept open, waiting to receive new names to grow the list. But for this post, I’d like to take the books I read and describe the books, or my thoughts around those books, in a few sentences. Bear with me…

Slaughterhouse-Five – This is what I spent January with. It’s a sad tale of how absurd wars are and how oddly they affect people. As I was reading it, I kept remembering Catch-22 and how it too showed the absurdity of war. When SLF merged the war and it’s post-war abducted-by-aliens narrative, things went for a toss, but in a seamless way, because if you believe in war, it’s not going to take you a giant leap to believe in aliens.
Where’d You Go, Bernadette – Ah, Bernadette! This was one of the most exciting novels I’ve ever read! The characters are crazy and the storyline is just brilliantly absurd. Recently, when I was in a bookshop, I told the owner, Dion, that I’d read this book and marveled at the beautiful way Seattle is portrayed in it. If you want to know Seattle from the eyes of Maria Semple, read this book. If you want to laugh at the absurd life of one Bernadette Fox, read this book!
The Golden Compass – I’ve wanted to read this book since a long time, ever since I saw the movie. From what I remember, the movie was only half the book and reading this completed the story for me to a certain level. Perhaps I’ll go back some day and finish the series.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms – This book has been sitting on my shelf since a long time and I really just wanted to read something of GRRM and this was perfect. The stories are nice and tie into the main storyline very well. There’s just so much in this world to explore!
Prisoners of Geography – This is only one of two non-fiction books I’ve read all year and I’m okay with that. It’s a great book, with loads of amazing stories and insight into why countries act the way they do with their neighbors. But reading it, I also realized that I’m not a non-fiction reader. I prefer fiction, even fictionalized accounts of events such as James Michener’s Poland and the book my wife is reading right now – The Other Einstein.
Marvel 1602 – I mentioned before that I won’t include 4 comics in the list. Those comics are Archies rebooted with new style of artwork and a more mature theme. Even so, they’re still my childhood Archie comics. Marvel 1602 is the brainchild of Neil Gaiman and he is one of the most fantastical authors I’ve read in a while. His ability to create strangeness out of the ordinary is almost infinite! Then, give him the Marvel universe and let his mind run wild and this is the result. It’s more story than comic (so I guess it’s a graphic novel?) and well deserving to sit here on this list, even though it got a little tiresome and predictable in some areas.
We have no idea – When Jorge Cham (from the famous PhD comics) said that his new book was coming out, I knew I had to have it. It took me a while to get around to this book, but it was a delight. It gets a little tiresome towards the end simply because there are so many amazing questions that get asked in every single page that one can spend an eternity trying to answer them! In some sections, I sat with a notebook and just kept writing down ideas that poured in. If you ever want to write science fiction, read this book and let your imagination run wild on it!
The Unknown Errors of our Lives – This collection of short stories is one of the saddest I’ve ever read. Right from the first one, Chitra paints this picture of life in the US that’s shiny, repugnant, restrictive, celebratory, and very, very dark. There’s sadness in almost every page. It took me a while to recover from this book. But would I recommend it? Absolutely. If you want to know the struggles of Indians in the US, or are going through those yourself and want to read some foresight, some hindsight, and something that you can relate to, read this book. Borrow it from me! I’d love to get it off my shelves for a while so it can’t haunt me!
Origin – Oh yes, Dan Brown came out with a novel and I read it and it’s awesome! I love Brown for his unabashed self-promotion. It’s very clear that he’s the hero of his novels and his character has a style that will sometimes make you want to throw the book away! But once you get past the first few chapters, you stop bothering with the absurd brand references (I don’t even know these brands!) and focus on the one burning question – what the heck was the discovery?!
Why you will marry the wrong person – I’m being cheeky by adding this book to this list. It’s more of an article, extended into a book. I paid good money for the article and for good reason – other than telling us all off for marrying people so blindly (“so you dated for a few years? Do you know why and how your other half is mad? Is their madness compatible with your madness?”), this book also introduces this amazing idea that we should submit to extensive and rigorous psychological testing to help us find the right person to marry. I guess Tinder doesn’t cut it for the authors of this book.
Embers – Gimme a book about the Old World and I’ll enjoy it like a well aged piece of cheese. Embers is poignant and beautiful. I discovered it from a Stanford book club RSS feed and Sandor Marai’s turn-of-the-century Hungarian world is bleak and colorful at the same time. It has layers upon layers and as the story unfolds in to the night, it opens up into this wonderful life lived by these two old men and asks the one important question we will all ask in our old age – “was it worth it?”
The Shape of Ideas – Grant Snider is one of my favorite web comic authors and his book is fun and inspiring and a great way to pull oneself out of a fug! I read this book once but whenever I’m feeling down or have writer’s block, I’ll read one odd page from this book and it’ll help me get right back on track!
Dandelions – Finally. This book was an excellent way to end the year, simply because it is an unfinished book. The author, Yasunari Kawabata, committed suicide before he completed this book. I really enjoyed the characters’ constant back and forth, almost a bickering, which leads them to reveal the story to us in peels of an onion, slowly, and surprisingly. One of the things I loved was that the story had no preface, but a postface, explaining some things about the book. When I was younger, my Dad once told me how he’s read every book in his studies from end to end, including all prefaces and notes from the editors, authors, etc. and he recommended that I do that. Well, Dad, I find that to be very wearisome because most of these authors just drone on about random things unrelating to the concepts or the stories I’m trying to read! When I read Plato’s Apology a few years ago, it was a forty page book with a fourteen page introduction! That was horrifying to me! Two pages in, I abandoned the droning of the translators and commentators and went straight to the text! It felt so gratifying to be reading the actual words I came to read instead of reading some random person’s boring analyses of the life and times of Plato.

There you have it. These are the books I read and these are my thoughts on them. If you want to look at my Goodreads year in review, here it is. It’s a nice feature Goodreads has. It tells me that I read a total of 3,644 pages. Those were some good pages!

If you’ve made it so far, I’d like to talk about something. Over the last two years, I’ve been reading Tolstoy’s epic tome, War and Peace. I started some time last year and this year, I’ve moved the needle from 50% 0f the book to 77%. It’s really not one book. It’s fifteen books and two epilogues, each with twenty to twenty-five chapters of ridiculous length. If I listen to my wife, I should be able to introduce these sub-books to the Goodreads listing, immediately putting me over my stated goal of twenty books, and then some. But I won’t do that. This book is more of a research project and relaxation system rolled into one. Whenever I’ve had a long day at work, I uncurl with a few pages of War and Peace and love how I’m transported to this amazing world where Napoleon has invaded Russia and hopes to conquer and get out. God only help these buffoons. If only they had “Prisoners of Geography”, they’d understand that Russia is not a simple thing to be quickly run over and forgotten. Russia is a crazy world, with one foot firmly in Asia and the other well in Europe. Russia is Old World and New. Russia is a sleeping dragon better left undisturbed. I read and laugh with the characters, cry with them, get surprised when they die or turn up alive. I am living this book out over the years and when I do finish it, which I am slated to in 2018, I’ll mark it as completed and either start on some other similarly long story, or restart this book, so I can once again live this beautiful book through.

That was my 2017 in review. I truly enjoyed failing at my reading challenge. It was a pleasure to read so many amazing books and feel this immense sense of achievement at having read so much, even if it’s a drop in the bucket of how many books get published every year!

Now, I’m off. Time to start the next book. I’m going to begin 2018 reading Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem, which I picked up from the Bellevue Amazon bookstore, after overhearing someone talk about what an interesting book it is! After that, it’s on to a few books I acquired at a charming little bookstore in an magical place called Sunriver over in Oregon. But that’s a story for another time. ?

Photo by Kilkennycat

DotDotDot.me: Instapaper finally has a replacement

All those of you who still remember reading paper based books, think about one thing – did you ever keep a separate notebook to make notes about your comments on certain sections of the book or to mark sections you really liked? Wasn’t it just better to just mark the sections in the book itself, wasn’t that more convenient and when you’d pick it up again, you’d remember the context? Similarly, in the digital world of web pages and ebooks, what’s better, keeping a separate service that you use to mark web pages you liked or to keep a single service where you can save the web pages, your comments and bookmarks and even be able to search through it all?

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