Reading

Finished reading: Maximum Bob by Elmore Leonard πŸ’™πŸ“š

A recent New Yorker article by Anthony Lane prompted me to read this one, my first Elmore Leonard book. I enjoyed the pacing and dialogue and colorful cast of characters, all set in languid south Florida.

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Take gratefully any pleasures the world provides, but don’t curse God when they fail. Nobody in the universe ever promised you anything. Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of a life amount not to wisdom but to scar tissue and callus.

Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird πŸ’™πŸ“š

@amylouise on Madame Bovary:

I hope that when you pay attention to the world, see every flower on every oat-stalk and every bumbling country doctor, you find that you can look them into loveliness. I hope that even being bound to a dull community of foolish people could bring unexpected graces. I hope that reality has a richer romance than fantasy.

I loved every word of this review. πŸ’™πŸ“š

Finished reading: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald πŸ’™πŸ“š

See my review for notes and favorite highlights. Still and always β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜….

Finished reading: Brightness Falls by Jay McInerney πŸ’™πŸ“š

McInerney’s great American novel: flawed characters grappling with timeless themes, set in what is arguably the greatest city on earth. I loved it. β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…

See my full review for notes and favorite highlights.

Finished: Nightmares and Dreamscapes by Stephen King πŸ’™πŸ“š

β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜† Not King’s best short story collection. I think that award goes to You Like It Darker from last year. But any collection of stories by this generation’s master storyteller is still pretty great.

Full review.

Finished: London Rules by Mick Kerron πŸ’™πŸ“š

β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜† Another brilliant volume in the wonderful Slow Horses saga. Jackson Lamb is as disgusting and brilliant as ever, with his Slow Horses saving the day yet again from ineptitude of the intelligence service bosses. These are comfort books to savor.

Full review.

Finished: A Short Stay in Hell by Steven Peck πŸ’™πŸ“š

β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜† A genre-bending novella with a mix of fantasy, horror and magical realism that pushes the β€˜library as heaven’ story by Borges to its logical conclusion.

Full review.

Finished: Gerald’s Game by Stephen King πŸ’™πŸ“š

β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜†β˜† Stephen King must have felt he needed a challenge when he started this one. How about a horror novel with just one character handcuffed to a bed with the only way to move the story along is through inner dialogue. Oh, and let that character be a woman, and let that woman be sexually abused by her father as a child. Yep, that would be a challenge.

Full review.

Keep a Book Journal with Day One and Apple Shortcuts

One of the easiest ways to get more out of the books you read is to keep a journal. When you take notes, you’re not just passively reading; you’re reshaping the material in your own words, deepening your comprehension and the connections in your brain. These notes become a record you can revisit to refresh your memory and make recall easier.

I’ve used Day One as my journal for years, but I only recently discovered how well it works to keep my notes and favorite passages from my reading.

Day One is a leading journaling app for the Mac, iPad, iPhone, Android, and most recently for Windows. Journals are protected from prying eyes using secure end-to-end encryption. Prompts and suggestions help remove writer’s block about what to share. The app makes it simple to create an entry from a photo, from your Apple Watch, from a location you visited, and many other ways that remove the friction from keeping a journal. I liked Day One so much that I transcribed a dozen old paper journals to have a complete digital record of my life in the app.

Continue reading β†’

Finished: Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell πŸ’™πŸ“š

β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜† Another great Malcolm Gladwell read. I think I’ve read all his books now and even took his Masterclass on writing. I listened to the audiobook, which was the perfect format for this one. Gladwell has an engaging reading voice and employed his podcast artistry by including recordings of his interviewees in the audiobook. I love how we weaves together diverse topics into a central theme.

Finished: Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway πŸ’™πŸ“š

β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… Rereading a book you haven’t read in 40 years is an interesting experience. I remembered only the bleakness but little of the story itself. I enjoyed most of the book, though all the decades of Hemingway parodies and copycats stole some of its luster. Still, it is a timeless classic that reinvented the novel. Makes me want to go back and read all those books I read when I was young. If this one is any guide, it will be like reading them again for the first time.

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.

Currently reading: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer πŸ’™πŸ“š

Seems timely.

Finished: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner πŸ’™πŸ“š

β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… What a beautiful and poignant book. Hopeful and joyous at the possibilities of life, but bookended by the realities of disappointment and loss.

You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.

Full Review.

Finished: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain πŸ’™πŸ“š

β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜† Fascinating deep dive into the world of introversion and extroversion. Some meaningful parts of our temperament are genetic and passed down from our parents. If you’re a fussy, highly sensitive baby at four months, there’s a good chance you’ll grow up to be introverted. There seems to be a biological connection between high physical sensitivity and introversion.

Full Review.

Currently reading: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain πŸ“šπŸ’™

This has been an eye-opening book for the ways that extroverts and introverts differ. Bloggers, who Cain suggests are almost all introverts, will share personal details with an online multitude they would never disclose at a cocktail party. This hits close to home!

Susan Cain, Quiet quote: Introverts and extroverts also direct their attention differently: if you leave them to their own devices, the introverts tend to sit around wondering about things, imagining things, recalling events from their past, and making plans for the future. The extroverts are more likely to focus on what’s happening around them. It’s as if extroverts are seeing β€œwhat is” while their introverted peers are asking β€œwhat if.”

Reflections on Reading The Story of Civilization

This month, I finished a multi-year reading of Will and Ariel Durant's The Story of Civilization, an eleven-volume opus considered one of the finest narratives of world history ever written.

Durant published the first volume in 1935 when he had just turned 50. The tenth volume, Rousseau and Revolution, won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 1968. Will and Ariel, his spouse and co-author, published the final volume in 1975, a culmination of forty years of writing and scholarship. No author’s body of work has even come close to the scope and duration of this epic history set. Excluding reference notes, the text spans ten thousand pages, covering human civilization from the earliest recorded history through Napoleon’s meteoric rise and fall.

Continue reading β†’

Finished: Laozi’s Dao De Jing by Lao Tzu πŸ’™πŸ“š

β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… This short book oozes with wisdom with the help of Ken Liu’s wonderful translation and notes. Read this one slowly and set aside time for reflection. So much of the advice is contrary to conventional western views that it can seem non-sensical. But try, you must.

Can you open yourself to your sensesβ€”quieting the mind like water?

Death is good. Senescence is good. The beginning is good. The end is good. You are, like all things in the cosmos, swimming in the flux of Dao.

Currently reading: Laozi’s Dao De Jing by Laozi πŸ’™πŸ“š

To solve the hard you must begin with the easy; To do something big you must start very small. All difficulties must be resolved through simple steps. All grand deeds must be performed through tiny details.

Finished: Creative Nonfiction: The Final Issue by Lee Gutkind πŸ’™πŸ“š

β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜† An interesting selection of essays from the print run of the Creative Nonfiction literary magazine. There were some essays that appeared to stretch the boundaries of truth, but that’s the creative part I guess.

Full Review.

Finished: The Age of Napoleon by Will Durant πŸ’™πŸ“š

β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜† The eleventh and final volume of the Story of Civilization, covering the years from the beginning of the French Revolution through Waterloo. Napoleon’s rise, dictatorship, stunning victories and ultimate defeat were thrilling to read.

From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step. β€” Napoleon

Finished: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway πŸ’™πŸ“š

β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… Donald Sutherland did a wonderful job narrating this audiobook. It was nice to reacquaint myself with Hemingway’s short and simple sentences, yet so full of energy. Made me yearn for the ocean.

Finished: Babel by R.F. Kuang πŸ’™πŸ“š

β˜…β˜…β˜†β˜†β˜† I tried to like this book. It has all the elements of a book I would love: etymology, 19th century England, a diverse set of characters, magic, and an academic setting (Oxford, no less!). But I found it slow and repetitive, filled with one-dimensional, unlikable characters, and lecture after lecture on how the rich and powerful mistreat the poor, especially those who aren’t white and British, except for those that are poor and British. It took me almost two months to finish this, and it was a struggle.

I appreciate the idea behind the story, but not how it was told. Not every book is for every reader.

Full Review.

Elevate Your Online Reading with Matter

I love the idea of a read-it-later app. The premise is simple: Save articles and blog posts that arise throughout the day with a single tap and read them later when you have the time. This way, you stay focused and never worry about misplacing or forgetting an important article.

A good read-it-later app can transform almost any web article into a clean, ad-free format with a consistent layout and font. It organizes newsletter subscriptions without clogging email inboxes. The best ones allow highlighting and annotations that carry over to popular note-taking apps.

The biggest problem with read-it-later apps is that saving articles is too easy. All those well-intentioned essays and posts languish in your queue, unread. You feel guilty about not reading them, so you archive everything and start over, only to repeat the process. And, maybe even worse, you end up reading the wrong articles.

Continue reading β†’

Ah, Patrick O’Brian. He was truly one of a kind. If you haven’t discovered Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, there’s not a moment to lose. πŸ’™πŸ“š

Patrick O'Brian from Post Captain: "Life is a long disease with only one termination and its last years are appalling: weak, racked by the stone, rheumatismal pains, senses going, friends, family, occupation gone, a man must pray for imbecility or a heart of stone. All under sentence of death, often ignominious, frequently agonizing: and then the unspeakable levity with which the faint chance of happiness is thrown away for some jealousy, tiff, sullenness, private vanity, mistaken sense of honour, that deadly, weak and silly notion."

Finished reading: Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks πŸ’™πŸ“š

An entertaining book filled with practical advice on how to improve your storytelling, whether in front of a live audience, on a date, or in a written essay. Dicks shares examples of his own stories, then breaks down why they work. β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜†

<img src=“https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/125484/2025/dd54e41e-b5b4-42ca-bc9a-83d3b708188c.png" width=“600” height=“337” alt=“Quote from Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks: “Storytellers end their stories in the most advantageous place possible. They omit the endings that offer neat little bows and happily-ever-afters. The best stories are a little messy at the end. They offer small steps, marginal progress, questionable results."">

Finished reading: Fallen Leaves by Will Durant πŸ’™πŸ“š

In 208 eloquent pages, Durant shares his views on death, religion, education, war, politics, spirituality, and, through it all, the meaning of life. Truly a gift to humanity from a scholar who devoted his long life to the study of history. β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…

Full Review.

Photo of a paper book book: Fallen Leaves by Will Durant

Finished reading: Just After Sunset by Stephen King πŸ“š

Read: 2025-01-27 | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜† Horror

On a quest to read the few Stephen King books I missed along the way. I forgot how great of a short story writer King is. Probably some of his novels should have been short stories! Gingerbread Girl and N were my favorites in this collection.

Continue reading β†’