Books
- Intro - my process and tools
- The Books - which books I recommend
- Analysis - some introspection and goalsetting
- Previously - links to prior years
- Books I plan to re-read
- Deluxe or art-filled editions
- Books I will use as a referenrce
- Books I enjoyed and want to keep around
- The Six Deaths of the Saint (Into Shadow #3) - Alix E. Harrow (see also)
- Nemesis Games (Expanse #5) - James S.A. Corey
- Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing - David Naimon
- Lifespan - David A. Sinclair
- The Scout Mindset - Julia Galef (see also)
- Eye of the Needle - Ken Follett
- Where the Deer and the Antelope Play - Nick Offerman (see also)
- Four Thousand Weeks - Oliver Burkeman (see also)
- Gilead - Marilynne Robinson (see also)
- Anthem - Noah Hawley (see also)
- Animal Farm - George Orwell
- The Screwtape Letters - C.S. Lewis
- Great Minds of the Eastern Intellectual Tradition - Grant Hardy
- The Great Mental Models (Vol #1) - Shane Parrish
- The Blade Itself (First Law #1) - Joe Abercrombie
- This Is Your Mind on Plants - Michael Pollan
- Before They Are Hanged (First Law #2) - Joe Abercrombie
- Babylon’s Ashes (Expanse #6) - James S.A. Corey
- Hunting Magic Eels - Richard Beck
- Algorithms to Live By - Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths
- Norse Mythology - Neil Gaman
- Nature Wants Us to Be Fat - Richard J. Johnson
- Rediscipling the White Church - David W. Swanson
- Reaper Man (Discworld #11) - Terry Pratchett
- Late in the Day - Ursula K. LeGuin
- The Future Is Female - Lisa Yaszek
- Into the Odd (Remastered) - Chris McDowall
- How to Take Over the World - Ryan North
- Persepolis Rising (Expanse #7)- James S.A. Corey
- The Arm of the Starfish (O’Keefe #1) - Madeleine L’Engle
- Dread Nation (Dread Nation #1) - Justina Ireland
- Recursion - Blake Crouch
- Meet the Austins (Austins #1) - Madeleine L’Engle
- Undercover (Into Shadow #5) - Tamsyn Muir
- A Load of Hooey - Bob Odenkirk
- The Fat Switch - Richard J. Johnson (superseded by Nature Wants Us to Be Fat above)
- Bury Your Dead (Inspector Gamache #6) - Louise Penny
- Lexicon - Max Berry
- On Juneteenth - Annette Gordon-Reed
- Roadside Picnic - Arkady & Boris Strugatsky
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X - Alex Haley
- All We Can Save - Ayana Elizabeth Johnson & Katharine K. Wilkinson
- Nimona - Noelle Stevenson
- Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel
- Ninth House - Leigh Bardugo
- Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama - Bob Odenkirk
- Everything Happens for a Reason - Kate Bowler
- Persephone (Into Shadow #2) - Lev Grossman
- The Little Book of Hygge - Meik Wiking
- Keeper of the Lost Cities (Keeper of the Lost Cities #1)
- Tell the Machine Goodnight
- The Prophet
- A Calling for Charlie Barnes
- The School for Good Mothers
- The Garden (Into Shadow #1)
📚 I had been looking to try Martha Wells. This humble bundle is a great opportunity to get started.
📚 The Heron Haven library is coming along nicely.
Finished reading: The Beautiful Mystery by Louise Penny 📚
🎲📚 reading my new copy of Whitehack 4th edition.
Between this and Knave 2nd edition it’s a great time to move away from D&D while keeping the best bits and losing the worst.
(I really want a notebook version of Whitehack like a previous edition had.)
📚
Isn’t the real question this: Is the work worth doing? Am I, a human being, working for what I really need and want–or for what the State or advertisers tell me I want? Do I choose? I think that’s what anarchism comes down to. Do I let my choices be made for me, and so go along with the power game, or do I choose, and accept the responsibility for my choice? In other words, am I going to be a machine-part, or a human being?"
David Streitfeld, Ursula K. Le Guin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations
📚 Half Price Books was 🔥 today
Finished reading: Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Q. Sutanto 📚
It’s like Nicholas Sparks tried to write a Coen Brothers script.
📚 As someone who has taken copious notes and lessons from the podcast over the years, I’m excited to read this accumulated tome of wisdom.
📚 I’m going to read the fantastic An Elegant Puzzle again.
Anybody want to do a reading group? Maybe chapter-based discussions?
📚📑 Another goodie from Death to Deconstruction.
Finished reading: A Trick of the Light (Gamache #7) by Louise Penny 📚
📚 So far I’m really enjoying Death to Deconstruction by Joshua S. Porter.
It’s got that Richard Beck 3rd-way-ism but also that Brian Zahnd flair. Challenges me quite a bit.
Couldn’t turn down a visit to Flyleaf Books, either. 📚🃏
Currently reading: Fight Like Jesus by Jason Porterfield 📚
(Note: not what it might sound like. 🕊️)
📚 2022 Book Review
Welcome to my yearly summary of books!
Table of contents:
Note: I will use Bookshop affiliate links when available, throughout this post. You don’t have to buy from my bookshop, but if you do, I put that money back into more books.
Intro
I use and recommend Libby for getting ebooks and audiobooks from the library. Most books I borrow digitally, but there are exceptions:
For those cases, I get physical editions via Bookshop. And lest you think I don’t really do physical books: my household has 15 brimming bookshelves.
I take copious highlights and notes, and save them to Readwise. Here’s how. Highlights and notes are especially important for me with digital books, where spacial-temporal recollection is not as easy, but spaced-repitition and note-linking can make up for it (and then some).
I track my reading in The StoryGraph. I prefer it because not Amazon and because it incorporates some data elements other than ratings which are useful for describing and finding books. I’m hoping micro.blog’s bookshelves feature continues to improve, so that I could rely on book tracking directly in my blog, as well. (Today, it doesn’t handle book search well nor let us use our own Bookshop links, but we’ll see what the future holds.)
I keep my to-read/wishlist as a Bookshop list, for ease of sharing and gift-giving.
The Books
Let’s start with the recommended ones, collected in this Bookshop collection or visually:
And here are all the books I read, individually, and in reading order (within rating):
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ :
👍:
🤷♂️:
👎 (authors and links removed because I feel bad about even putting these in, but wanted to show the broader view):
Did you read anything I did? What’d you think?
Based on looking at my list, is there anything you’d recommend?
Analysis
This was an mixed year for reading goals. I exceeded by book goal (55 out of 53) but missed by pages goal (15,868 out of 17,500). I’ll go for 60 books next year, but keep the 17,500 page goal.
Similar to my normal ratio, I read 63% fiction this year:
I continue to add to my intentionality in reading, seeking a variety of voices, formats, styles, etc. With such a long list of things I’d like to read, I’m also trying to be wiser about what I should read sooner than later such as things related to health or permaculture.
Here’s to a good year of reading!
Previously 📚:
I gave readow.ai as many of the books as it could find from my ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 📚 list, and then deleted some results (things I’ve read or am reading, multiple items from the same series), and these are the books it recommended to me.
Finished reading: A Man Called Ove: A Novel by Fredrik Backman 📚
A rare Five ⭐️ Read.
Currently working through: (My) Principles by Ray Dalio (and me) 📚