Review
- 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- The Fat Switch - Richard J. Johnson (superseded by Nature Wants Us to Be Fat above)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)
- A Memory Called Empire: this one had some elements that ended up intersecting in interesting ways with Foundation (the show at least)
- Echo: a challenging and beautiful younger-reader book that I recommend listening to, as they do some interesting things with the audio
- Anxious People: I started off disliking this one, but the things that annoyed me at first turned out to make sense as it went on, and it ended up being something I enjoyed very much
- Altered Carbon: great start to the series, and it was good to see the written version
- The Resisters: interesting mashup of baseball and speculative fiction
- Parable of the Sower: another great series start, one that I had put off reading too long!
- Abaddon’s Gate and Cibola Burn: Expanse #3 and #4, the former of which was a very rare 5-star book for me
- Harrow the Ninth: #2 in the series…a very-challenging-but-very-rewarding “all the genres at once” book
- The Testaments: #2 in the series, and a worthy successor to Handmaid’s Tale
- A Canticle for Leibowitz: I was surprised this was written decades ago, as it feels like modern speculative fiction
- Ursula K. Le Guin: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations: full of her cutting insights and beautiful wit
- Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty: summarizing how political and economic are intertwined and how extraction leads to downfall
- The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains: we are getting better at some ways of thinking and worse at others, and it’s important to understand the modes and tradeoffs
- Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art: fascinating look at the development of our faces, how breathing affects health, and various breathing experiments & exercises
- The End of Alzheimer’s: The First Program to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline: while I’m not high risk (due to not having the genetic variants), I wanted to learn more about this topic, and this book is a very interesting deep dive full of detailed guidance and information that is relevant to any person’s health
- The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century: the description of this book made me think I would hate it, but it ended up being one of the most interesting things I read this year
- Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony: as a Methodist-turned-Mennonite, Hauerwas is probably “required” reading for me, but it took until this year for me to finally read this one
- Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: another classic that I finally read to get back to the principles that started a movement
- The Fate of Food: What We’ll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World: highly speculative, but a fascinating overview of the various areas in which we’ll need to meet challenges
- Plough Quarterly: I love engaging with their challenging blend of radical and conservative (published by the Bruderhof, an Anabaptist common-purse denomination)
- Anabaptist World: similarly, the publication for my Anabaptist denomination (Mennonite)
- New Philosopher: a thoughtful periodical with each issue being dedicated to a topic
- Indianapolis Recorder: the best local newspaper
- Your local theater - enjoyed (even via streaming) renditions of Tuesdays with Morrie, Cyrano, and A Christmas Carol
- See Season 1 - terrifying, mesmerizing, and incredible
- Rememory - contemplative and crushing
- Dear White People Season 2 - very well done
- Resident Alien Season 1 - Alan Tudyk is great in this mishmash of all the genres into a single show
- John Oliver on Raids - Raids are devastating and almost never necessary.
- John Oliver on Sponsored Content - All ad-driven news creates perverse incentives, but sponsored content is particularly bad
- Canadians rescue the USA national anthem - brilliant use of harmony
- The Sinner Season 3 - more terribly haunting than the first two seasons, combined
- The Commute: Walking 90km to Work - another incredibly documentary from Beau Miles
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Season 1 - in release order of Trek shows, this is my favorite, so far
- Kim’s Convenience Seasons 1–2 - fun sitcom, though it got a little formulaic by season 3 and we got tired of the “people didn’t communicate” trope as the main plot driver
- Endeavour Season 5 - I love the attention to atmosphere in this series. It feels like a (modern) history lesson every time, too. Warning: every episode of this show seems to end on a melancholy note, literally and figuratively.
- I Am Mother - I’d love to discuss this sci-fi suspense!
- The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Season 1 - This felt like the most “comic book” of the MCU so far, due to the everybody having to fight everybody, etc. Great preaching from Sam at the end of the season.
- Venom - utterly ridiculous and a lot of fun
- Blade - rewatched this; interesting to hear Blade will be coming into the MCU
- Fantastic Planet - totally original french animated scifi from 1973
- Mr. Show Seasons 1–3 - some of this didn’t age well, but I love sketch comedy and their take on the Python-esque surreal sketch transitions
- Tenet - this was an instant purchase
- Line of Duty Season 1 - What a wild ride! I had to space these out because they were so provocative, complex, and intense. Season 2 not recommended.
- A Black Lady Sketch Show Season 2 - Not as good as season 1, but still good sketch comedy
- Love, Death & Robots Season 2 - Not as mind-altering as Season 1, but still full of incredible experiments
- Self/less - Good, interesting. Would have been even better with more of a Christopher Nolan treatment and less of a Product Placement treatment.
- 🎶 Welcome to the Internet - “could I interest you in everything all of the time?“ Lots of good critique in this hilarious self-produced music video. Full special here.
- Primal Fear - Very late to the party on this one. Surprised I didn’t see this back when it came out, as it was definitely my kind of movie. A little dated and a little predictable, but still very enjoyable and worth a discussion.
- 🎶 Tiny Desk Concert: clipping. - this is the first actual tiny desk concert, and the start of my obsession with clipping. (Stay tuned for Listening Recommendations)
- The Suicide Squad - Ludicrous, gory, and hilarious. I’m not much of a DC guy, but this was some wicked fun.
- 🎶 Marc Rebillet and Madison McFerrin - incredible looping and improv chemistry
- Middleditch & Schwartz - long-form improv comedy
- Ted Lasso Season 2 - not as good as season 1, but still challenging, human, and funny
- Foundation Season 1 - Unnecessarily brutal at at times (and I mean the storytelling, not the content…some details don’t need to be on the screen), but otherwise very good
- Soul - Heartbreaking at times, but a beautiful movie
- 2021 Recommended Products & Services (incl. those related to watching)
- See last year’s writeup here.
- Your Local Library and Libby for borrowing ebooks and audiobooks
- Bookshop for purchasing books and supporting your favorite bookstore
- UpNext for read-it-later (note: I will likely move to Readwise Reader once I get through the waitlist)
- Readwise.io to automatically manage & resurface highlights and notes from all of the above and more
- Storygraph for tracking books
- Inkl for lower-hassle news from a variety of sources
- Bandcamp for trying and buying music
- MusicHarbor for finding out about new music releases for bands who have made the poor choice to not be on Bandcamp
- iTunes match to make your music collection available across multiple devices
- Marvis Pro for listening to that library on iOS
- Plex for serving up your whole media library and Plexamp for an incredible listening experience wherever you’ve made that library available (note: I’m looking for Plex friends!)
- Last.fm for tracking listening, including from Marvis and Plex (above) or from Web Scrobbler in the browser
- JustWatch for seeing where a show or movie is currently available and tracking watchlists/watching without losing your place when a show moves to another provider
- Overcast for podcasts
- Craft for fun notetaking, writing, shared documents, and impromptu websites
- Fastmail for email, calendar, contacts
- Micro.blog for blogging, microblogging, social media that’s not a dumpster fire, and (optionally, additionally) POSSE, a newsletter service, read-it-later service, bookshelf service, podcasting service, and video service
- Mars Edit 4 for revising, tagging, managing, or deleting micro.blog posts or importing/adding a backdated post
- NextDNS for blocking a lot of bad stuff (including trackers and ads)
- Signal for direct messaging and calls
- DuckDuckGo for search that respects you
- A digital password vault
- Multi-Factor Authentication for everywhere that supports it, especially for your main email provider that all your other accounts are tied to (note: avoid text messages as the 2nd factor whenever there are better options)
- A couple hard drives and an alternate location (such as a family-member’s home or a safe deposit box) for periodic swapping of backups outside of your cloud storage
- Parcel for tracking packages and deliveries
- CloudMounter for accessing cloud storage on your Mac
- Magnet for turning OSX into a tiling window manager
- Vivaldi for a full-feature independent browser that still works on most of the Internet
- Levels for learning about how different foods, activities, and events affect your glucose and health
- A periodic home cleaning service
- A personal trainer to help with physical therapy and fitness
oh no, I’m now looking at capacities app.
I really appreciate that they built in robust backup and export from the start.
📚 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 didn’t know about the artificial sweeteners part, but my experience aligns to the rest: after a handful of days without sugar and refined carbs, the urges went away.
📺 watched: The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window
This was hilarious, though I would say it was only about 5% more ridiculous than other Netflix originals.
📝🖋 Recommendations for a firm top-bound notebook that is B5 or A5 or smaller?
“Firm” meaning I can write on it w/o a hard surface like a desk.
Preferably something where I can write on both sides of the paper (unless this means a spiral-bound format that does not hold up).
TIL: “inspiresting”
Note: the linked essay is recommended reading, as well.
📚 Four Thousand Weeks: it’s as good as they say.
Nothing original, but a great collection of wisdom distilled from various traditions (faith, agile/lean, strategy, psychology, etc.).
📑 Sunday Quote
(see my reference and review)
🎥 Shang Chi was really good. Maybe the best marvel movie? Or maybe it’s just a huge relief after Eternals?
2021 Recommendations Recap Recap:
2021 Recommendations - Reading 📚🗞
Note: I’ve collected the recommended books from this post on this bookshop list, where possible. It is an affiliate link (though you can and should change to your local favorite bookshop), but if you buy any of them via my storefront, I will put that money back into getting more books and sharing the good ones.
I read 48 books in 2021. As I mentioned in my 2021 service recommendations I use StoryGraph to track reading, so you can see an overview of my reading there.
But just because I read a book doesn’t mean it was good! Here are the ones I recommend:
Fiction
Nonfiction
Periodicals
Further reading: 2020 Fiction Review and 2020 Nonfiction Review
📚🖋 Nice bonus item from PM Press for the new year.
The Future Is Unwritten journal with quotes on the recto pages.
It’s a shame they didn’t make any sequels to The Matrix. It was such a good movie.
Also a shame I keep having to make this joke.
Also, I find the lack of Juno Reactor just insulting.
2021 Recommendations - Watching 📺
Further Reading:
2021 Recommendations - Products and Services
Reading 📚📑
Further reading: 2021 Reading Recommendations
Listening 🎙🎶 and Watching 📺
Further reading: 2021 Watching Recommendations, 2021 Listening Recommendations
Writing and Communication
Security and Privacy
Other
Luxuries That I Wish Weren’t
Note: This page contains affiliate links. I may receive a discount or commission for things your purchase. Nevertheless, these are real recommendations for products and services I have used.