Review
- 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
- pioneer in transparency, character goals, “say yes”, “let it ride”, and “use-based improvement”
- emergent story, character, & setting complexity
- unique, character-driven play
- minigames
- rewards mastery
- Ginger Masala Chai: ✅
- Turmeric Chamomile Herbal Tisane: ✅
- Daily Darjeeling Second Flush Black Tea: ✅
- Moringa Tulsi Green Tea: 👎 (we must just not appreciate moringa)
- ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ How to Invent Everything by Ryan North - I can’t recommend this highly enough (micro review)
- ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Born a Crime by Trevor Noah - this had been on my list for a while, but I picked it up to read with a book club at work, after Noah came to our company all-hands meeting for a deep, insightful, and humorous interview with our company president.
- ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I Am Not Your Enemy: Stories to Transform a Divided World by Michael T. McRay - Resilient Review
- ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Deep Work by Cal Newport - How do we get meaningful work done in a world of increasing fragmentation and distraction? Newport has some ideas. (f you like this, see my in-depth Digital Minimalism reference and review)
- ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Four Futures by Peter Frase - What are different directions our political economy might go, especially in light of increased automation and ecological crisis? These thought experiments will help you ponder not just the author’s four directions, but others, too.
- ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis - Lewis brings his famous explanatory lens to high-frequency trading (micro review)
- ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ No Name in the Street by James Baldwin - insights from Baldwin’s life that we unfortunately still need to hear today
- ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ What Is Reading For? by Robert Bringhurst - A thoughtful and beautiful talk-turned-book. I bought a second copy so that I could have one to mark up on one to keep clear.
- ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Immunity to Change by Lisa Laskow Lahey & Robert Kegan - When actions & systems don’t change even after declaring our intent and good plans to do so, it’s usually because someone (including yourself) is invested in the way things are. Real change requires addressing that. (micro review)
- ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Remote by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson - As a remote-first company, the Basecamp & Hey founders share what they’ve learned. There’s a lot here that will be valuable even after more desk jockeys start returning to the office.
- ⭐️⭐️⭐️ The Unicorn Project by Gene Kim - what Kim did for Ops & DevOps in the Phoenix project, he has continued for product development in this work
- ⭐️⭐️⭐️ In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan - in this work, Pollan shares the history of “nutritionism” and ways we can reverse the trends in “western diets” and proliferation of metabolic diseases
- ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Imaginary Borders by Xiuhtezcatl Martinez - Resilient Review
- ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek - micro review
- ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder - I thought this was going to simply about people who lived like nomads, but it’s a look at people living precariously and the industries and companies that are exploiting them
- ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes - like Pollan above, Taubes looks through the history of nutritionism, especially the problems with how we adopted a high-carb diet, and zeroes in on habit change to address the most dangerous parts
- ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Get Together by Bailey Richardson, Kai Elmer Sotto, and Kevin Huynh - how to build and maintain community
- ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Nobody Knows My Name by James Baldwin - powerful essays that (as with No Name in the Street above) have far too much relevance still today
- ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
- ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Banksy Locations & Tours Vol. 1 by Martin Bull - micro review
- ⭐️⭐️⭐️ An Unintentional Accomplice by Carolyn L. Baker review
- ⭐️⭐️⭐️ The Time-Block Planner by Cal Newport - micro review
- ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky
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.
There’s a topic I’m tentatively calling “Stand for Something”. It’s about the weakening of “filtering and alignment” capabilities in modern society.
Sunday Quote
Beautiful Trouble updated their toolkit.
With the new toolkit you can slice and dice depending on what you are considering, and also create pdfs from your favorites.
This is a nice online companion to the deck of cards.
🎲 Great writeup of my favorite game system(s): Burning Wheel 🔥☸️
Summarizing:
James Clear came to our all-hands meeting today and presented the story and takeaways from Atomic Habits. 👍
📚 Finished Reading Give and Take by Adam Grant ⭐️⭐️⭐️
I am skeptical of “put people in categories” books, due to all the evidence we have that things like this are not hard & fast categories. This book still had important wisdom to share.
Sunday Quote
📚 Finished reading: The End of Alzheimer’s by Dr. Dale Bredesen ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Recommended. Even though I am not at higher genetic risk, I’ve ordered this book as a reference, due to the depth of cognitive health information included.
Sunday Quote
🎶 just learned about Zeal and Ardor, from Manuel Gagneux, an artist who used to make chamber pop music and now creates experimental metal versions of spirituals.
📚 Finished Reading: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Recommended. Atwood has great skill at showing varied human dimensions of power.
📚 The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Highly recommended.
Sunday Quote
Tenth day of Christmas
🫖:
🧱: monster design was clever… no idea what the site piece is
🧩: getting close!
Sunday Quote
Ninth day of Christmas
🫖:
🧱: robot design is clever!
🧩
Ok, now that both my fiction and nonfiction 📚 reviews are up, here are the 30 recommended books that are available in bookshop
Happy reading, and I’m looking forward to your recommendations!
2020: Nonfiction 📚 Review
To view other 2020 review posts (including fiction, feeds, newsletters, and magazines), visit the main post here.
I read 23 nonfiction books this year, down from 31 last year. I attribute this to a tough year, and also reading more fiction as well as reading more from other sources. I read more overall this year than last.
I prefer to read nonfiction in ebook format, so that I can create highlights and notes and have them automatically export to Readwise, where I keep all my reading notes for review. I read through the notes when finishing a book, so that I can capture what I learned in my own words (an important part of learning & synthesizing). I also have Readwise setup to surface 15 highlights from my reading every day (with a built-in “smart system” that follows my weighting choices based on source and recency of the work).
My first choice is to borrow the ebook from the local library, using Overdrive/Libby. Then I can read in the Kindle (or Kindle app). If not available there, I try to buy it as epub, and open it in iBooks. Both Kindle and iBooks are supported by Readwise.
When I read a paper book, I buy my own (usually from Bookshop.org these days, to support independent bookstores) and underline text and write in the margins. Then I also add those to Readwise using the Readwise app and follow the same process I listed above. It just takes more time, which is why I prefer ebooks.
If I’m not sure if a book is going to be relevant, high-quality, or have a lot of content that I want to highlight, I will listen to an audiobook, usually from Overdrive/Libby again (though we have an Audible subscription as backup).
I have collected my 2020 recommendations (both fiction and nonfiction) on a Bookshop list for easy perusal. That, and all of the individual book links, are affiliate links.
Recommended
Other Books
Here are the other at-least-3-star books that I read in 2020. Books that are unfinished, I abandoned, or I only gave 2 stars are omitted.
What did you read this year? What do you recommend?