I just finished my 23rd out of 24 books to hit my reading goal for the year 2024.
You can catch up with what I’ve been reading on the Bookshelf page of this website.
I’ve mentioned it previously, but shelved the book called “S.” by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst until now. It’s a doozy and requires a lot of time to read/process. Now is the time and I can’t think of a better book to hit my end goal.
I’ll not stop after this one of course.
I just wrapped up a sobering re-read of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. A cautionary tale of what happens when books are outlawed and burned upon discovery by firemen. This novel carried more weight for me today, then when I first read it back in junior high.
“A book is a loaded gun in the house next door…Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
This completed book takes me to 18 out of my goal of 24 novels read in 2024. Only 6 more to go for the next four months. Hell, I’m sure I can beat 24 and go to 30 by then. But then my desire is more than a goal because there is too much out there I want to consume. None of these include all of reading I have done from the RSS feeds, Substack or magazines offered in the Apple News app!
On the last day of 2023, I mapped out which books I wanted to read this year and it fun to see how it is flexible. The titles changed based on whimsy, discovery, availability and finally, how one book’s theme can affect the next pick. Example- I’ve read mostly fiction this year but have a desire to switch to non-fiction for the next one.
My issue with non-fiction books are that the recent offerings are lacking. I don’t care to read someone’s opinion on a war, politics, historical biographies with “new” information to sway my bias. Self-help books are en vogue for a few months but cannot stand tall over time due to another new craze on the topic.
Under the Library page of this website is a list of the previous readings for the past few years. At the top it will say “Currently Reading.” This is blank for now, purposely.
Amazon was kind enough to offer a three month trial of Kindle Unlimited. So I installed a few books to the Kindle for reading, because, I.Don’t.Have.Enough.To.Read.As.It.Is.
There are a few titles on the waiting list from my libraries but those will take weeks to deliver and borrow. Thankfully Kindle had them so immediately all of this paid off. Time to speed read the previous two books I borrowed. Zoom Zoom.
Also, how great is it that if there is a word I am not sure about, I can long press the screen and a dictionary will pop up with a definition. Love that feature. With a paper book has a word that needs defining, I’ll have to break out the paper dictionary, you know, like our ancestors did.
Another feature that doesn’t get enough credit is the Highlights and Notes options. When I highlight a word or passage, Kindle sends the meta data to my personal database for later reference. Don’t ask me how because I don’t want to explain all of the heavy scripting and API codes I needed to script to make all of that magic happen.
“People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”
— Aldous Huxley
Huxley’s words from 1932 are truer now than when he wrote it. His novel Brave New World deserves a re-read.
For digital documents you want to keep for a long time, I suggest the Three P’s:
While in college in the mid 1990’s, and prior to purchasing my first computer, I utilized a word processor. Think manual typewriter but with a 3.5″ floppy disk for storage. I wish I had known enough to preserve all of my writings. The floppy disks were formatted for the word processor but not the computer. It wiped everything off the disk to make room for the Windows formatting. The lesson here is to preserve your work and prepare by future-proofing formats. It was a hard learned lesson. All of my personal writing, studies and papers gone.
I was reminded of all of this when I read about how Hemingway’s early notes and the beginning of a novel disappeared. His wife had gathered his works and left Paris by train to Switzerland to meet him and a publisher and somehow, the suitcase went missing from the train platform and they were devastated.
My loss was due to ignorance and in no way as significant as Hemingway’s loss. But the pain was there.
My revamped workflow process is:
Interesting enough, while walking through the library’s “read and return” section, the word “Hemingway” ended up in my peripheral vision.
Rabbits and Frequency Illusion!
I usually don’t give them a glance but the paper spine was attractive. The fiction novel title is “The Hemingway Thief” and how the aforementioned luggage was lost. I haven’t read it yet, but it seems to be a good yarn with a few secrets and twists. Looking forward to reading it as soon as possible.
While researching an unrelated article, I came across that phrase, “Theseus’ Paradox” and went down a rabbit hole of nerd-scrolling after that. The Wikipedia page here details the story and the philosophy about it so I won’t get into details for now.
However, it does refer to the “Ship of Theseus”, from the Ancient Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. Then something sparked in me where I recalled I have a book in my library titled “S.” by J.J. Abrams, the famous movie director. Long time readers will remember a post back in March where I was tempted to read it but was overwhelmed at the time and wanted to read it properly. Well, after this new round of frequency illusion it is time for me to dive even deeper to see how far down the rabbit hole goes. Unrelated except by name only, there is a documentary film out of India with the same title, “Ship of Theseus” that has to do with photography. I need to find and watch this soon as well.
Picking up the pace here on my 24 books in 2024 reading goal. Check them out on the Library page
Halfway through the 2024 reading list and I feel as if I am on a spree. The first quarter of the year was slow reading with work travel, relocating and heavy, difficult books to sort out. The libraries felt generous and dumped four books on me all at once to hurry and consume, but it just won’t be possible to do this and give them justice.
99% of the books on my list are fiction and yet, halfway through it, I am looking for some non-fiction. No biographies, self-help, politics or history. Something thought-provoking. The search is on.
The Los Angeles Library system recently purchased a local book publisher and plans on publishing even more from local authors. Brilliant!
Local libraries could and should support people to self-publish books, e-books, websites, etc. Instead of just computers for the homeless to play games on, set up printers, scanners, zine machines, etc. Beef up the local writers and potential authors by hosting writing parties. Maybe even add a community feed to host all of those websites and their owners with a shared feed of everything published in blog format and RSS?
I want to design and place a machine to fill up with books that people can purchase on the go as opposed to them buying a soda or a snack. I know we will all be a lot healthier.
They remind me of the Little Free Library stands all across the country, of which I used to be a curator of one back home.
They also remind me of the Art-O-Mat art vending I’ve seen in Las Vegas.
*with apologies to Fleetwood Mac
Scrolling is a tool of our current digital existence, no matter how much we dislike our dependence on it. This is because most people are scrolling on an app platform where they have little control on the content they see.
Social media algorithms mean you don’t see the posts of everyone you follow. You see only what is currently popular from some of them. Plus you see other stuff you don’t follow that their algorithm “think you might like”. Popular means engagement, so the original post is swarming with comments from strangers. You also see ads everywhere that often takes over the original material you are trying to consume. The interface itself is urging you to scroll! Like! Subscribe! Buy!
No thank you.
Digital life shouldn’t be this way. The best way to consume media is not with social media anyway. It exists on websites – blogs, news, magazines, opinions. Millions of new, and better quality articles created every week.
But you don’t want to visit dozens of websites to find out what’s new. What you need is a way to have the website content you choose come to you, when you want it.
This solution exists already in the form of a little known technology called RSS. It exists in the background of almost all websites. It’s a way for RSS apps to subscribe to that websites content and receive new articles when they are available.
In the RSS context, “SUBSCRIBE” doesn’t mean you pay, nor do you give your email. In fact the website owner won’t even know you’ve subscribed at all!
It’s like podcasts — but for reading.
This is not a paid sponsorship, but an RSS reader such as the no cost app called NetNewsWire. It shows you articles from your favorite blogs and news sites and keeps track of what you’ve read.
This means you can stop going from page to page in your browser looking for new articles to read. Do it the easy way instead: let a feed reader bring the news to you instead.
If you’ve been getting your news via Facebook and Twitter — with their ads, algorithms, user tracking, outrage, and misinformation — you can switch to your news feed reader to get news directly and more reliably from the sites you trust.
Take back control of your scroll. Scroll your own way.
Start with two or three sources. Maybe a news site and a couple of blogs you like such as, oh, I don’t know, chrisdenbow.website. His RSS feed is simply: https://chrisdenbow.website/feed
Give it a go, and after a few days, you’ll feel something magical happen. You have an app with a feed you can scroll through that you completely control. You decide what is in there. There is no algorithm. Just the latest posts from every site interleaved in reverse date order.
You don’t even need to leave the app to read. I subscribe only to full text feeds, so the entire article is readable within the app. No cookie pop ups or confusing menus to navigate.
There’s no comments or likes. If you no longer wish to see posts from a particular author, you remove their feed from your app and you never see them again.
Everyone should have the ability to scroll your own way.
While typing this up, I obviously sung this in my head the whole time.
I’ve mentioned previously that something about writing online has to change soon. I’ve looked into the options to host my decades of digital journals with various low/no cost alternatives and they suck.
Speaking of The Future, I just finished this book of the same name as well as a quick re-read of Alice In Wonderland. That makes ten titles down out of my 2024 reading goal of twenty four.
The world’s most powerful artificial intelligence machine has decided you are a threat and is targeting you. From there, anything goes. I’d give this a 3 out of 5 stars because 3/4 through and the novel has lost it’s way diving into computer science and black majick.
A shame because I had high hopes for this book based on the premise that really never delivered. Up next, a book from a Florida native entitled “Bad Monkey.” I’ve never read Carl Haissen’s works before but figured when in Florida…
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” — Haruki Murakami
Picture yourself walking through the halls and shelves of a vast library. Among the endless rows of books, one catches your eye. You reach out, and as your fingers graze its spine, there’s a moment of connection, a spark of recognition. It’s as though fate has guided your hand to this particular book, at this precise moment.
Once you start reading, it feels like you’re embarking on a journey with this book. Its words lead you down paths of discovery, challenging your perspectives and opening new horizons. You find yourself nodding in agreement, pausing to think, and sometimes even disagreeing with it.
As you read, you realize that this book isn’t just something you’re consuming; it’s becoming a part of you. Its characters, its ideas, it’s prose.
Sometimes books seem to find us by chance. You might stumble upon a forgotten book on a dusty shelf, find a book left behind on public transportation, or receive one as a gift unexpectedly. In the novel, Rabbits, one of the recurring themes of playing the game is…the game chooses you to play, not the other way around.
The older I get, the more cynical I become. Nationwide chain bookstores are all the same by design, so if you can make it past the coffeeshop, past the rows of tiny trinkets designed for you to grab while waiting to purchase, past the Bestsellers(!) that everyone else is pushing, past the toy section that is there for no explicable reason besides another money grab and past the music/collectible culture sections, then and only then you may come to the bookshelves and hope to discover a unique book, one that resonates with you.
I prefer the used bookstore. Each store is unique and forces you to hunt on every shelf. Because every shelf has treasure on it waiting to be discovered. The books there seem almost tangentially organized, like they were arranged according to conversation rather than by category. There’s a loose structure, a rough outline, the topics, and genres move seamlessly from one to another, and sometimes off shoot to unintended places, places where one has lost their train of thought, when one must pause to reflect and wonder how they even got there. This isn’t the kind of book store you go to looking for something specific. If you do, you’ll, more than likely, leave disappointed and unimpressed. If you’re searching for specificity, you probably won’t find it here. This is not the kind of book store you go to seek out “a book”. This is the kind of book store in which the books start to seek you.
“Somewhere, there is a book written just for you. It will fit your mind like a glove fits your hand.” — Neil Gaiman
One of my favorite books is titled A Gentle Madness by Nicolas Basbanes, wherein the author describes perfectly how a bibliophile gets caught up in their passion for books, libraries, and knowledge. I used to be a bibliophile, but thankfully not drawn completely into madness. Having said all that, to say:
The right book chooses you as much as you choose it. It’s a meeting of minds and souls, a serendipitous encounter that can enrich your life and leave you grateful for the magic of literature.
