Tag: reading

A few days ago I finished Haruki Murakami’s, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Loved it; great book. It’s a book about running that, really, is about far more than running. Murakami weaves an engaging memoir together that illustrates the place running has in his life, work, and personal happiness.

How You Know

Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you’ve lost the source of. It works, but you don’t know why.

How You Know by Paul Graham.

An upside to tracking my reading is knowing that, so far, I’ve read 34 books this year. 1 I’ve been aiming for one book a week and am close to that goal; just 7 books short.

Those 34 books break down as 19 non-fiction and 15 fiction. I’ve been on a bit of a sci-fi kick this year, reading 11 books. That will soon be 12 sci-fi books as I’m nearly done with Abaddon’s Gate.

Notes:

  1. Pardon the dust on that linked page. Still need to work out how best to display books with this new theme.

New Reading Material

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I’ve been reading a lot more recently, about a book every week. This should keep me busy for a while; a benefit to living three blocks from Powell’s.

As an aside I find it really beneficial to read one fiction book in conjunction with one non-fiction. Ensures I have reading material no matter the frame of mind I’m in.

Paper vs digital reading is an exhausted debate:

Ebooks are here to stay because digital is, and quite shortly we’ll stop having this debate about paper vs ebooks because it will no longer make a lot of sense.

New Reading Material

New reading for 2014

Picked up some new reading material to start off 2014.

Status

Daemon, and its sequel Freedom, by Daniel Suarez are two of the best fiction books I have read in a long time. Props to Daniel for the recommendation.

Status

I just started reading The Birth of the Museum by Tony Bennett. I’ve been fascinated by museums for a while now and lucked out in getting a reading list from a friend’s course at Cambridge. Slow reading so far but good stuff.

Picturing Books:

all of these choices—these transpositions we choose when reading— work. They work for us because books do not tender precise images, sounds or smells. Books, like plays, present ideas, and the juxtaposition of ideas. It is the interaction of ideas that catalyzes feeling in us readers.

A long essay that is well worth the read.

Using WordPress to track my reading

A while back I put together a small plugin for tracking the books I read. Today I put the code up on Github in case it’s useful to others. You can see a live demo of it on my reading page.

The plugin uses a custom post type for books which lets you track each book as a new post. There’s also a custom taxonomy to keep track of the authors you’re reading as well.

I also wanted to create a repository for the notes I take when reading. I went with the easy way to do that. 🙂 Within the custom post type any content will show as notes. The main reading page has a little “View notes” link that is added automatically once you add content. It means I’ll slowly build up a public, searchable set of notes from my reading.

For displaying books I put together a few templates as a child theme. It’s what I use on this site and the child theme is up on Github. I need to clean up the author archive templates a bit but it at least gets a basic layout done.

In the future I’d love to add a graph at the top of the page which plots monthly stats of my reading. Having a visual representation of my reading velocity would be neat to see over time.