Finished reading: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner 📚💙
What a beautiful and poignant book. Hopeful and joyous at the possibilities of life, but bookended by the realities of disappointment and loss. ★★★★★
Reading
Finished reading: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain 💙📚
Fascinating deep dive into the world of introversion and extroversion. Some meaningful parts of our temperament are genetic and passed down from our parents. If you’re a fussy, highly sensitive baby at four months, there’s a good chance you’ll grow up to be introverted. There seems to be a biological connection between high physical sensitivity and introversion.
Highly sensitive people also process information about their environments—both physical and emotional—unusually deeply. They tend to notice subtleties that others miss—another person’s shift in mood, say, or a lightbulb burning a touch too brightly.
According to Cain, bloggers are almost always introverts. We’ll share personal details with an online multitude they would never disclose at a cocktail party. This is me.
The U.S. is one of the most extroverted countries in the world, while countries in Asia rank among the most introverted. The difference relates in part to genetics but mostly to cultural norms.
Social anxiety disorder in Japan, known as taijin kyofusho, takes the form not of excessive worry about embarrassing oneself, as it does in the United States, but of embarrassing others.
Best takeaway: An introverted/extroverted couple likely has a conflict in their degree of shared sociability. Cain recommends a “Free Trait Agreement” where each partner agrees to a balance of activities in their free time, i.e., a wife who wants to go out every Saturday night and a husband who wants to relax by the firework out a schedule: half the time they’ll go out, and half the time they’ll stay home. Helpful for this INTJ.
Currently reading: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain 📚💙
This has been an eye-opening book for the ways that extroverts and introverts differ. Bloggers, who Cain suggests are almost all introverts, will share personal details with an online multitude they would never disclose at a cocktail party. This hits close to home!
Reflections on Reading The Story of Civilization
Friday, March 21, 2025
This month, I finished a multi-year reading of Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization, an eleven-volume opus considered one of the finest narratives of world history ever written.
Durant published the first volume in 1935 when he had just turned 50. The tenth volume, Rousseau and Revolution, won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 1968. Will and Ariel, his spouse and co-author, published the final volume in 1975, a culmination of forty years of writing and scholarship. No author’s body of work has even come close to the scope and duration of this epic history set. Excluding reference notes, the text spans ten thousand pages, covering human civilization from the earliest recorded history through Napoleon’s meteoric rise and fall.
Finished reading: Laozi’s Dao De Jing by Laozi 💙📚
This short book oozes with wisdom with the help of Ken Liu’s wonderful translation and notes. Read this one slowly and set aside time for reflection. So much of the advice is contrary to conventional western views that it can seem non-sensical. But try, you must. ★★★★★
Can you open yourself to your senses—quieting the mind like water?
Death is good. Senescence is good. The beginning is good. The end is good. You are, like all things in the cosmos, swimming in the flux of Dao.
Currently reading: Laozi’s Dao De Jing by Laozi 💙📚
To solve the hard you must begin with the easy; To do something big you must start very small. All difficulties must be resolved through simple steps. All grand deeds must be performed through tiny details.
Finished reading: Creative Nonfiction by Lee Gutkind 📚
Finished reading: The Age of Napoleon by Will Durant 💙📚
The eleventh and final volume of the Story of Civilization, covering the years from the beginning of the French Revolution through Waterloo. Napoleon’s rise, dictatorship, stunning victories and ultimate defeat were thrilling to read. ★★★★☆
Finished reading: The Old Man And The Sea by Ernest Hemingway 💙📚
Donald Sutherland did a wonderful job narrating this audiobook. It was nice to reacquaint myself with Hemingway’s short and simple sentences, yet so full of energy. Made me yearn for the ocean. ★★★★★
Elevate Your Online Reading with Matter
Thursday, February 27, 2025
I love the idea of a read-it-later app. The premise is simple: Save articles and blog posts that arise throughout the day with a single tap and read them later when you have the time. This way, you stay focused and never worry about misplacing or forgetting an important article.
A good read-it-later app can transform almost any web article into a clean, ad-free format with a consistent layout and font. It organizes newsletter subscriptions without clogging email inboxes. The best ones allow highlighting and annotations that carry over to popular note-taking apps.
The biggest problem with read-it-later apps is that saving articles is too easy. All those well-intentioned essays and posts languish in your queue, unread. You feel guilty about not reading them, so you archive everything and start over, only to repeat the process. And, maybe even worse, you end up reading the wrong articles.
Wednesday, February 12, 2025 →
Ah, Patrick O’Brian. He was truly one of a kind. If you haven’t discovered Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, there’s not a moment to lose. 💙📚
Finished reading: Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks 💙📚
An entertaining book filled with practical advice on how to improve your storytelling, whether in front of a live audience, on a date, or in a written essay. Dicks shares examples of his own stories, then breaks down why they work. ★★★★☆
Finished reading: Fallen Leaves by Will Durant 💙📚
In 208 eloquent pages, Durant shares his views on death, religion, education, war, politics, spirituality, and, through it all, the meaning of life. Truly a gift to humanity from a scholar who devoted his long life to the study of history. ★★★★★
Finished reading: The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen 📚
What a delightful book. The first chapter reeled me in with the story of how the Moleskin notebook exploded in popularity in the 1990s. The author clearly has been bitten by the same notebook fetish bug. He cites brand names of notebooks that are all too familiar to me. He decided to write a history of the notebook about ten years ago and proceeded to fill four or five notebooks with scribbles and quotes and references that ultimately became this book.
Allen used effective storytelling techniques to share dozens of examples of notebook usage over the past six hundred years from accounting ledgers in the 1400s, artist sketchbooks in the 1500s, Darwin’s field notes, to modern day journaling. Definitely a niche book, but great for any lover of notebooks and journals.
★★★★★
New post with my favorite books from 2024 along with updates to my reading system. My year in books for 2024.
My Year of Reading in 2024
Saturday, January 4, 2025
I read 53 books last year, split about evenly between physical and e-books, and listened to just one audiobook. I usually listen to 10 -15 audiobooks a year, but in 2024, I decided to leave the AirPods behind on long walks to be more present. This felt like a fair exchange.
Finished reading: Rousseau and Revolution by Will Durant 📚
The tenth volume of the Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant. This one provides an immensely readable history of Europe leading up to the French Revolution. This series has been such an education. ★★★★★
Finished reading: The Work of Art by Adam Moss 📚
Finished reading: The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl 📚
Finished reading: The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clarke 📚
Finished reading: Thinking on Paper by V.A. Howard, J.H. Barton 📚
Finished reading: James by Percival Everett 📚
Finished reading: A Rage in Harlem (Special Edition) by Chester Himes 📚
What a crazy rollercoaster ride through Harlem in the 1950s. I’m just now catching my breath! ★★★★☆
Finished reading: Needful Things by Stephen King 📚
This one missed the mark for me. Too many characters — almost the entire town of Castle Rock. With so many, I had a hard time connecting with any of them. Any other author would get a two stars, but King gets a pass. ★★★☆☆
Finished reading: A System for Writing by Bob Noto 📚
A guide to the Zettelkasten method of note-taking. Writing and linking atomic notes feels so non-intuitive and…nutty? The examples late in the book of the poor quality of published books compiled from atomic notes did not help the cause. ★★★☆☆
Finished reading: The Age of Voltaire by Will Durant 📚
Continuing my quest to read all eleven volumes of Will Durant’s Opus, The Story of Civilization. Volume IX centers on science and philosophy overtaking religion through thinkers like Voltaire and Diderot. The church did its best to stop it, but in the end, the French Enlightenment steered the faithful away from religion toward the beginnings of existentialism. While this movement addressed religious corruption and the horrors of inquisitions, there is also a feeling of great loss as civilization let go of its rudder of morality and faith. ★★★★★
Finished reading: This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett 📚
I came for the essays on the craft of writing, but stayed for her views on RV life, dogs, opera, marriage, friendship, etc. An eclectic collection, but all Ann Patchett. What a writer. ★★★★☆
Finished reading: The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner 📚
A poignant novel on retirement, the fleetingness of life, and all those many paths not taken. One to savor. ★★★★★
Finished reading: The Elephant Whisperer by Anthony Lawrence 📚
I enjoyed these episodic adventures in the wilds of South Africa amongst elephants and the incredible struggle to preserve and cohabitate with these massive and intelligent animals. An Immense World by Ed Yong introduced me to the ways in which elephants see the world from a scientific basis. Here, the author tells the story from practical experience.
Anthony is a good storyteller. Much of the book feels more like a suspense novel than memoir. The writing isn’t great, but the stories are good enough to look past that.
What I didn’t expect was the sadness mixed in with the joy. There were hard losses sprinkled throughout the book that spoke to the necessary interchange between growth and decline, life and death. I was pretty emotional at the end with the loss of two brave souls, one then the other.
I was saddened to learn that Anthony passed away a few short years after publishing this book. May he rest in peace with the knowledge of the incredible legacy he left behind. ★★★★☆
Currently reading: This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett 📚
