Three new art pieces.
(Yes, that last one looks like sushi. I’m okay with that. I love sushi.)
Blog
Links #134
Lincoln Michel on TV prose, his name for writing overly affected by visual media. Yes, 100%. This is something I’ve thought about frequently in recent years, and I’m slowly trying (with varying levels of success) to get into older novels to offset this.
Alan Jacobs on breaking bread with the dead (reading old books, etc.). “A vast cultural inheritance is ours for the taking, and to access it almost all we need is a computer with a web browser.”
Jonathan Edward Durham. “If you think about it, the very best books are really just extremely long spells that turn you into a different person for the rest of your life.” Ha. I like that.
David Epstein on taking a vacation from news consumption. Agreed. Doing this soon after the election made a huge difference for me.
James Goldberg’s essay on Latter-day Saint holidays from the Holiday Lit Blitz. “I will admit that, living less than two centuries into Latter-day Saint history, our holidays can feel a little underwhelming to me. But I suspect they’re still in their early stages, waiting to see what we might make of them.” I really liked this and agree.
Samuel Arbesman on creating a humanist monospace font for his terminal. “I wanted to construct a monospaced typeface—where the width of all glyphs are the same—that is ideal for writing code, but that would also have certain features of handwritten manuscripts that make it feel a bit like working with an old and mysterious text. I wanted programming to mingle with dusty tomes or spellwork. If programmers have been talking about the similarities between coding and magic for years, maybe we need a font that tries to make this more manifest.”
The Tilings Encyclopedia, a list of aperiodic tilings (like Penrose tiling). Cool.
Quick minor note: I’ve redesigned the art page, grouping the pieces into collections. I’ve also added RSS feeds for all collections and tags (linked from the top of each collection or tag page), so if you’re just interested in the religious art and don’t want to subscribe to the full blog, there’s now an RSS feed for that. There’s also a feed for all the art.
Booknotes 3.24
Nonfiction
- The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement, by Sharon McMahon, published 2024. Quite good. Lots of inspiring, hopeful stories from history, which was just what I needed when I read this. Speaking of the challenges these people overcame, by the way, it’s awful how America has been (and clearly often still is) so sexist and racist. Human tribalism is a hard thing to overcome. I feel like the gospel of Jesus Christ is an effective countermeasure, though.
- The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, by Roland Allen, published 2023. I heard about this from the newsletters of Austin Kleon and Ryan Holiday. Really liked it. For the past few years (I’ve mentioned this before), I’ve been using pretty much exclusively digital notes, but reading this got me itching to return to paper at least some of the time. The little that I’ve done so far has been satisfying. I didn’t know it took five hundred years for Florence to return to pre-plague population levels. I also hadn’t really thought about paper being so critical in the development of art, but it makes a lot of sense (having an affordable way to do lots of sketches and studies). In the part about the Dutch album amicorum, I suddenly remembered that when I was on my mission, the younger Thais (and missionaries, including me) had friendship books, which I had totally forgotten about. Two other parts that stood out to me and that I’m still thinking about: the idea of notebooks containing rough notes that later get transcribed into journals and then get refined and processed until they’re ready for publication, and the idea of notebooks as an actual extension of one’s mind — an SD card for the brain, basically. Oh, I also enjoyed the history of double-entry accounting.
Fiction
- Still Alice, by Lisa Genova, published 2007, fiction. I read this for book group. It’s from the perspective of a woman who gets early-onset Alzheimer’s and shows what that’s like. Whew, it’s tragic. Fiction is a great vehicle for this type of thing, though — letting you experience something you probably haven’t (similar to Kindred). Looking forward to reading Genova’s ALS book at some point down the road.
- The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman, published 2020, mystery. Quite liked it. Fun, delightful characters (Joyce especially), and twisty, too. Looking forward to reading the rest of the series, and then Osman’s newer series after that.
- The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett, published 2024, fantasy. A twisty Holmes/Watson-style murder mystery, with big monsters in the background for flavor. Other than a few small parts I didn’t care for, I liked it. Especially the interesting worldbuilding. I still need to finish Bennett’s Founders trilogy, which also had interesting worldbuilding (magic ala programming).
Two new typographic art pieces (a thing I’m experimenting with) and two new religious art pieces.
Links #133
Alex Chan on using static websites for tiny archives. Ooh, I really like this idea. I’m now planning to do this with my personal apps (to do list, journals, notes, etc.), having them regularly export static site archives. (I already archive the database files, but an HTML export is a lot more usable and would work without the app needing to run and without the user needing to know how the database is structured, which is nice.)
Rachel Andrew on Chrome’s new support for adding content to page margins (like page numbers, as part of the CSS Paged Media spec). Exciting to see this start happening! I’ve been waiting a while for browsers to start implementing this, making Paged.js less necessary. Hoping the other browsers follow suit soon.
Sean Voisen on reading at whim. I have lists of books I want to read — several lists, in fact — and update them daily, but even then, what I read next almost always comes down to whim. I feel like it’s working out okay.
Keith Cirkel on not having time to learn React. I like and echo his advice on studying web platform fundamentals, learning a strongly typed systems language, and reading specs.
MIT is offering free tuition to students whose families make under $200k/year. Wow.
Michael Walther on ETH Zürich’s new method for printing buildings with earth-based materials. Also see this article by Rupendra Brahambhatt about it, with more details. Very cool.
HTML for People, by Blake Watson. If you want to learn HTML and start making websites, this seems like a good first step.
Booknotes 3.23
Though I’ve been reading a lot (as you can see on the reading log), I’ve been rather slow writing these up. Hoping to get back on track soon.
Nonfiction
- Printing Types: Their History, Forms, and Use, volume 1, by Daniel Berkeley Updike, published 1937. This first volume looks at typefaces designed early on (1500–1800) in a few different European countries (Germany, Italy, England, etc.) and also examines how they were used. I read it primarily for the type specimens and sample pages and less for the commentary, which turned out to be a bit dry and snobby. Fun to see the variety of typefaces. Also, I learned that “out of sorts” meant the printer was missing some characters in the typeface.
- A Life of My Own, by Claire Tomalin, published 2017. While I haven’t read any of Tomalin’s biographies yet, my wife has read her Jane Austen, and I figured I may as well start with Tomalin’s autobiography in the hope that there would be a lot about the biographies she’s written. There was some (less than I wanted), and those were the parts I enjoyed most. In her own life, there was a fair amount of cheating and tragedy. (Her husband! Her daughter! And that story her teacher told her about the child in India whose toes got cut off while crossing a road and who just picked up the toes and kept running! Whew.) Fun fact: Jane Austen and Samuel Pepys had the same banker, and said banker’s financial records for both are still available for research (or were when Tomalin wrote the Austen and Pepys biographies, anyway).
Fiction
- The Adventures of Pinocchio, by Carlo Collodi, published 1883, fantasy. What a weird little book. I’ve only seen the original Disney movie, and that was a long, long time ago. The morals of the story are laid on a bit thick. I suppose in hindsight that that shouldn’t have been a surprise to me. Also a surprise: the Talking Cricket’s fate early in the book. Whoa. Not a surprise: people being kind of violent back then. (Wait, what? You’re telling me that human nature has not in fact changed all that much since the 1800s? Oh snap.) The scene where Pinocchio refuses to take his medicine was funny. Overall, glad I read it.
- Kindred, by Octavia E. Butler, published 1979, science fiction. Family history time travel, basically. For some reason I was expecting it to be boring, but it was compelling from the first page. And whew, that was a brutal, violent, and uncomfortable book. Slavery is insanely awful. Ugh. (This book reminded me, by the way, how effective fiction is in mentally simulating conditions one hasn’t experienced oneself — like what it might have felt like to be a slave.) A good book and well worth reading.
Four new art pieces (three religious, one family).
“Our Savior’s Love” hymn print:
“Joy to the World” hymn print:
Welcome Home (hey, look, I finally drew something sort of representational again):
Italian Book of Mormon reader’s edition
Just released an Italian reader’s edition of the Book of Mormon, available for download in EPUB.
Booknotes 3.22
Nonfiction
- Books in Chains: And Other Bibliographic Papers, by William Blades, published 1890. An interesting little collection of essays about book history — chained books, signatures, the Great Controversy regarding whether the Germans (Gutenberg) or the Dutch (Coster) were first to invent movable type. Very nerdy and I enjoyed it, especially the bit where a printer was marking signatures and after getting through the double alphabet they started using the sequence of Latin words from the Lord’s Prayer. Ha! I also didn’t realize chained books were a thing for so long (three hundred years or so).
- First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process, by Robert D. Richardson, published 2009. A short book about Emerson on reading and writing. I’ll admit this didn’t resonate with me as much as I was hoping it would, and I don’t know why. (I do plan to read both Richardson’s Emerson biography and Emerson’s essays down the road and should have a better idea then if Emerson just isn’t for me or if it was this particular book.) The idea that language is rooted in nature — and that even abstract words often started out as references to concrete things — intrigues me, though I don’t know how broadly true it actually is. This quote got lodged in my head: “Always that work is more pleasant to the imagination which is not now required.”
Fiction
- Walking to Aldebaran, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, published 2019, science fiction. Enjoyed this, particularly the core concept and setting (bleak though it was). I did not see the twist coming until it was twisting.
- My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein), published 2011 (translation published 2012), fiction. The first of Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. This felt like it paired surprisingly well with Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography, though it’s around four hundred years later and it’s fiction. Sure seems like there was a lot of fighting and violence in Italy during both times. Whew. The book itself was good, though maybe not really my thing. Not planning to continue with the series, sadly.