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.
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.
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.
Jesper on Andy Matuschak’s post about learning from textbooks. Particularly the last bit: “I’ve been doing way too much silent reading, and though I rarely stop thinking about things, I’ve been doing way too little writing and processing.” I feel the same.
Eleanor Konik on what it means to not have time. A good counterpoint and reminder. “But it’s okay if you just pick one thing you really care about, and it’s okay if that thing is ‘being a good friend’ instead of ‘maximizing your potential’ or ‘journaling daily’ or whatever.”
The Facemaker, by Lindsey Fitzharris, published 2022. Book group read. A harrowing but fascinating history of plastic surgery during World War I. Not for the weak of stomach. (Might not want to read it while eating anything squishy.) Back in 2020 I read Fitzharris’s The Butchering Art, which I think I liked a little more, but both are good and worth reading. I particularly enjoyed reading about innovations like the tubed pedicle and the discovery of blood types. Also crazy to learn about Violet Jessop, who was on the Olympic when it hit a ship, then the next year was on its sister ship Titanic when it sank (she survived), and then four years later was on the third sister ship Britannic when it too sank (she survived). Whew.
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, by Benvenuto Cellini (huge surprise there), translated by John Addington Symonds, originally published 1563ish, translation published 1887. Far more entertaining and readable than I expected it to be. There’s lots about Cellini being a goldsmith and a sculptor, brown-nosing popes and kings and dukes, getting into fights and, uh, murdering people, and getting into, um, short-term age-gap relationships, let’s call them. Leonardo and Michelangelo are mentioned. There’s plague. Jail time makes a cameo. There’s probably a significant amount of exaggeration throughout, and there’s definitely an inflated ego. Not to mention Italy in the 1500s is a crazy time, at least for Cellini. Glad I read this. (Not least because I have Italian ancestors and it felt kind of like reading about a batty old uncle.)
Fiction
Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson, published 2013, historical fiction / alternate history. I heard about the book (and Atkinson, for that matter) in Lev Grossman’s newsletter. (Looking forward to reading The Bright Sword, by the way.) Loved the writing, concrete and vivid. And whew, this story was kind of brutal (and a bit earthy), which is understandable given its core time loop conceit but still a punch in the gut at the end of each loop. Reminded me a bit of The Edge of Tomorrow in some ways, though this takes place during World War I and II and there are no aliens. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August was good, too. Ah, I love time loops.
Firewalkers, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, published 2020, science fiction. Post-apocalypses don’t appeal to me all that much (as I’ve mentioned before ad nauseam), but this one had interesting ideas and was compelling enough that I’d be down to read more stories set in this world.
A couple weeks ago I built my own EPUB reader called Scroll, and since then have pretty much moved off Marvin. Here’s what Scroll looks like (light and dark themes):
Thus far I’ve read two books using it, and while there are still a few small issues, overall I’m very happy with it. I don’t plan to release it anytime soon, but as a not-even-close-to-the-same-thing substitute, here are some notes:
I’d made decent enough progress with epub2pdf that it was usable, but reflowability and theme-changing are nice, and having quick navigation between books is even nicer, and printing a book to PDF in Firefox is slow, and browsers already natively support the HTML that’s inside EPUBs, so I abandoned the PDF route.
Scroll (after both the noun and the verb) is a PWA without a backend. It’s actually just static HTML files: I wrote a script that concatenates all the HTML in an EPUB into one long HTML file, with some processing to fix links and wrap things and bake the table of contents out. Then there’s a little bit of vanilla JS for the reader functionality (saving the debounced current scroll location to localStorage (I wish Safari supported scrollend), restoring it on the pageshow event, calculating pagination, jumping to pages, switching themes, etc.), and another vanilla JS file listing the current books (so that I don’t have to re-build all the other book files when I start reading a new book).
While I said “pagination” above, I’m not actually chunking the book into pages; I’ve chosen to stick with vertical scrolling for now instead of horizontal paging, primarily because being able to make sub-page progress is nicer than I realized. That said, I still want to know how many “pages” I’ve read, so I use the scroll percentage (scrollTop divided by scrollHeight, super simple) multiplied by a rough heuristic of 1,200 characters per page, ignoring whitespace. It’s not perfect but it’s good enough for my needs.
I added a slight blur to the text so that it feels a little less digital. For now I’ve opted against a background image, but I may change my mind about that.
Whenever I add/remove a book, I copy the baked files to a private directory on my server
I’ve saved the root HTML file (which is just a list of the current books, loaded via JS) to my home screen as a PWA
Mandy Brown responds to Alan Jacobs, including a compelling peasant woodland metaphor borrowed from Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (which I need to read). “A peasant woodland is one in which human participation and activity help the woods become more productive for humans and wildlife both—not through anything shaped like a plan but rather through a kind of call and response, an improvisation in which all the critters and creatures of the forest are players among us.” This way of thinking about the web seems healthy.
Devin Kate Pope on fearing home cooks. “The U.S. food system disconnects people from their food and each other. […] We, the people, are really remarkably capable of cooking everything and anything. Why am I more comfortable buying frozen tamales made by a corporation flown into my town than from the lady up the street? Who is the suspicion serving? Who profits when people are scared to eat food made by their neighbors?” Good point, one I hadn’t thought of much before. (Even though my favorite food in other countries is typically street food sold by small vendors, which is close to the same thing.)
Mandy Brown on staying in the gap, referring to Ira Glass’s taste gap story about creative work. I think of the original quote quite often and like this expansion of the idea. “The gap between your abilities and your taste is not a gap to be crossed but one to be cultivated.”
