Havana: A Subtropical Delirium, by Mark Kurlansky, published 2017, nonfiction, 202 pages. I went into this having liked Kurlansky’s Cod, but alas, this one didn’t work as well for me. (I stuck with it because one of my family lines is from Cuba and I want to know more about the history and culture there.) I did enjoy reading about Cuban post-embargo constraint-driven creativity and ingenuity, and I didn’t know the sloppy joe originated in Havana, nor that Habaneros apparently hate the sea, because loved ones leave by it and because new people (invaders, historically) arrive by it.

Bunner Sisters, by Edith Wharton, published 1916, fiction, 117 pages. About two sisters, Ann Eliza and Evelina, and Mr. Ramy the clockmaker. Darker than I expected going in, with some unexpected choices by the characters. Liked it. My plan right now, by the way, is to finish up Wharton’s novellas first and then read her novels in chronological order.

A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico, by Amy S. Greenberg, published 2013, history, 461 pages. Quite good. I read this because one of my ancestors fought in the war and I realized I knew almost nothing about it. It would, I think, do most Americans good to learn more about the war (whether through this book or elsewhere), to better understand some of the costs of manifest destiny and the annexations that led to the geography we have today. (Saying this as someone who lives in territory seized during the conflict.) I agree that it was a wicked, unjust war, and for me there were several echoes with our current war du jour — a war of aggression sparked by lies, for example, and weak-willed people in Congress mumbling that we simply have to support the president’s war if it’s already been started (balderdash). I have no strong feelings about this, clearly. In the book it was also fascinating to see how the Mexican–American War functioned as prologue to the Civil War, and Lincoln’s part in protesting it. Recommended.

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HellMood’s 16-byte Sierpinski triangle demo. Sixteen bytes!

Derek Sivers on being a netizen. I’ve been online since 1991 and that same early ethos was instilled in me, too. I believe it makes for a better internet.

Harry Roberts on the new No-Vary-Search browser cache control header.

Ally Piechowski with some helpful git log commands for getting familiar with a new codebase. Bookmarking these.

Nishant on Earth’s radio wave bubble, which is only 240 light years across. One of the most compelling answers to the Fermi paradox I’ve seen so far.

Tracy Durnell on human-oriented online posts. Some interesting ideas here. The analog parts made me think of Robin Sloan’s printing projects: “In the years since, the Kindle has matured and curdled … the web has become an even more brutal arena … and only one realm has remained truly, reliably apart. Only one realm has remained reliable, period. That’s the realm of the physical, of course.” Making and shipping zines (or some other printed matter) is tempting.

Asher Cabrera on adding UI for reply posts on a blog. I like this. Lately I’ve defaulted to these batched link posts with a smidge of commentary per link, but maybe I’ll get back into the habit someday of responding more fully, at least some of the time.

James Goldberg on how Mormon literature is arriving. Unrelated to the link: hard to believe it was almost twenty years ago when I first met James and got involved with New Play Project (writing, typesetting playbills and scripts, helping run auditions, selling tickets and concessions, a little bit of directing). Good memories. And that means it’s been eighteen years (18!) since I started Mormon Artist (may it rest in peace). Sometimes I find myself missing those days of working on larger collaborative projects. (On a related note, withdrawing from social media has absolutely been good for my mental health, but it’s come with the undesirable side effect of feeling far more disconnected from other people doing creative work. I haven’t yet figured out how to balance this.)

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The Tempest, by William Shakespeare, published 1610, play, 66 pages. This was the Shakespeare play I’d been looking forward to the most, because I’d never read it before but had seen several references to it over the years. It did not disappoint. (Though Julius Caesar remains my favorite, I think.)

The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America, by Jeffrey Rosen, published 2024, history, 382 pages. Delighted to read that many/most of those involved in the Founding were voracious readers, though in hindsight I suppose it could be more surprising that any were not. Regardless, my main goal in reading this book was to come out with a list of older books and authors I want to read next, like Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, and I now have that list. But do I have sufficient time? Aye, there’s the rub.

Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, by Joseph J. Ellis, published 2000, history, 418 pages. Fascinating detail into different parts of the Founding — the Hamilton v. Burr duel, the postponing of discussions about slavery, Washington’s farewell address, the troubled friendship between Jefferson and Adams, the split between the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian views of government that still causes issues today, etc. This won the Pulitzer. Really liked it — on its own merits, not because of the award — and recommend it. And no, I didn’t read either of these last two books because of the 250th, though the timing certainly looks suspect.

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Road to Disaster: A New History of America’s Descent into Vietnam, by Brian VanDeMark, published 2018, history, 763 pages. Really liked it. It’s a history of Vietnam up until LBJ leaves office, including a bit at the beginning on the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis (useful context for the early decisions both Kennedy and McNamara were making), looking in particular at the various cognitive blind spots that led smart people to make poor decisions throughout the war. Recommended. Also: war is evil.

Père Goriot, by Honoré de Balzac, published 1835, translated 1890s by Ellen Marriage, fiction, 383 pages. My first time reading Balzac. Shallow society, lots of unhappy marriages and surface-level affairs. And yet in spite of all that (which to be fair is only a small part of the novel), I quite liked the book and found myself looking forward to picking it up again each day. I don’t know that I’ll read his whole Human Comedy — there are a lot of volumes — but a few more, certainly.

Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, by John Matteson, published 2007, biography, 684 pages. Quite good. Compelling and readable. Bronson was an odd character, egotistical (“my genius is epic” — who says that?!) and weird (the whole Fruitlands episode, for example), with some obsessive journaling on parenthood. “Bronson desperately wanted to cure Louisa’s seemingly innate violence. In his records, he fretted endlessly over her fierce will and volcanic temper.” She was two or three at the time, if I recall correctly. Ha. Emerson and Thoreau show up fairly often, which was fun. On the less fun side of things, I hadn’t known about Louisa’s disability and health issues that seriously affected her last couple decades. Another casualty of the Civil War. And of course it was interesting to see which parts of Little Women were more autobiographical. Speaking of that and, more candidly, of the trail of deaths of her family toward the end of the book: biographies often leave me with a feeling I don’t get from any other kind of book, the feeling that a friend has died.

The Life of Charlotte Brontë, by Elizabeth Gaskell (who was six years older than Charlotte and was her friend), published 1857, biography, 684 pages. So good. Tragedy after tragedy, though, with her mother dying at age 39, her two oldest sisters dying at ages 11 and 12, and then, later on, Branwell, Emily, and Anne all dying within eight months of each other at ages 31, 30, and 29, and Charlotte herself dying a few years after that at age 38 while pregnant. The father outlived them all and made it to age 84. A family haunted by death. My wife’s ancestors, by the way, were from Keighley and Haworth, and we visited Haworth as a family a few years ago, so it was fun to read about it. Except that Haworth back then was a bit of a death trap: “And thus we find that illness often assumed a low typhoid form in Haworth, and fevers of various kinds visited the place with sad frequency.” The autobiographical elements of Jane Eyre were striking — I didn’t realize Helen Burns was basically her older sister Maria. Or how her father’s near-blindness and her own extreme nearsightedness surely led to all the references to sight and eyes. The biography includes lots of letters, which I found very effective in drawing me into Charlotte’s world. Some passages that give a feel for the book, and the first two are Charlotte’s words:

A bereavement of this kind gives one a glimpse of the feeling those must have, who have seen all drop round them—friend after friend, and are left to end their pilgrimage alone.

And:

For my part, I am free to walk on the moors; but when I go out there alone, everything reminds me of the times when others were with me, and then the moors seem a wilderness, featureless, solitary, saddening. My sister Emily had a particular love for them, and there is not a knoll of heather, not a branch of fern, not a young bilberry leaf, not a fluttering lark or linnet, but reminds me of her. The distant prospects were Anne’s delight, and when I look round, she is in the blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizon. In the hill-country silence, their poetry comes by lines and stanzas into my mind: once I loved it; now I dare not read it, and am driven often to wish I could taste one draught of oblivion, and forget much that, while mind remains, I never shall forget. Many people seem to recall their departed relatives with a sort of melancholy complacency, but I think these have not watched them through lingering sickness, nor witnessed their last moments: it is these reminiscences that stand by your bedside at night, and rise at your pillow in the morning. At the end of all, however, exists the Great Hope. Eternal Life is theirs now.

And:

Some one conversing with her once objected, in my presence, to that part of Jane Eyre in which she hears Rochester’s voice crying out to her in a great crisis of her life, he being many, many miles distant at the time. I do not know what incident was in Miss Brontë’s recollection when she replied, in a low voice, drawing in her breath, “But it is a true thing; it really happened.”

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Typographica Library’s specimen books of metal and wood type. Lovely. I occasionally dream of using some of these specimens as inspiration for new rough, wobbly fonts in the same vein as the IM Fell fonts, but I don’t know if it’ll happen — I’m beginning to suspect that maybe, just maybe, I might not have the right temperament for doing type design.

Marissa Lingen’s book reviews (twice a month). Enjoying these. So much so, in fact, that I’ve gone back and have been reading through the entirety of her blog archive.

Robert Birming on stories hiding in plain sight, and how perspective determines what’s interesting. This is in context of blogging and perhaps creative nonfiction as well.

Samuel Arbesman’s Microcosm Industries, a register of simulation games like SimCity, Factorio, and Dwarf Fortress. Fun. My brain doesn’t like playing computer games anymore, but when I was younger I would have loved these.

Worse on Purpose. “Corporate autopsies on the brands you trust. Who bought them, who gutted them, and what’s still worth buying.” I think the world would be better off with more rigorous regulations for mergers and acquisitions, and also for private equity.

Andrea Wulf’s recommendations for biographies of 18th-century figures, including Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder, which I’ve been looking forward to. And this reminds me that I’ve been itching to read Wulf’s other books, since I really loved The Invention of Nature by her.

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Also: I thought I’d built the first version of this site in July 2001, but when I came across this 2002 post (and double-checked in my journal) I found that it was actually a year earlier, on July 4, 2000. Further digging in my journal revealed that there was an even earlier incarnation of the site, Home One, which I began toiling away at in September 1999 but never actually released and had completely forgotten about.

As a celebration of youthful cringe and a tiny corner of web history, let’s take a look at the earliest versions of this site. I took the Home One screenshot today, so it’s not perfectly representative of what it looked like back in 1999, but it’s close enough. (Noting here that I think putting my initials after the dates in the Site News section may have been a little chronologically misleading.) The other screenshots were taken in 2002.

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Foster, by Claire Keegan, published 2010, fiction, 34 pages. I normally try not to read books from the same author in such close temporal proximity, but this came in on hold and it’s so short. (I love short books.) (I also love long books.) (I just really love books.) Keegan’s writing continues to bewitch my brain.

Penric’s Fox, by Lois McMaster Bujold, published 2017, fantasy, 144 pages. Part of the Penric & Desdemona series. A murder mystery this time, and I liked it a lot, as always with Bujold.

Piers Plowman, by William Langland, published 1370s, poetry, 337 pages. I read this in Middle English (which I took a class in back in my undergrad days) with no aids, to see what it would be like. While it was fun, I sadly came out of it retaining very little, even though at the line level I kept feeling like I was comprehending everything well enough. I’ve also learned that allegories are not really my thing. Loved the crazy Middle English orthographic diversity and the utter avalanche of biblical Latin quotes, though.

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The Old Regime and the Revolution, by Alexis de Tocqueville (translated by Henry Reeve), published 1856 (translation published 1873), history, 410 pages. An analysis of the causes of the French Revolution and a thesis that the revolution perhaps didn’t reform French political institutions as much as people may have thought. Fascinating and readable. Felt surprisingly contemporary, too, with passages like these: “And it may be said with strict accuracy that the taste a man may show for absolute government bears an exact ratio to the contempt he may profess for his countrymen.” And: “Since the object of taxation was not to include those most able to pay taxes, but those least able to defend themselves from paying, the monstrous consequence was brought about that the rich were exempted and the poor burdened.” All too familiar. And: “The men of the eighteenth century knew little of that sort of passion for comfort which is the mother of servitude.” Looking forward to reading Democracy in America.

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, by Merlin Sheldrake, published 2020, science, 340 pages. The first part felt like a constant stream of fascinating facts ala An Immense World, with nuggets like this: “According to some estimates, if one teased apart the mycelium found in a gram of soil—about a teaspoon—and laid it end to end, it could stretch anywhere from a hundred meters to ten kilometers.” And this: “One study estimated that if a hypha was as wide as a human hand, it would be able to lift an eight-ton school bus.” And especially this: “Globally, the total length of mycorrhizal hyphae in the top ten centimeters of soil is around half the width of our galaxy.” Whew! Also, lichens are surprisingly interesting. But alas, towards the end the book went off into magic mushrooms and brewing alcohol and I completely lost interest. I do still very much recommend the first part, though.

Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan, published 2021, historical fiction, 47 pages. Somber yet human and ultimately hopeful. I found the prose bewitching in ways I still don’t understand but which left me wanting to read more Keegan. (Which — spoiler alert — I’ve already done. This is what happens when I’m perpetually behind on writing up these booknotes.)

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Peter Saint-Andre on pair reading. I’ve been doing a form of this for the last year and a half and have really enjoyed it.

epub-merge, a tool I recently used to merge two EPUBs from Project Gutenberg. Worked great.

Matt Glassman on proportional representation in the House of Representatives. Ooh, I like this idea.

Blain Smith on the bare essentials of development tools. I’m not quite as minimalist as this, but the principles resonate with me. I’ve been working recently on slimming down my Neovim config (I’m planning to post about that sometime soon) and hope to move further in this direction. I also quite liked the posts on software engineering discipline and posture and humanities in the machine.

Sava on living in the terminal. (On one’s computer, that is, not at the airport.) I, too, find the terminal to be soothing and quiet, and using it sparks joy for me.

Ashur Cabrera on asking what you’ve tried, when debugging things. “Eventually I learned to compile this list before asking for help. And, reader, what a difference!”

Frederick Chan on setting up a free locality domain. “In the US, can get a domain name like somename.city.state.us for free.” Had no idea.

Riley Walz’s Empty Screenings, a little web app to show you which AMC theaters around you haven’t sold many tickets, for people who prefer their theaters on the empty side.

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The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim, published 1922, fiction, 299 pages. I loved it! Delightful, witty, well-wrought, and the voice was a great fit for me. Very much looking forward to reading all the rest of von Arnim’s books. Her Vera was apparently an inspiration for Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which I still haven’t read but need to.

Truth Has a Power of Its Own: Conversations About A People’s History, by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez, published 2022, history, 155 pages. I would rather know the truth even if it’s ugly, and I have zero interest in whitewashing history to be more palatable, but whew, this book ended up being depressing and deflating, because the actual history is depressing and deflating. Greed continues to wreak havoc throughout the human story. Slavery: bad. Wealth disparity: bad. War: bad. Speaking of which, here are a few war-related passages from the book that resonated with me: “War is terrorism on a very large scale.” “I came to the conclusion that war itself should not be tolerated, not even a so-called Good War, not even a war against an evil enemy. Because war is inevitably the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of innocent people, and I don’t think it can be morally justified.” “We can no longer accept war as a way of solving problems. In fact, you might say that this is the great challenge before the human race in our time: how to solve problems of tyranny, aggression, and injustice without killing huge numbers of people.” Hear, hear.

Richard Nixon: The Life, by John A. Farrell, published 2017, biography, 940 pages. I really liked this and recommend it for those interested in political biographies. It’s readable and seemed reasonably evenhanded, at least as far as I could tell — I went into it not liking Nixon at all but came out with more understanding and compassion, even if I still disagree with much of what Nixon did. (I also don’t think every book needs to be evenhanded; there’s value in reading books from other perspectives.) The Chambers/Hess part was particularly compelling for me and I’m looking forward to reading Sam Tanenhaus’s Whittaker Chambers.

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