In this she was very much in step with the Arts and Crafts movement, then in full sway, which held that craftsmanship provided both satisfaction and rescue from the perceived dehumanization of the industrial revolution.

Also found this of note:

Off the southeast tip of Italy a young Austrian U-boat commander named Georg von Trapp, later to gain eternal renown when played by Christopher Plummer in the film The Sound of Music, fired two torpedoes into a large French cruiser, the Leon Gambetta. The ship sank in nine minutes, killing 684 sailors.

Life of Johnson volume 1: 1709–1765, by James Boswell (edited by George Birkbeck Hill), published 1791, biography, 980 pages. I’ve long wanted to tackle this but the whole thing was daunting in its full length. (In print it’s 1,400 pages of what has to be a fairly tiny typeface, but in my ebook reader — a standard 1,200 characters per page — it’s 4,200 pages long.) Turns out it’s very readable and so good. I’m glad I’m going with the unabridged edition, by the way, because I find the letters add helpful flavor. And the footnotes sent me off with loads more books I want to read, mostly old memoirs and letters. Mmm. Can’t wait to read the remaining volumes.

A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness, by Nassir Ghaemi, published 2011, nonfiction, 355 pages. The core argument is that some degree of mental illness (depression, bipolar disorder, etc.) is actually desirable in leaders during times of crisis, with examples pulled from Lincoln, Gandhi, MLK, FDR, JFK, Hitler, and a few more. I’m not sure how fully I agree with the thesis, and I do know for sure that I disagree with the part of the argument that says that in our leaders maybe we need to accept the vices (hypersexuality, etc.) that accompany mental illness, but I still found the book biographically interesting, and I agree that continuing to destigmatize mental illness is worthwhile and important.

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood, by Trevor Noah, published 2016, memoir, 320 pages. I read this because my kid’s English class is reading it and the teacher asked us parents to read along. (Though I’ve had it on my list for a while and would have read it anyway, to be clear. This readindg was not under duress.) Some of the stories are deliciously bonkers. Overall, it’s a funny, occasionally harrowing, and eye-opening look at life in South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s. I liked it.

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Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, by Patrick Radden Keefe, published 2018, history, 540 pages. Quite good. Compelling and well-written. There’s the titular murder as a frame story, but overall the book is much more about the Troubles, which I was grateful for (true crime makes me squirm too much these days). Reminded me a lot of Days of Rage, about the bombings in the U.S. in the 1970s. I feel like I have a better understanding of Ireland now. (Though this is admittedly just one sliver of what appears to have been centuries of tension and strife.)

David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens, published 1850, fiction, 1,470 pages. Loved it. Agnes! Little Emily! Dora! Peggotty! And Uriah Heep. And the Micawbers. So good. This was Dickens’ favorite novel, and I can see why. Great characters, poignant in places, delicious prose, funny throughout. Very much looking forward to continuing my grand tour of Dickensian literature.

The Blue Castle, by L. M. Montgomery, published 1926, fiction, 270 pages. One of Montgomery’s adult novels (which didn’t feel all that much like Anne of Green Gables to me, by the way), about a woman who decides she’s going to live life her own way and not let her family dictate everything any longer. I enjoyed it.

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Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, by John Green, published 2025, nonfiction, 215 pages. A quick read about an awful, awful thing. Fascinating and worthwhile. I wish the world were a fairer place.

The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898, by Evan Thomas, published 2010, history, 450 pages. Another step on my unofficial quest to learn more about the smaller American wars I don’t know much about, in this case the Spanish–American War. Quite good, recommended. I hadn’t realized Teddy Roosevelt was so war-hungry, which came as a bit of a disappointment but in hindsight clearly means I didn’t know much about him. (I need to read the Edmund Morris biography. And The Bully Pulpit.) Boo to warmongering.

Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, by Stewart Brand, published 2026, nonfiction, 270 pages. The book doesn’t talk about actual maintenance as much as I would have hoped, and I struggled mightily with the Musk adoration at the end (given DOGE, his Epstein Island thing, turning Twitter into a cesspool, etc.), and Marcin Wichary’s review points out some other flaws, but there are still some interesting anecdotes, especially the sailing stories in the first chapter. Also, I had no idea there were electric cars way back in the early 1900s. Wow.

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At St John’s College there is a servitor named Shakston, a tall, thin, pale fellow, who eats spiders with as much greediness as nuts, saying they comfort his stomach.

You’re, uh, welcome.

The Shadow of Vesuvius: A Life of Pliny, by Daisy Dunn, published 2019, biography, 295 pages. A compelling account of Pliny the Elder, who died after Vesuvius erupted, and Pliny the Younger, who later became a senator and wrote a lot of letters. Quite liked it, lots of interesting things. In reading this I realized my Italian ancestors probably lived within 100 miles of Vesuvius. (I say probably because I’ve only traced those lines back to the 1700s; I don’t actually know where they were living 1,700 years before that. Maybe nowhere near.) It includes a quote from John Aubrey about the death of Francis Bacon, which was fun since I didn’t expect to see Aubrey again so soon.

Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages, by Phyllis Rose, published 1983, biography, 280 pages. Compelling short biographical portraits of the marriages of Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Carlyle. The author is fairly anti-marriage (and I am not), but in spite of that I really liked the book and the stories of these five writers. I’ve read books by four of them, by the way, which may have something to do with my level of interest; I don’t know whether this book would still be interesting to someone unfamiliar with them.

Blue Nights, by Joan Didion, published 2011, memoir, 140 pages. Alas, while I’ve really liked Didion’s essays, this memoir of grief after the loss of her daughter didn’t resonate with me as I was hoping it would.

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Hitler, by Joachim C. Fest (translated by Richard and Clara Winston), published 1973, biography, 1,500 pages. After spending that much time in that headspace I felt like I needed a mental shower, but it was still worthwhile to me (I’d never read anything in depth on Hitler himself). Tragic and disturbing, as expected. Interesting how obsessed he was with people not knowing who his family was, and his mania for beating architectural records, and his plans for introducing polygamy, and all the cake gobbling in the bunker at the very end. The insomnia and keeping court all night long reminded me of Stalin. “Though later on he was always involved in close social relationships, always surrounded by a host of people, his biography is eerily empty of other human beings.” What a toll isolation — and mental illness and drugs — can take on the world. “Hardly ever has a centering of all power in a single person ended in such total and blatant disorganization.” Which sounds familiar. (As did several other things in this book. One wonders if they’re consciously cribbing or if evil is just monotonously uncreative.)

Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell, published 2020, historical fiction, 390 pages. Whew. A harrowing and heavy meditation on grief, brutal knowing roughly what’s to come (the novel’s subtitle is “A Novel of the Plague”) and then stumbling through the aftermath. I cried a fair amount during the last third or so. Recommended for those in the mood. The choice not to ever mention the name Shakespeare (or even William) in the text reminded me of Wolf Hall and I felt it worked reasonably well here, too.

Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman, by Lucy Worsley, published 2022, biography, 440 pages. Liked it but didn’t love it. I knew Christie had been married to an archaeologist later in life but didn’t realize what a big part of her life archaeology was during those years. It had also somehow escaped me that the person who adapted her novels into plays was Christie herself. Planning to read Laura Thompson’s 2007 biography of her at some point.

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The Marne, by Edith Wharton, published 1918, fiction, 70 pages. World War I from an American perspective, and as part of that, a meditation on war. Quite liked it — one of my favorites of Wharton’s, I think. This part amused me: “Her studies had probably been curtailed by the task of preparing a repertory, for she appeared to think that Joan of Arc was a Revolutionary hero, who had been guillotined with Marie Antoinette for blowing up the Bastille; and her notions of French history did not extend beyond this striking episode.”

The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer, published c. 1400 (translation by Nevill Coghill published 1951), poetry, 520 pages. I didn’t love it, for the same reasons I didn’t really like The Decameron (whence several of Chaucer’s stories came from): too bawdy. Though, to his credit, Chaucer’s characterization work is much better, and the frame story has interesting detours where people interrupt and derail the order of tale telling. Even so, I’m beginning to suspect that medieval lit may not be my thing after all, which comes as a surprise to me.

Unto This Last, by John Ruskin, published 1862, essays, 100 pages. Interesting essays on political economy, touching on ethical, humane economics. Some interesting ideas, like equality of wages regardless of aptitude (which seems kind of crazy but was still interesting to think about). And then I got to the end of third essay where Ruskin drops this: “My continual aim has been to show the eternal superiority of some men to others, sometimes even of one man to all others.” Ugh. Plop goes Ruskin into the interesting-yet-problematic bucket. But other than that it was worth reading. Some passages that stood out to me:

Men nearly always speak and write as if riches were absolute, and it were possible, by following certain scientific precepts, for everybody to be rich. Whereas riches are a power like that of electricity, acting only through inequalities or negations of itself. The force of the guinea you have in your pocket depends wholly on the default of a guinea in your neighbour’s pocket. If he did not want it, it would be of no use to you; the degree of power it possesses depends accurately upon the need or desire he has for it—and the art of making yourself rich, in the ordinary mercantile economist’s sense, is therefore equally and necessarily the art of keeping your neighbour poor.

And this:

And whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor.

And:

Consider whether, even, supposing it guiltless, luxury would be desired by any of us, if we saw clearly at our sides the suffering which accompanies it in the world.

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Bookshelf, my reading tracker, which I’ve been using pretty much daily over the past fifteen years to keep track of which page I’m on in each book and also (via the automatically generated stats) as strong motivation to reach my per-day and per-book page count reading goals. I love it. No plans to move to something else.

Cast, my static site generator, used to build this site for the last year and a half. Glad I finally put in the time to make this happen, because I love static files and having fewer moving parts, and I’ve been very happy with Cast itself. No plans to move to a third-party SSG like Origami or Hugo. (Nothing against those, to be clear.)

Codex, my notes app, which I use daily to track which books I want to read, notes on house and car maintenance, tracking progress on my journal transcription work, story outlines, genealogy research notes, blog drafts (I’m writing this post in it), and more. I like it a lot, but lately I’ve gotten back into taking notes by hand in my Field Notes and other pocket notebooks (as mentioned in the last links post, and probably in other posts before that), and I’m now figuring out when I want to use this app vs. paper notes. Long-lived notes that I modify a lot over time still seem like a better fit for digital, for example. Anyway, no immediate plans to move to something else, though I imagine more types of notes will probably move to paper over time.

Digest, my static RSS reader. It’s been six months so far, and this way of reading feeds still works really well on my brain — the self-contained nature of bundling posts by day is soothing, and instead of feeling anxious that I need (“need,” I should say) to keep up with an endless stream of new posts, I feel like I can read at whatever pace I want to, which usually ends up being every few days instead of daily. I love that each day is its own static HTML file that I rsync up to my server. I also have really loved reading posts on their original sites instead of in a homogeneous design of my own make. Feels much more human and more delightful.

Gate, my quick entry app. I use it dozens of times a day to send to-dos to Liszt and journal notes/entries to Leaf, and it’s working really well. No plans to move away from it.

Leaf, my journal app, where I keep my daily journal and my project logs. While it’s tempting to write paper journals again, I’ve been transcribing my older journals and it’s nice being able to read older entries and search through all of them to find out when something happened, and I don’t see myself wanting to give that up. The app automatically exports each day’s entries to a day-specific text file for extra preservation beyond the database itself, which I love and plan to do in other applicable apps of mine. No plans to move to something else, though I do write some types of entries in my Field Notes.

Liszt, my to-do list app, which I use dozens of times a day, and it’s working well. I love being able to quickly add items via Gate, including multiple items at a time (each on its own line). I love the text-based annotations. (Write that blog post ! #writing 5m marks it as important, tags it, and indicates I should spend five minutes on it.) I love having my daily routine autopopulated in the list each morning. All of that said, however, I do find myself thinking about going back to pen and paper for to-do lists, because I don’t know that I strictly need any of the extra functionality the app is giving me. Also, for the past few years I’ve been using a plain text Markdown file on my work laptop for my work to-do list, and that same model could easily work for my projects where I’m almost always working on them mainly on my laptop. In fact, as I write these words I’m now remembering that when I was younger I used to keep my to-do lists as plain text files. (Part of these thoughts, by the way, come from wanting to move more analogward, and part come from wanting fewer dependencies, fewer moving parts, fewer things to maintain on my server.) Not sure yet what I’ll do.

Momentum, my time tracker, which I use daily to track time (go figure) for scripture study and conference talk study and, primarily, to make sure I’m walking enough each day (for my back pain). It’s nice being able to just tap a button to start or stop tracking, and to see the recent history of how much time I’ve spent per category, but I’ve also been thinking I could probably do this via pen and paper, or via the stopwatch on my phone. We’ll see.

Saturn, my quick launcher web page, which I use daily for fast access to notes and other bookmarks and as a quick search entry point — I type in a query and then choose where I want to search (my journal, Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, eReaderIQ, my library, etc.). Works great, love it, no plans to move to something else.

Scroll, my ebook reader. An absolute win in my book. It’s been almost two years now and I still love it and use it almost every day and wish I’d made the move earlier. I love having full typographic control, bleedthrough and paper backgrounds, autoscroll (and scrolling in general, instead of swiping), and the lightweight feel of knowing it’s just static HTML files with some JavaScript. There are admittedly some things I still want to fix — changing pagination from percentage-based (which is unstable across font changes) to statically built in (which has the extra advantage of being usable in other apps and devices, like the Xteink X4) (which I got for my birthday, by the way; been meaning to post about it), and using publisher styles instead of overriding everything like the madman that I am — but overall I’d say it’s perhaps my favorite among all the things I’ve built.

Storybook, my fiction writing app. It’s working fine, though I don’t use it often enough — and wish I did, so I would be finishing stories more often. The daily word count tracking is nice. Per that Neal Stephenson link earlier today, though, the idea of writing more by hand has intrigued me, and if I do that (and even if I don’t), I think plain text files are fully adequate for story drafts. (As opposed to using a database in an app.) So…we’ll see.

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Neal Stephenson’s advice on writing by hand. I’ve wanted to do more of this. Just need to put in the time to get my cursive hand to a place where I’m happy with how it looks, and I need to figure out how to avoid hand cramps, since unlikely Neal I do get those every time I write by hand for more than a minute or two. (Maybe I’m writing too small or holding the pen too tightly.)

Jess Zafarris on rebracketing (words that got broken in the wrong place). Fascinating!

Alan Jacobs quoting John McWhorter on why “h” is pronounced “aitch.” Also fascinating and unexpected.

The Godox C100 screenless camera and the screenless Camp Snap 2 both look interesting.

ReadBeanIceCream on only working at their desk. “I have a toolbox. I do not carry it around with me. I do not bring it the grocery store, on vacation, or anywhere else. It sits on a shelf until I need it and I treat my digital tools the same way.” Intriguing. I already do this for work but hadn’t thought about doing it for personal projects as well.

Petra Stock on a species of jellyfish, turritopsis dohrnii, that is kind of immortal. Crazy. Though having to turn back into a kid and grow up all over again seems like it might be more of a curse.

The Virtual OS Museum. “Want to see the earliest resident monitors? The ancestor of all modern OSes (CTSS)? The earliest versions of Unix? The first OS with a desktop metaphor GUI (Xerox Star Pilot/ViewPoint)? Early versions of mainstream OSes? If you want to explore historical OSes and platforms without having to worry about configuring/installing emulators and OSes or corrupting emulated installations, you’ve come to the right place.” Cool.

Video of Ancient James making a DSLR adapter mount out of an LCD. Mesmerizing.

vga256’s northern perspective. “When technology breaks down in the north, there isn’t a tech support number to call, or dealership or mechanic to take it to. You’re on your own. This encourages you to care for your tools, and make repairs using whatever knowledge and resources you have on hand. People who live on the land only take with them what they can maintain, upgrade and repair themselves. Big, complex, fragile, expensive, high-performance, high-maintenance stuff is left at drydock.” A good philosophy.

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Classics: A Very Short Introduction, by Mary Beard & John Henderson, published 2000, history, 98 pages. It was good for its length and scope, with the temple at Bassae as the entry point for several of the topics. My favorite parts, I think, were those showing what types of discussions classicists often engage in. I also have not thought nearly enough about how slavery in Greece and Rome affected the ancient world.

Who Owns History?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World, by Eric Foner, published 2002, essays, 249 pages. Foner is a historian of Reconstruction (or at least started as one) but these essays cover more ground — social Darwinism, South Africa, freedom in the U.S., originalism and the Supreme Court’s racism in recent decades, the historiographic weakness of the final episode of the Ken Burns Civil War miniseries, etc. I liked it. A couple passages that stuck with me:

We can forget the past, but the past, most assuredly, will not forget us. The experience of dead generations, Karl Marx once wrote, “weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”

And:

The price of maintaining freedom, as an Irish judge commented two centuries ago, is “eternal vigilance.”

Biography: A Very Short Introduction, by Hermione Lee, published 2009, nonfiction, 140 pages. Focused mostly on literary biography. I very much enjoyed it and emerged with many more books added onto my to-read list. (Though one that did not get added to my list was Boswell’s Johnson, because I’m already reading it. Around 10% of the way in and I’m loving it. It’s so good.) Also, I did not know that Henry James and Edith Wharton toured France together in 1907.

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