Introducing Life of Theseus, from Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans. Available as a free PDF download.
Making-of notes
It’s set in LfA Aluminia, a resurrected version of Electra. I enjoyed this article about the making of the typeface.
Chrome still has the bizarre copy-paste issue in macOS Preview, so I used Firefox. But Firefox doesn’t yet support hyphenate-limit-chars, sadly. I decided not to stress about it.
It’s left-justified since browser justification still isn’t great and I didn’t want to spend eons fine-tuning the spacing. I did, however, tweak word-spacing to eliminate hyphens at the ends of pages and most widows and orphans (though I wasn’t fully strict here). Also manually inserted ­ to insert hyphens as needed (mostly in the Greek names — and I probably got some of those wrong but I did try my best) and turned off ligatures that crossed hyphenation breaks (“ff”).
I used Paged.js, which generally worked well. Whenever I made changes, though, reloading the page and finding my place again (usually by cmd+f with some string of text) started getting laborious. Thinking about either building a Firefox extension that maintains scroll position even on hard refresh or building an Electron app that does the same.
Not sure yet if I’m going to continue on with typesetting the rest of the Lives, but hopefully I do.
AIDungeon — I didn’t realize a BYU grad had done this, but it’s impressive and I can’t wait to see where this kind of tech leads in another five to ten years
YouTube keyboard shortcuts — I wish I’d known about these years ago (j has been handy lately when watching tutorial videos)
Over the last few years I’ve wanted to get back into reading classics (“back into” referring to high school and college lit classes), but…it’s a struggle. I’ve DNFed pretty much all the classic novels I’ve tried to read — Oliver Twist, Madame Bovary, War & Peace, and Scaramouche, among others. What I suspect is probably at fault here: my fiction tastes skew heavily toward genre (primarily sf&f with occasional forays into mystery and thrillers), with realistic/literary fiction (basically all those aforementioned classics falling into this category) usually boring me out of my mind. Not entirely sure what to do about it yet, other than to try reading something like Dracula to see if the same thing happens.
Also, from the flip side of the coin: I’ve been reading a fair amount of more contemporary sf&f lately (the last several years) and goodness, there’s a lot of great fantasy and science fiction being published these days.
I recently came across a post about reading goals that got me itching to go and do likewise. I’ve had numeric goals in the past — read X books this year — but I’ve realized I’m less interested in the total number of books read and more interested in the types of books I read. (It’s also a grudging acknowledgement that this mortal life is finite and there’s no way I’ll be able to read all the books I want to. Such a sad thought. But there are massive libraries in heaven, right? I’m banking on that.)
Here, then, are my reading goals for 2015:
Read more books I wouldn’t ordinarily be interested in. Basically, expand my horizons, both in fiction and nonfiction.
Read more science fiction and fantasy classics. I did read the Foundation books in 2012–2013, but most of the time I tend to read newer stuff. (I guess I did also read The Stars My Destination earlier this year. I didn’t like it at all.)
Read more literary classics. Specifically, I want to read at least War and Peace and Dante’s Divine Comedy, and hopefully the Dostoevsky novels I haven’t yet read. Yes, I know, this isn’t the first time I’ve made a goal to read War and Peace. But this is the first year I’m going to actually do it, so help me. (I’ve read enough 1000-page epic fantasy novels by now that I can handle the length just fine.)
Read more nonfiction. Specifically, more history and biography. I’ve been reading more nonfiction this past year (Rubicon, Lies My Teacher Told Me, Food Rules, Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn, Stuff Matters, etc.) and it’s been quite enjoyable. Right now I’m reading and loving Edmund Morris’s Rise of Roosevelt, the first of a three-volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt, and Blake Harris’s Console Wars, a history of Nintendo and Sega in the 1990s.
Any of you have reading goals or happen to be reading something particularly interesting?
Today’s release: Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, available in EPUB and Kindle formats. It’s been a favorite of mine since the first time I read it years ago, and I’ve wanted to make a nice ebook edition of it for a while now. Enjoy.
(If you’re wondering why I make my own editions of books that already have plenty of ebook editions available, it’s mainly because bookmaking is fun. And I don’t really like the other freely available ebook editions of Jane Eyre.)
I’ve been in a bit of a Latin mood lately, so here is a short ebook of Cicero’s Catiline Orations in the original Latin, available in both EPUB and Kindle formats.
My second book release for today is Преступление и наказание (Crime & Punishment). This is an EPUB edition of Dostovesky’s novel (which I love) in the original Russian.
This marks my first attempt at creating an EPUB from a text in a non-Roman script (Cyrillic), and I was pleasantly surprised at how well it all went. I should note that Stanza displays the book just fine, but I haven’t yet tested it in iBooks.
I designed the cover in Photoshop. There’s a higher resolution version available on Flickr.
