I generally read between four and ten books at a time, though at times it’s gone as low as two and as high as, uh, thirty. (Those were wild days.) For me it’s a balance between finishing books — where fewer at a time helps — and reading across more of my areas of interest in parallel.

Each day I try to read at least 100 pages. My loose goal is at least ten pages per book per day, though I’m not strict about that. I also try to read at least fifty pages per day from the main books I’m reading (usually either book club books or the ones I’m closest to finishing). Even long books like War & Peace melt away fairly quickly at fifty pages per day.

When I get near the end of a book (fewer than 150 pages left), I tend to switch to burndown mode where I focus only on that book and largely ignore the others (reading only a page or two from them per day, if that).

As of today, this is my list of reading tracks, which is how I divvy up my reading across genres. I usually try to read one book per track, but that’s not a hard and fast rule.

• Nonfiction, authors I’ve already read. Working through the bibliographies of authors I like, basically.
• Nonfiction, authors new to me. Which in practice means any nonfiction that isn’t already covered by one of the other nonfiction tracks.
• Old nonfiction. “Old” is defined loosely here but mostly means books one can find on Project Gutenberg.
• Biography/memoir. On these I try to alternate between modern and old (same meaning of “old” as above).
• Diaries and letters. I’ve split these up into their own tracks before and may do so again, but for now I flip between them.
• Classics. I try to switch between more serious classics (the Brontës, Tolstoy, Gaskell, Hardy, that kind of thing) and more “fun” classics — a designation I’m not totally happy with — like Anne of Green Gables, Dracula, The Secret Garden, and Phantom of the Opera.
• Modern lit. I tend to rotate through sf&f, lit fic, and historical fiction, though the genre lines are messy and I don’t worry much about which track a book ends up in since it’s the reading that matters. Sometimes I split sf&f out into its own track, but lately I’ve been less interested in it so I’ve consolidated.

The list is alive and changes frequently. It will no doubt change tomorrow, or even later today. I don’t know what that says about me.

Reply via email

First: an async Google Doc book club. Each chapter could be in a separate tab or doc, or all in one long doc. People leave comments, and since the comments are attached to the relevant part of the text, hopefully spoiler risk is somewhat mitigated. Legally, this would only work with texts in the public domain or Creative Commons. If the Google Doc is public or at least open to later requests/invites, you potentially get the interesting effect of the book club discussions happening over longer periods of time (which could be either good or bad, depending on how the others feel about past books getting resurrected).

Second: a Discord audio channel with synchronous meetings where someone reads a chapter (this part is optional) and people talk about it, via audio and/or text. Writing this out, I suppose it’s basically just an audio-only online book club meeting, isn’t it. Still, the audio-only aspect feels more interesting than a group video call. Perhaps the glamour of radio lingers on from my childhood. (Note that I say this as someone who doesn’t really listen to the radio or to podcasts or anything like that, so my opinion here should not be given much weight.)

Third: I came across this bit from Sara Hendren recently.

In August, my friend M and I start a spontaneous micro book club conducted entirely on shared voice notes. We send seven- or eight-minute missives on the ideas we’re reading together: saints and martyrs, postwar humanism. My smart phone, mostly a diabolical source of idling distraction, affords weeks of asynchronous exchange by making audio communication seamless and intuitive. Now I do voice notes with my niece who’s a new mother and with a young friend sharing the ups and downs of her dating life.

Sounds fun. I wonder whether it scales to slightly larger groups. (Not that it needs to, to be clear. Nothing wrong with small.)

If any of you end up trying any of these out or have already done so, let me know how it goes!

Reply via email

Nonfiction

• The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, by Erik Larson, 2020
• The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World, by A. J. Baime, 2017
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick Douglass, 1845
• A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy and War at Oxford, 1900–1960, by Nikhil Krishnan, 2023
• The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession, by Michael Finkel, 2023
• Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet, by Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon, 1996
• Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius (translated by Gregory Hays), 167 (translated 2003)
• Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, by Mark Kurlansky, 1997
• Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa, by Marilyn Chase, 2020
• The Common Reader, by Virginia Woolf, 1925
• The Voyage of the Beagle, by Charles Darwin, 1839
• How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World, by Deb Chachra, 2023
• Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion, 1968
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas S. Kuhn, 1962
• The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, by Virginia Postrel, 2020
• Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, by Simon Sebag Montefiore, 2003
• Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, by Ada Palmer, 2025
• The Coming of the Third Reich, by Richard J. Evans, 2003
• Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, by Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson, 2012
• The Years of Lyndon Johnson volume 1: The Path to Power, by Robert A. Caro, 1982
• The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives, by Adam Smyth, 2024

Fiction

• The Bright Sword, by Lev Grossman, 2024
• The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton, 1920
• The Grief of Stones, by Katherine Addison, 2022
• Medea, by Euripides (translated by Gilbert Murray), 431 B.C. (translated 1912)
• Glorious Exploits, by Ferdia Lennon, 2024
• Lent: A Novel of Many Returns, by Jo Walton, 2019
• Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, by Max Porter, 2015
• Tuyo, by Rachel Neumeier, 2020
• Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, 2004
• Middlemarch, by George Eliot, 1872
• Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2024
• Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare, 1599
• Yvain, the Knight of the Lion, by Chrétien de Troyes, 1180
• Ajax, by Sophocles (translated by Francis Storr), 442 B.C. (translated 1919)
• Dogs of War, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2017
• Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf, 1925
• Children of Memory, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2022
• Penric’s Mission, by Lois McMaster Bujold, 2016
• Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, 1851
• The Touchstone, by Edith Wharton, 1900
• The Dagger in Vichy, by Alastair Reynolds, 2025
• House of Open Wounds, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2023
• The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson, 1959
• Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel, 2009
• The Orb of Cairado, by Katherine Addison, 2025
• Sanctuary, by Edith Wharton, 1903
• Saturation Point, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2024
• Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel, 2012
• Half a King, by Joe Abercrombie, 2014
• Making History, by K. J. Parker, 2025
• Moonbound, by Robin Sloan, 2024
• Where the Drowned Girls Go, by Seanan McGuire, 2022

Reply via email

Initially I considered baking the bleedthrough images onto the backgrounds in advance, but since the font can change (family, size, leading) and I wanted the bleedthrough to match, and since baking (whether directly onto the background textures or as transparent images to be layered on in the client) would mean dozens of permutations and images, I ended up doing this instead:

• On load, create a new canvas in memory (leaving it out of the DOM)
• Get the font information, padding, etc. from the DOM
• Render the lines of bleedthrough sample text onto the canvas, at a light opacity, flipping the canvas horizontally and applying a mild blur filter (noting that mobile Safari doesn’t yet support canvas filters, so the blur doesn’t work there)
• Export the canvas to a data URL
• Set that data URL as a second background image on the content area (where the first background image is the paper texture), with the blending mode set to multiply

It’s working fairly well, I think, and seems performant enough so far.

Potential future work:

• Get the bleedthrough to line up better with the text. While the leading stays more in sync in Firefox, in mobile Safari it drifts off within a few lines and I don’t know why. That said, for some reason I don’t mind that it doesn’t line up, and I’m not sure getting things aligned would be worth all the effort.
• Use the text of the book itself instead of a hardcoded sample text. Also may not be worth it, since the bleedthrough is subtle and isn’t meant to actually be read.

Reply via email

Nonfiction

• Super-Infinite, by Katherine Rundell
• Becoming, by Michelle Obama
• Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise, by Katherine Rundell
• The Disappearing Spoon, by Sam Kean
• The Education of an Idealist, by Samantha Power
• A Midwife’s Tale, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
• The Wager, by David Grann
• The Power Broker, by Robert A. Caro
• Young Stalin, by Simon Sebag Montefiore
• An Immense World, by Ed Yong
• Medieval Horizons, by Ian Mortimer
• The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, by Benvenuto Cellini
• The Small and the Mighty, by Sharon McMahon
• The Notebook, by Roland Allen
• Brunelleschi’s Dome, by Ross King
• Skunk Works, by Ben R. Rich & Leo Janos
• The Dark Queens, by Shelley Puhak

Fiction

• Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel
• I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith
• The Heroes, by Joe Abercrombie
• The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty
• The Hallowed Hunt, by Lois McMaster Bujold
• The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, by Beth Brower (all eight volumes so far)
• The Big Score, by K. J. Parker
• The Witness for the Dead, by Katherine Addison
• The Redoubtable Pali Avramapul, by Victoria Goddard
• The Butcher of the Forest, by Premee Mohamed
• Komarr, by Lois McMaster Bujold
• Witches of Lychford, by Paul Cornell
• The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman
• City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Over Sea, Under Stone, by Susan Cooper
• The Lost Child of Lychford, by Paul Cornell
• The Tusks of Extinction, by Ray Nayler
• The Warden, by Anthony Trollope

Reply via email

Why the madness: ebooks feel kind of sterile to me, and I’m intrigued by the idea of giving them a more analog feel.

The experiment is still early on (I’ve only automated the first step so far), but at this point the process involves:

1. Turning the EPUB into a PDF (concatenating each file in the EPUB into a single HTML file, setting some print CSS rules, and printing from HTML to PDF in a browser)
2. Turning each page into an image (at left in the above image)
3. Eroding/dilating the image to simulate ink spread
4. Adding a very slight ripple
5. Blurring the next page, flipping it backwards, and compositing it at a low opacity
6. Adding some paper texture (at right in the above image)
7. Compiling all the page images back into a PDF

Other notes:

• This does mean larger file sizes, but not prohibitively so. (For me, anyway.)
• Right now I’m experimenting with doing this statically, in PDF but I imagine most if not all of it could be done dynamically in-browser. (filter: blur(0.25px) contrast(3) in CSS applied twice to text can give a roughly similar effect to erosion/dilation, for example.)
• The current erosion/dilation method is acceptable, but I feel like there’s more room for improvement here.
• A shortcut to doing the full process is to export a blurred backwards page image, composite it onto the paper texture, and then use that as the background image on each page. You lose the variety, but it’s probably not noticeable.

Reply via email

Nonfiction

• The Perfectionists, by Simon Winchester
• The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder
• First, by Evan Thomas
• All the President’s Men, by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
• The River of Doubt, by Candice Millard
• Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson
• Convictions, by John Kroger
• Indigenous Continent, by Pekka Hämäläinen
• When the Heavens Went on Sale, by Ashlee Vance
• Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood, by W. Paul Reeve
• Leadership, by Doris Kearns Goodwin
• Avid Reader, by Robert Gottlieb
• Ways of Being, by James Bridle
• In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson

Fiction

• Memory, by Lois McMaster Bujold
• The Justice of Kings, by Richard Swan
• The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison
• Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold
• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows
• The Will of the Many, by James Islington
• In the Woods, by Tana French
• Blood Over Bright Haven, by M. L. Wang
• Cage of Souls, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Memories of Ice, by Steven Erikson
• The Return of Fitzroy Angursell, by Victoria Goddard
• Chosen, by Benedict Jacka
• Made Things, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Reply via email

Nonfiction

• The Golden Thread, by Kassia St. Clair
• The Cubans, by Anthony DePalma
• The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber & David Wengrow
• Stretching the Heavens, by Terryl L. Givens
• This Changes Everything, by Naomi Klein
• The Invention of Nature, by Andrea Wulf
• The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert
• The Plantagenets, by Dan Jones
• How the Word Is Passed, by Clint Smith
• Human Errors, by Nathan H. Lents
• I Wish I’d Been There, edited by Byron Hollinshead
• Extra Life, by Steven Johnson

Fiction

• Ring Shout, by P. Djèlí Clark
• Network Effect, by Martha Wells
• The Curse of Chalion, by Lois McMaster Bujold
• Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor
• The Hands of the Emperor, by Victoria Goddard
• Babel, by R. F. Kuang
• Ogres, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Reply via email

In 2022 I read an even 100 books, a number I achieved largely because I stacked the end with novellas. I have no shame. There were also 37 books I decided not to finish. (Those abandoned books are, however, included in the count of 36,440 pages that I read, to provide a slightly more accurate picture.)

Of the 100 that endured to the end:

• 55% were fiction and 45% were nonfiction
• Of the fiction, and acknowledging that genre boundaries aren’t always clear cut, the genres were: 53% fantasy (29 books), 35% science fiction (19), 7% horror (4), 4% classics (2), and 1% general fiction (1)
• 39% of the 100 had at least one female author, 61% did not
• 14% were written before 2010 (9% were before 2000 and 4% before 1900)
• A whopping 54% were written in the last three years (18 from 2020, 19 from 2021, 17 from 2022)
• The earliest book I read in 2022 was written around A.D. 731 (go Bede), roughly thirteen hundred years earlier

After looking at this, I’ve got a microresolution to get myself to read more old books this new year, so that I’m not skewing quite so much toward the hyper-recent.

Reply via email

Reply via email