Reading for the Week of 3/13/2022

Here is what I read this week. Some of the articles/posts may require a subscription to read them. I also share my recommended reads on Pocket for anyone who wants to follow along there.

Books

Finished

• The Rising Sun by John Toland (16/1144). A fascinating and engaging read, and my first specifically on the war in the Pacific with an emphasis on the Japanese point of view. I wrote about my inital thoughts on the first half of the book. Next week I’ll have a more comprehensive post on my notes on this book.

In Progress

• The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer. Another long book, but an appropriate follow-on to The Rising Sun.

Articles/posts

• Commuting with Audiobooks by Melanie Novak (blog, 3/13/2022). I wish I’d taken advantage of audiobooks back when I was commuting in L.A. Coincidentally, I also wrote about audiobooks this week. #books #reading
• Canoes by Eleanor Konik (Eleanor’s Iceberg, 1/26/2021). An interesting piece on research about canoes. It reminded me of John McPhee’s wonderful book The Survival of the Bark Canoe.
• A Tale of Survival Surfaces as an 1891 Shipwreck Is Found in Lake Superior by Christine Haydee (NYT, 3/15/2022). It has been a month for discovered shipwrecks, what with Shackleton’s Endurance being located as well. #exploration
• Three Problen-Solving Prompts by Mike Dariano (The Waiter’s Pad, 3/14/2022)
• 24 Years by Jason Kottke (kottke.org, 3/14/2022). I thought I had some longevity with this blog of mine, now into its 17th year, but Jason has at least 7 years on me. How I haven’t already discovered his blog is beyond me, but I’ve found it now, at least. #blogging
• Casablanca (1942): “No one ever loved me that much.” by Melanie Novak (The Golden Age of Hollywood, 3/16/2022). Casablanca, the Bartlett’s Quotations of golden age Hollywood film. #film
• How Migrating Birds Use Quantum Effects to Navigate By Peter J. Hore and Henrik Mouritsen (Scientific American, April 2022). Reading this article, trying to imagine birds “seeing” the magnetic lines of the earth, I couldn’t help but picture “the path of the beam” as depicted in Stephen King’s Dark Tower novels. #science
• A Taxonomy of Video Game Difficulty by Jason Kottke (kottke.org, 3/15/2022). I’m all about taxonomy, and I liked how the various levels of difficult were broken down in this piece. #videogames
• Do You Really Need A Zettelkasten? | Curious by Matt Giaro (Medium, 3/2/2022) #themes/theory-of-notes
• Fed raises rates and projects six more increases in 2022. – The New York Times by Jeanna Smialek (NY Times, 3/16/2022)
• Spark Creativity with Thomas Edison’s Napping Technique by Bret Stetka (Scientific American, April 2022). I’m always happy with articles that justify my daily naps. #science
• What Joe Biden Can Learn From Harry Truman by John Dickerson (Atlantic, April 2022). I don’t think schools provide enough practical lessons, and I’ve recently argued that biographies are a great way to do this. Here, Dickerson is taking lessons from a new Truman biography and asking what Biden can learn from them. I already have this biography queued up in my TBR list. #history #biography
• Some FAQs You Might Enjoy by Brandon Sanderson (blog, 3/16/2022). For anyone looking for inside baseball on the publishing industru, Brandon provides a great look behind the curtain here, in response to his massively successful Kickstarter. #publishing
• Stop Feeling Guilty — Rebrand your TBR List by Eleanor Konik. I don’t stress about my TBR list anymore in part because I’d never want it to be empty, in the same way I’d never want to have read every book on my bookshelves. I agree with Umberto Eco that we all need an anti-library. #reading #books
• Vim: a waste of time, isn’t it ? by Nizar Ayed (Medium, Feb. 2022). I’ve re-enabeld Vim keyboard mappings in Obsidian, forcing myself to use the keyboard as much as possible, so I’ve been reading posts about Vim that appear in my various sources.
• Why Vim is better than VSCode by Sean Warman (Medium, Feb. 2022).
• The Code that took Astronauts to the Moon is full of Comedy and Heroism by David Goudet (Geek Culture, Feb 2022). This is a great piece, not just because it combines several passions of mine (coding and the Apollo program) but because of some of the glimpses it gives into the thought process around the code. The code is all assembly, but the comments are what really matter in this piece. #coding
• Better Citations Workflows & Native Callout Boxes by Eleanor Konik (Obsidian Roundup, 3/19/2022). Hey! Ctrl-W finally works correctly in Vim mode in Obsidian!

Any recommendations for books, articles or posts I should read? Let me know in the comments?

Written on March 19, 2022.