Here is what I read this week. Some of the articles/posts may require a subscription to read them. As you can see, I managed to read a bunch of books this week, but that ate into article reading time, so my article/post reading was way down this week.
Books
Finished
- A Darkness More Than NIght by Michael Connelly. I needed a break from all of the nonfiction I’d been reading so I decided to continue reading some of Michael Connelly’s “Bosch” series of mysteries.
- City of Bones by Michael Connelly.
- Lost Light by Michael Connelly. This is the best of the Bosch books I’ve read so far. Excellent from start to finish.
- Never Panic Early by Fred Haise. I think it is wonderful that more than 50 years after the first moon landing, the astronauts involved in Apollo are still coming out with memoirs about their experience. Fred Haise, who flew on Apollo 13 and who piloted test landings of the space shuttle Enterprise has a delightful memoir in this book.
- Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel. I came across this book in my sister’s Goodread’s list. I enjoyed it, although it is not a particularly original time travel story in the tropes that it uses. It is the characters that make the book interesting. In some ways, I was reminded of Lauren Beukes The Shining Girls, although this book wasn’t a murder mystery.
In Progress
- The Age of Louis XIV: The Story of Civilization, Volume 8 by Will and Ariel Durant. Sated on fiction, I turned to Will Durant. I’ve read the first 7 volumes of his Story of Civilization (which is my desert island bookshelf) and I’ve been wanting to finish the series.
Gave Up
- The Narrows by Michael Connelly. I started the next book in the Bosch series, but after reading three in a row, I’d had my fill, so I gave up on this one and will return to it eventually.
Articles/posts
- The Secrets Ed Koch Carried by Matt Flegenhiemer and Ross Goldensohn (New York Times, 5/8/2022)
- Their restricted action section – The Waiter’s Pad by Mike Dariano (The Waiter’s Pad, 5/9/2022)
- Young Man With a Horn (1950): Bacall Searches for the Spotlight – Melanie Novak by Melanie Novak (Golden Age of Hollywood, 5/11/2022)
Any recommendations for books, articles or posts I should read? Let me know in the comments?
Written on May 13-14, 2022.
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Seriously, how DO you read and write so much? I’m quite in awe of the volume you’re consuming and producing lol. BTW, a recent admirer of your blog – found you as I was searching for information about Obsidian. Your series, while overwhelmingly detailed for me, was helpful 🙂
Liz, Welcome! And thanks for the kind words on the blog. I’m glad you found at least some of the Obsidian series helpful. I have a tendency toward overwhelming details in subjects like that.
I get asked the “how do you read and write so much?” question with surprising frequency. From my point of view, it seems I never read or write enough. I often recount the story of Milo of Croton, a Greek bodybuilder and wrestler from the 6th century B.C. Legend has it that to train, Milo would lift a newborn calf everyday, until eventually, he was lifting a full-grown cow. That’s the way it’s worked for me: For the last quarter century, I’ve gradually increased my reading and writing workloads at such a small, but steady pace, that today I find I’m reading and writing far more than I used to–but I’m hardly aware of the change since it was in such small increments over such long periods of time.
That answer never seems to satisfy people, so from a practical standpoint: (1) I rely on audiobooks quite a bit because I can “read” while doing other things like driving, chores around the house, exercising, etc.; (2) over the last 9 years, I’ve steadily increased the speed that I listen to audiobooks so that today I am generally listening to books at 1.7x their normal speed. Anything slower sounds strange to me; and (3) my natural “idle” is reading. When I’m not doing anything, I’m reading.
Nice! I listen to audiobooks quite a bit too, often while walking 🙂 I used to read quite a bit but for some reason The pandemic has affected that, masing it hard for me to focus much.
I now use Obsidian thanks to your series. Love its simplicity