[A]lthough I have a list of everything I’ve read since 1996, here is a version which covers just this year. Orange titles are audio books, blue titles are e-books. Bold titles are books I’d recommend to others. A ^ after a title indicates a re-read. Christine by Stephen King (1/8/2014) Work Done for Hire by Joe…
[I]am, apparently, still on my nonfiction kick for the most part. I will finish up my re-reading of Caesar and Christ today, and begin a long-awaited re-read of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. After that, I think it is back to nonfiction, and here is some of the nonfiction that I’ve acquired around the holidays to fortify me. The…
[T]hey say that with age comes wisdom, and that part of wisdom is the ability to allow your opinions to be changed with changing facts, arguments, or the natural flow of time. Long time readers will no doubt recall the opinion I once held that audiobooks were not for me. It is interesting to look…
[I] have always had strong feelings about books. Books have been such a big part of my life that it impossible not to develop feelings about them. Lately, however, while my opinions remain strong, I’v found that they have changed in a fundamental way. For as long as I can remember, I have always tried…
[I] thought about waiting until 2014 is actually over before posting about my best reads this year, but I figured if there is a late-comer in the next few weeks, nothing prevents me from revising my list. It would have to be a really fantastic late-comer, but anything is possible. Note that I called this my best reads…
[J]anuary will mark the 20th year I have maintained the list of books that I read each year. I started my list back in January 1, 1996, when notions of self-tracking in the digital age hadn’t yet risen to their current ubiquitous levels. Over those two decades, I have read 590 books (I’m in the…
[I] completed my 34th book of 2014 a few days ago, and realized that I haven’t said much about my recent reading, which has branched out in many different direction. The last I mentioned was how much I enjoyed Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators. Since then, I’ve read a couple more books. American Prometheus: The Triumph and…
[E]arlier today I foolishly listed out the next three books I’d planned on reading. I even cautioned that such lists were foolish because what I desire to read changes quite rapidly, often affected by what I’ve just read in some way or another. I mentioned how I just finished reading The Fellowship of the Ring for…
[I] just finished reading J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. It was my 32nd book of 2014, and marks the first time I’ve read the book since long before I was keeping track of my reading. Probably since I was 10 years old or so, I’d guess. I’m particularly excited about the next…
[W]ay back when I first got my iPad 2, I began the long-awaited transition from paper-to-digital magazines. At the time, the only magazine that I read that really had a decent digital edition was New Scientist. I used the Zinio app to access my magazine, and at first, Ioved it. Later, Scientific American became available in digital form…
[Y]esterday, I finished read Walter Isaacson’s latest book, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. I loved it. It is an excellent overview of the history of the digital age, from Ada Lovelace, right up through Google and Wikipedia. The book took a logical progression through the history of…
[I]t occurred to me recently that I haven’t been reading much science fiction. Strictly speaking, I haven’t been writing much of it either. My more recent stories have been more along the lines of mainstream alternate histories, with a slightly (barely detectable) element of science fiction to them. This isn’t anything intentional. I just go…