Recently, in my reading, both James Boswell and Edward Gibbon keep popping up. Boswell’s Life of Johnson is frequently referred to as the ultimate in biography and Boswell the ultimate biographer. Meanwhile, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall comes up again and again as one of the best histories ever written. Moreover, many people I admire have…
Over the weekend, while visiting a friend from high school, I learned of the horrifying revelations of grooming and abuse in my high school program in the time just after I was there. Seyward Darby spent 9 month investigating this abuse and exposed in a recent piece of journalism that rivals anything that Ida Tarbell…
On August 28 I finished reading The Path Between the Seas by David McCullough. It was a milestone read in that it was the last remaining McCullough book I had to read. Having read it, I have read the complete David McCullough–at least his books. Since he recently passed away, unless he has a book…
When I read I am always trying to learn. In particular, I try to take practical, actionable lessons from my reading, especially when reading biographies. Recently, I was thinking about what would make a truly great president, and since I have read quite a few presidential biographies, I considered what I have learned from them,…
I don’t know about you but I have been afflicted with decision fatigue for a long time now. Some of it comes from my job as a software project manager. There are constant decisions to be made every day, from what to tackle on a given day, to how best to organize my day based…
I try to reading 8-10 books per month. With school starting on Monday, and summer winding down, I’ve started to think about what I want to read in the fall. Much of my reading is dictated by the butterfly effect of reading. So lists like the one that follows are subject to severe winds and…
Chatting with my son on Saturday morning, he told me that he thought he might want to be an architect when he grew up. This made a lot of sense to me. He’s always constructing all kinds of interesting things with Legos, or sketching out elaborate bases on paper. It also reminded me of a…
Just about eight years ago, I wrote an essay for the venerable SF Signal titled, “Daddy, What’s Dungeons & Dragons.” In that piece, I talked about getting a copy of the 5th edition Player’s Handbook, and about my son, then five years old, asking me what Dungeons & Dragon was. This summer, my son and…
For the first 22 years of my life, I lived offline. Of course, my life straddles the digital divide and the birth of the Internet, which made things a little easier. I can recall a time (college, say) when I had no mobile phone, when I still put dimes and quarters into pay phones, when…
Recently, I read 2-1/2 books that were related, in one way or another, to books and book collecting1. The first two books were Diary of a Bookseller and Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell. Bythell is the owner and bookseller of the Scottish used bookstore The Bookshop. These books were wonderful for anyone (like…