Stuff Cam Wrote

Reading 30 minutes per day is the difference between reading 0 books per year and reading 20 books per year.

This year I didn’t read 30 minutes every single day, I took some days off but on other days, I’d spend many hours reading. Taking the mean, I probably read close to 45 minutes daily.

Books in bold are my recommendations.

Self Help/ Productivity

• How to Read a Book- Mortimer Adler
• How to Take Smart Notes- Sonke Ahrens
• Atomic Habits- James Clear
• A System for Writing- Bob Doto
• The 12 Week Year- Brian Moran
• Writing to Learn- William Zinsser
• Antinet Zettelkasten- Scott Scheper
• I Will Teach You to be Rich- Ramit Sethi
• How to Write a Thesis- Umberto Eco *Still reading
• The Millionaire Next Door- Thomas Stanley

Self help and productivity is my least favorite type of book. I absolutely detest the idea of reading a book about becoming a more efficient cog in a machine.

That said, this year I became more serious about writing and self-learning, so I read a number of books on knowledge management, learning, and writing. Of those books, I’d recommend “How to Read a Book” to anyone, anyone. For someone looking to start a zettelkasten, I’d tell them steer clear of Scheper and Ahrens, go for the Bob Doto book.

I read two books on personal finance, and while both were elementary, they were helpful reads. The Thomas Stanley book shows its age; the US now doesn’t feel like it did in 1993, but saving money is still useful.

Speculative Fiction (sci fi/ fantasy)

• The Empress of Salt and Fortune- Nghi Vo
• The Word for World is Forest- Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Wool Trilogy books 1 and 2
• Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers- JRR Tolkien *Gotta read Return in 2025
• A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet- Becky Chambers
• A Psalm for the Wild-Built- Becky Chambers

Look, this year I read Tolkien and Le Guin. All the SFF I read this year was good, but Tolkien and Le Guin are gods.

After finishing Silo on Apple TV, I read the Wool series to get ahead of the show. I haven’t read any other dystopia series, but these books are fun. The TV show is almost as good, even if it is quite streamlined.

Becky Chambers is in the modern pantheon of sci fi. I’ll keep reading both of those series in the future.

Literature

• Pride and Prejudice

Teenage girls gossiping about boys in Victorian England isn’t my vibe, but damn this is a good book.

Pop Sci

• Burn- Herman Pontzer
• Quanta and Fields- Sean Carroll

I read plenty of science textbooks and research this year, so this list is pretty short. Burn is great for anyone into running. For the Carroll book, if you are the type of person who’s going to read it, my recommendation won’t mean much either way.

Chinese Language

• 開端
• 不便利的便利店
• 活著

Of these books, 活著 takes the cake. There’s a movie adaptation and, I believe, a TV show being released on it. It’s a real banger- historical fiction tragedy in mid to late 20th century China. I gave my copy to my wife’s dad. He was born in Vietnam, but can read, write, and speak Chinese much better than I. Apparently he ate this book up to and finished it in three days. Check out the movie if you haven’t.

不便利的便利店 is Korean, but I read a translation in Chinese. It is the kind of book you’d see on a best seller list at the airport. The main character is a doctor who drank himself into homelessness, but because he’s just such a good guy, he’s even a nice homeless guy while all the other homeless guys are violent bums. The book is classist to the core. Still, it was an easy read for me in Chinese, and despite the subtle messaging, I found it a cozy read.

Philosophy

• The Tao of Physics- Frijtof Capra
• A Thousand Plateaus- Gilles Deleuze *Still reading
• Apology of Socrates- Plato
• Euthyphro- Plato

The Tao of Physics is a funny one (I spell it dao instead of tao). I consider myself a daoist, and study physics, so it seemed a perfect match for me. The book is so old and the ground so trodden that there’s little new criticism I could offer. In short, it’s borderline woo.

I see the value in making connections between physics and the dao, and I think this book raises some very interesting points, but a lot of it is either “everything is connected like Buddha said” or “look how these 2000 year old religious icons look like modern physics diagrams”. The book does little to look into connections between physics and the dao- it is more superficial than I wanted it to be in that regard.

“The Tao of Physics” ends making a case that the whole universe is reflected in every little thing, and every little thing is reflected in the whole universe, and I do go for that kinda stuff, so I can’t say it was all bad.

Of the philosophy I read, I loved Euthyphro and the Apology of Socrates. Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus is also a favorite, but I’m taking it apart and writing about it elsewhere.

History and Related Stuff

• Shadow Divers- Robert Kurson
• Pirate Hunters- Robert Kurson *Stopped reading halfway through
• A Splendid Exchange- William J. Bernstein *Still reading
• Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars- Angela Nagle

Splendid Exchange is great, though I’m reading through it slowly. It’s a rather large volume, and the chapters take an hour or two to read. I won’t crack it open unless I have time to read and process a whole chapter.

One chapter of this book I found to be so interesting, I started designing a board game on it. When it’s ready, I’ll share on here.

Thoughts

Praise be to my kobo libra and to public transportation. If I couldn’t carry a whole damn library in my bag or if I had to pay attention in transit from place to place, I wouldn’t have been so fortunate as to have read so much in the last 12 months.

My favorite reads of the year are Pride and Prejudice and How to Read a Book. The former is just flawless, and has fantastic dialogue. The latter has taught me how to push myself with harder books and how to work to understand text no matter how difficult.

Next year

Next year I’m gonna read so many fuckin’ books man, it’s gonna be awesome. Reading is just the best for real. Having fun isn’t hard when you’ve got a library card.