Category: books
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Tina Fey’s Rules of Improvisation (and Parenting?)
Tina Fey’s Bossypants was one of the top 5 books I read this year (that I listened to, actually, but I don’t make the distinction). It’s a great mix of sharp humour, personal anecdotes, and insightful commentary on life and the entertainment industry. One part I think of frequently is Fey’s ‘rules of improvisation’. They’re…
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Tsundoku and Eco’s Antilibrary
Today I learnt of tsundoku: 19th-century Japanese slang for “the phenomenon of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one’s home without reading them”. Yep, that’s me—with physical books, sure, but especially with ebooks. I love books as much as the next person, but I’m no bibliomaniac. Instead, I’m reminded of the more…
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Prioritising the Search for Good Books
A favourite hobby of mine is research. Structured or unstructured, informal or scholarly. Deep diving on a topic, old or new, is my jam. For that reason, I spend a lot of time reading about the thing, rather than actually doing the thing. The meta-activities. There are clear negatives to this approach (limited impulsivity, slower…
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‘Locked’ Value, and Paying for Everything Twice
How to account for the true cost and value of our possessions? In the same vein as Thoreau, who wrote in Walden: “the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run”, David Cain suggests that everything…
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Five Books: Books Reviews Through Expert Interviews
Five Books has been a favourite reading discovery site of mine for a few years. Twice a week, an expert in a given field is asked to select five books on a related topic, and then explains that selection in an often-enlightening short interview. I’ve never failed to come away from an interview with some…
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“If you like to play [computer game], then try [book]”
If you like to play [computer game], then try [book]. That’s the simple premise of a post from the imitable Powell’s Books, back in 2018. In Console-free camping, for a bunch of popular computer games, they recommend a book you might like. The list, for posterity (non-commission, non-tracking links to Powell’s):
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Cooking for Engineers, Geeks, and the Impatient
The vast majority of new and original cooking content feels like it comes from YouTube, with few original developments happening on independent sites (although I’ll happily be corrected here, as Wadsworth Constant certainly applies to the vast majority of cooking videos, too). Meanwhile, the long-running joke of a rambling, sombre life story complementing a simple…
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Mister Rogers’ Nine Rules for Talking to Children
Having not grown up in the US, I only became aware of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood as an adult. However, this is entirely due to Fred Rogers himself: his kindness, his humanity, and his ability to draw children into his safe world. In the lead-up to the publishing of The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work…
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Long Reads and the Stockholm Syndrome
Since reading one of the longest novels I have shied away from other lengthy tomes despite thoroughly enjoying my 1000-page adventure. When considering this choice, I frame my decision as defending against a type of literary post-purchase rationalisation: after investing such an enormous amount of time in reading a book, will I be able to objectively consider both…