Reading on Garo

Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching by U. Le Guin

Fri, 06 May 2022 22:54:00 -0700

Finished reading, with satisfaction: Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way by Ursula K. Le Guin 📚

But like, I’m going to have read it ten more times at least. There is an extra dollop of mystery in this poetry, and calling it that seems to be understating it. I’m not even sure what to say right now, so much good stuff here.

For future ease of reference, I leave here one of Le Guin’s sources: Carus’s word-for-word translation of the text from 1898.

< newthought >I read this book< /newthought > as a physical book, and a very nice copy too! Good thing because I’ll be back!

A few quick thoughts after having just finished The Grail by B. Doyle

Thu, 05 May 2022 09:59:00 -0700

Finished reading yesterday, with satisfaction: The Grail: A year ambling & shambling through an Oregon vineyard in pursuit of the best pinot noir wine in the whole wild world by Brian Doyle 📚

It is, as Brian Doyle says, “a thirsty book.” In just one sentence: a great many enjoyable personal essays on the growing and making of the Lange Estate wines. And really it did make me want to head out and pick up one or several bottles of pinot noir from all around, Oregon or elsewhere, because that is a wine that I do enjoy, among others.

I made many underlinings, and asteriskings, and otherwise notings and dogearings while reading this one, which is my new habit. I am going to let those marginalia age for a month and then come back and I might have more to share about this book. And after I talk it over with my dad who recommended it because he knows many of the people in the book and worked in the Oregon wine industry for almost 30 years, I suspect I’ll have a few more things to say then too.

Oh, and a very unexpected cross connection: this is “a thirsty book”, and so was the chicken< marginnote >“paprika hendl”< /marginnote >“very good but thirsty,” that Jonathan Harker eats for supper on the 3rd of May in Bistritz, Romania in the very opening of Dracula that I just started reading yesterday.

< newthought >I read this book< /newthought > in the form of a physical trade paperback that was printed very very well, however if I had one thing to mention it would be that the typesetting was left aligned instead of justified, but I think that may have been a design choice to support the author’s rather conversational, and often long, sentences. Good bright white paper and clear text throughout. A joy to read.

PS: my writing style may, just a bit, have been affected by the writing style of the author of this short book.

Too Much to Know by A. Blair

Wed, 04 May 2022 16:55:00 -0700

< summary >In which I report a couple of very interesting things I found in the book, and why I ultimately abandoned reading it.< /summary >

< newthought >The other book that I recently abandoned reading:< /newthought > Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age by Ann M. Blair 📚.

There is a ton of fascinating history in managing and accessing all the information in books. A lot of the tools and technology you and I use today are much older than you might think! Tables of contents probably started out as the outer layer of a scroll.

Also, lots of fun random trivia. And not at all presented as fun random trivia. This is a serious scholarly book after all. Example: incipit: “the first few words of the text, employed as an identifying label.” I didn’t know that word or definition. I didn’t even know that was a thing. I might be able to use that. Cool!

Or the crazy random rabbit holes you can get to on the internet now. I learned about the Bibliotheca of Photius, which is Photius’s< sidenote “Who is Photius” >Photius of Constantinople, 810-893.< /sidenote > list of all the books he read, and his reviews< sidenote “Inventor of book reviews?” >Maybe he even invented the book review, or at least the written form.< /sidenote > of them. Like this gem about Socrates of Constantinople: “There is nothing remarkable in the author’s style, and he is not very accurate in matters of doctrine.” Ouch. You can check out the rest of Photius’s big list of books with commentary here! Never would have found something like this in a million years.

< newthought >But, what am I going to do with it?< /newthought > Right now I haven’t got many plans that this would fit in. Maybe one story idea could use it for texture, so I’m glad I found it. Reminds me a bit of The Ninth Gate (book or movie, take your pick). But there was a lot of reading to find these two and the few others too.

So, I’m a bit more bummed about quitting this one than the other one. It was interesting, often fascinating. But, in the end there was too much to read here to get the useful bits out that I wanted to use for my own practical gain. I’ll probably graze occassionally, maybe I’ll pull out more random gems.

< newthought >I read this as an Apple Book< /newthought >, and my comment is the same as last time: I’ve seen the end notes done in a more useful way in other books. But I was able to get to the good stuff, so they are at least workable. Really appreciated that about it.

cc @chrisaldrich

Tue, 03 May 2022 13:01:00 -0700

Oh oh, oh! Dracula Daily began today! I don’t know why I am so excited about this! Maybe it’s the travelogue nature of the beginning, or the comparison of weathers< sidenote “About Weather” >I mean, the experience of comparing and contrasting my weather against the atmosphere of the book, which I assume will follow some seasonal trend and be called out. Just a guess on my part.< /sidenote >I’ll be having over the next 6 months (weather: I’m a fan). I plan to do some realtime commenting on the reading too.

Started reading: Dracula (Norton Critical Editions) by Bram Stoker 📚. Nicely formatted ebook from Standard EBooks if you’re into that.

The things I noted in the first day’s reading: the food (I see cooking opporutnities here), the locations, the corporeal inhabitedness,< sidenote “About Immediacy” >Harker mentions how he slept, and talks about food, and not wanting to miss the train. It seems all very personal/experiential, and immediate.< /sidenote > and the sense of mystery and even a bit of calamity. The world is being set before me, and I don’t know which of the possibilities is a probability. It was only a couple of pages worth. The annotations in the Norton Critical Edition help and also distract a bit.

Anybody want to start a reading club?

Mon, 02 May 2022 16:57:00 -0700

Lena @ Things of Interest is a short-ish piece of sci-fic posing as something like a Wikipedia article. It’s about the first successful brain image create in the year 2031. I’d say the piece is a success because my reaction was “oh god, the horror.” And this is not a piece of horror sci-fi.

Have you read Lena? What did you think?

Sun, 01 May 2022 16:00:00 -0700

Started reading Writing Life Stories: How To Make Memories Into Memoirs, Ideas Into Essays And Life Into Literature by Bill Roorbach 📚 on 2022-05-01 SUN.

Sun, 01 May 2022 15:30:00 -0700

Started reading The Grail: A year ambling & shambling through an Oregon vineyard in pursuit of the best pinot noir wine in the whole wild world by Brian Doyle 📚 on 2022-04-30 SAT.

This is a request from my dad; he worked in the Oregon wine industry for 28 years in distribution and knows a lot of the people mentioned in the book. Just not the mainly featured vintners.

Sun, 01 May 2022 14:00:00 -0700

Started reading Discourses, Fragments, Handbook (Oxford Worlds Classics) by Epictetus 📚 on 2022-04-25 MON.

Planning to read it slow-ish and interactively, taking lots of notes on the paper copy. I already see that it’s not the most pleasant object to read with variable clearness of the actual text.

Sat, 30 Apr 2022 16:59:00 -0700

Abandoned reading: The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy Paul 📚. I was reading this book on my iPad with Apple Books.

I approached it with the mindset that these ideas are options for me to consider in my own mind practice, and there were a number of interesting ideas. But yesterday I had to admit to myself that it is time to abandon my comittment to reading this book. I have to do the same with another book it was partnered with, but I’ll get to that another day. I think I read about 30-40% of the book before my calculations told me a sustained effort would require more energy than I had to give it at this time. I will keep it around for the option to browse different sections look for useful tidbits.

I found the idea of the Magpie Mind to be a useful one for understanding how I assemble bigger ideas from whatever is around. Want better ideas? Have better stuff around. Also remember to pause and examine the ideas you have constructed.

I also found the ideas discussed around the poured paintings of Jackson Pollock to be really helpful for inspecting and understanding some things about my own computer art practice that had been quite mysterious to me. My random search for what works and what doesn’t work for me will probably be much more effective with this clue.

There are many other ideas that were also useful and that I will continue to personally explore. You can get a pretty good sense of the type of ideas from Ezra Klein’s podcast with the author.

But some sections were less obviously plausible. I did not see the connection to thinking in groups in the tale about the aircraft carrier and the sailboat. If one of you did find a connection there, I would listen. There was also quite a bit of text related to the ideas presented that I didn’t feel added all that much; some stories about trainings and their audiences that I didn’t think clarified what I was to do with the idea at all. Maybe it’s just me.

Now, some comments about the (virtual) book itself as an object. This is a thing that I care about and might explore at a later time. One thing that I greatly appreciated the author and publisher for including is rich end notes. I was able to use these to track down more technical materials on some of the concepts that had been diluted beyond recovery in the book. Those breadcrumbs are invaluable. However, I’ve seen it done in an easier to use way in Apple Books before, and the increased friction was an annoyance. I have nothing else worth mentioning in my review of the experience of reading the book on an iPad.

Did you read The Extended Mind? What did you think of it?

Fri, 29 Apr 2022 17:00:00 -0700

Found out about Dracula Daily, a Substack that will mail out the contents of the book on the dates that they happen. That starts next week, May 3. I’ve not read Dracula before, so I’m kind of excited about this. Got me a hard copy too: Dracula (Norton Critical Editions) 📚.

In general I enjoy an episodic driven story. The Name of the Rose has a time driven story, and for me it adds an extra dimension to read it around the time of the year that it happens (late November, if I recall correctly).

Anybody have suggestions of other good writing like this? There are some suggestions on the Epistolary novel wikipedia page, but that focuses more on the document aspect of the novel materials, rather than the time/season aspect.