Category Archives: Reading

2023 Reading List with Lots of Neil Gaiman, Do Books, and Colson Whitehead

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2023 was my best year reading to date.

It was the first year I started reading books by Neil Gaiman, seven books, five Do Books, and three by Colson Whitehead, making them the top two authors and group of books.

My Yearly Plan

Each year, the plan is to read a book a week, and this year will be the closest I get to that goal. This year, I’m close to finishing reading a book every eight or nine days on average, even though because I read a few at a time, I finish them a day or so apart.

Typically, from mid-November/Thanksgiving until the end of the year, I attempt to finish up many books I still need to finish, along with some of the shorter/more straightforward/easier-to-read books.

NOTE – I typically read a handful of books at once.

Reading more than a book at a time allows me to switch around depending on my mood. If I need some light reading or have time to read through something a bit denser that needs more attention, I can.

My List of Books for 2023

I broke my list of books into categories in the order I read them.

  • I try. I Fail. I learn. – Hiut Denim (Do Lectures)
  • Delicious Beans from Rancho Gordo – Every Pot a Victory – A Guide to Happy Beans Every Day – Rancho Gordo
  • Arbitrary Stupid Goal – Tamara Shopsin
  • Cooked – A Natural History of Transformation – Michell Pollan
  • Shop Class as SoulCraft – Matthew B. Crawford
  • Lark Ascending – A Novel – Silas House
  • Dave Grohl – The Storyteller – Taste of Life and Music – Dave Grohl
  • Four Thousand Weeks – Time Management for Mortals – Oliver Burkman
  • The War of Art – Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles – Steven Pressfield
  • Rebel without a Crew – Or How a 23-year-old Filmmaker with $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player – Robert Rodriguez
  • No. 4 – On the Writing Process – John McPhee
  • I Will Teach You to Be Rich – No Guilt. No Excuses. No BS. Just a 6-Week Program That Works (2nd Edition) – Ramit Sethi
  • Salt Fat Acid Heat – Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking – Samin Nosrat and Art by Wendy MacNaughton
  • Eat That Frog! – Get More of the Important Things Done Today – Brain Tracy
  • Scrap Steading – Prosperous Homesteading on Any Budget – Billy Bond and Matt Hundley
  • The One Thing – The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results – Gary Keller with Jay Papasan
  • Toby Dog of Gold Shaw Farm – Morgan Gold
  • Animal, Vegetable, Miracle – A Year of Food Life – Barabra Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver
  • In the Blink of an Eye – A Perspective on Film Editing – 2nd Edition – Walter Murch
  • The Man Who Made Things Out of Trees – The Ash in Human culture and History – Robert Penn
  • Man’s Search for Meaning – Revised and Updated – Viktor E. Frankl (Reread)

Books by Neil Gaiman

  • Coraline
  • Good Omens – The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter. Witch – Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
  • The Graveyard Book
  • The Ocean at the End of the Lane
  • American Gods – A Novel
  • Neverwhere – A Novel
  • Stardust – A Novel

Do Books

  • Do Earth – Healing Strategies for Humankind – Tamsin Omond
  • Do Make – The Power of You Own Two Hands. – James Otter (Re-read)
  • The Book of Do – A manual for living
  • Do Interesting – Notice. Collect. Share. – Russell Davies
  • Do Sourdough – Slow bread for busy lives. – Andrew Whitley

Books by Colson Whitehead

  • The Nickel Boys – A Novel
  • Harlem Shuffle
  • Crook Manifesto – A Novel

Homesteading/Farming Book Club

  • The Living Soil Handbook – The No Till Grower’s Guide to Ecological Market Gardening – Jesse Frost
  • The Art of Fermentation – An In-depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World – Sandor Ellix Katz

Apartment Building Book Club

  • The Maid – A Novel – Nita Prose
  • Perfume – The Story of a Murder – Patrick Suskind

Remote JavaScript Book Club

  • Cracking the Coding Interview – 189 Programming Questions and Solutions – Gayle Laakmann McDowell (The group did not finish it.)

Total Books Read

I finished the year strong and managed to read 41 books.

I’m Learning More Through YouTube

I continued watching more YouTube to learn about cooking, shooting videos, storytelling, starting a YouTube channel, starting a small farm, etc., and taking a few courses I purchased about editing with DaVinci Resolve.

Less Reading in 2024

Here’s to less reading in 2024 than in 2023.

In 2024, I plan to spend more time learning how to shoot, edit, and add special effects/graphics to videos to start my YouTube channel.

Please comment if you have read any of these books, what you thought of them, and if you have any suggestions.

2021 Reading List

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My 2021 book reading started well and continued with a slow plod through the longer books.

Total Books Read

I started strong and finished the year strong too by reading 26 books, which was three more than last year.

My plan was to read when I could and see how much I could get through.

Book Length in Pages

Like last year (2020), the books I read were both long and short and were between 120 and 150 pages, while others were over 450+ pages.

Need More YouTube Learning

To break up my reading, I continued watching YouTube to learn about different ways to cook, start a small farm, create videos/movies, ideas for a tiny house, etc. More on that likely in another post.

List of Books

Below is the list of books I read. They are more or less in the order I read them.

  • Picture This: The Near-sighted Monkey Book – Lynda Barry
  • Austin Kleon
    • Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
    • Show Your Work! 10 Ways To Show Your Creativity And Get Discovered
    • Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad
  • One Percent Better – Yearbook Five by Hiut Denim
  • Do Sea Salt – The Magic of Seasoning. by Alison, David, and Jess Lea-Wilson
  • Amoralman – A True Story and Other Lies by Derek DelGaudio
  • Charles Dowding’s No Dig Gardening, Course 1: From Weeds to Vegetables Easily and Quickly by Charles Dowding
  • The First-Time Gardener: Growing Vegetables: All the know-how and encouragement you need to grow – and fall in love with! – your brand new food garden (Volume 1) by Jessica Sowards
  • How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need by Bill Gates
  • Restoration Agriculture Real-world Permaculture for Farmers by Mark Shepard
  • Do Walk: Navigate earth, mind and body. Step by step. by Libby DeLana
  • Do Make: The Power of Your Own Two Hands by James Otter
  • How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell
  • Young Men and Fire: Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition by Norman Maclean
  • The Backyard Adventurer: Meaningful and Pointless Expeditions, Self-experiments, and the Value of Other People’s Junk by Beau Miles
  • The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It: The Complete Back-to-Basics Guide by John Seymour
  • Fermentation as Metaphor by Sandor Ellix Katz
  • Do Preserve: Make your own jams, chutneys, pickles, and cordials. (Easy Beginners Guide to Seasonal Preserving, Fruit and Vegetable Canning and Preserving Recipes) by Anja Dunk, Jen Goss, and Mimi Beaven
  • Do Open: How a Simple Email Newsletter Can Transform your Business by David Hieatt
  • Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual by Michael Pollan
  • How to Eat by Thich Nhat Hanh
  • Make a World by Ed Emberley
  • The “You Don’t Know JavaScript Yet” series books by Kyle Simpson
    • Types & Grammar – 1st Edition
    • Async & Performance – 1st Edition
    • ES6 & Beyond – 1st Edition

List of Magazines

  • Growers & Co
    • Celebrating the Movement of Small-scale Organic Agriculture – Issue 01
    • A Promise of Renewal – Shaping Stronger Food Systems and Social Change in the Movement of Small-scale Organic Agriculture – Issue 02
    • A Regenerative Movement – Explore How Growers are Redefining the Agricultural System in Favor of Traditional Practices that Preserve te Health of Ecosystems and Their Communities – Issue 03

I plan to do a more in-depth write-up of the ones I liked the best in the future.

More Reading in 2022

Here to as much or more reading in 2022 as in 2021 if possible.

Please leave a comment if you read any of these books and your thoughts.

 

Snowy Sunday

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With knowing it was going to be a snowy Sunday and nowhere to be. Besides my remote JavaScript Book Club at 5:00 PM, I didn’t set my alarm this morning or most Sundays.

Start of My Morning

I woke up at about 7:56 AM. laid in bed, and read until after 9:30 AM. Then I got out of bed to watch some cooking and farming videos on YouTube. I figured I could spend my lazy morning learning something.

Not Ready to Learn

I knew I wasn’t ready to learn JavaScript by watching my Wes Bos “JavaScript for Beginners’ videos. Maybe later this afternoon or this evening.

After watching videos, I cooked up a dozen breakfast sausages I had thawed out the last night. They had been in the freezer since the summer. I figure they would be getting a little freezer burn, etc., and they were.

Cooked Breakfast

While the sausages were cooking on medium-low heat, I washed dishes. Then I chopped the sausages into smaller bite-size pieces to make sure they’re cooked thoroughly. I then could use them in salads later, and with the four eggs, I was getting ready to scramble and cook for breakfast.

I toasted up some Wegman’s sliced garlic bread. Then I added strawberry preserves to one slice and apricot to the other. Once all that was done, I ate it while watching one more video.

Snow Shoveling

Then I got dressed to go out and shovel the sidewalk, walkways to each of the doors, and the back porch. With not having a car anymore, my shoveling is way down by many hours, depending on how much snow we get. I only had to make a path in the driveway.

Today was easy because we only got an inch and a half, maybe two inches at most.

Off for a Walk

After shoveling was done, I went for a 45-minute to an hour walk of over two and a half miles. I took my time to wander the neighborhood and see what was going on.

Home from Walk

Once I was back home, I cleaned up a few spots on the sidewalk and then went into the house. With being cold and a bit achy after shoveling I took a long hot shower. I know TMI.

Then I laid on my bed to read a bit on Twitter and see if I was ready for a nap, and I wasn’t.

Writing this Post

So I started writing this blog post after making a large bowl of popcorn on my stove with some oil and a little bacon fat. The bacon fat made for some tasty popcorn. I got myself a GT’s Gingerberry Kambucha and some water.

The next thing I do before a possible nap and book club is edit and post this blog post.

Then it’s outline/write a draft post about writing blog posts every day of January.

Possible Dinner Plans

Thinking dinner will be leftover curried coconut milk shrimp with elbow noodles, farro, corn, greens beans, and roasted Hatch Chili’s. Most likely, it will be a salad with greens that look to have seen better days.

More Lazy Weekends

So here’s to having more lazy Sundays or even weekends with not much to do but relax, read, nap, etc.

My Plans for Three Days Off

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I have the next three days off, with today being the MLK (Martin Luther King Jr.) holiday. Then Wednesday being the Inauguration, I decided to take Tuesday off too to have a five day weekend.

So I plan to use the three days like a workday and spending eight hours doing things for my projects and learning. It might be broken up more than a workday, but that’s fine.

Video Learning

Each of the days, I plan to spend an hour or two watching my Wes Bos “Beginner JavaScript” video tutorials. During that time, I  will be taking notes and attempting the code examples to get used to coding the syntax.

I plan to spend an hour or two watching and taking notes of Penn and Teller’s Masterclass “Penn & Teller Teach the Art of Magic”.

I’m not necessarily watching Penn and Teller to learn magic, but to learn about storytelling and presentation. If I learn a magic trick or two in the process, all the better.

In the evening, there will be some watching of YouTube videos.  The subjects I want to learn more about are cooking/baking, farming/gardening, tiny houses, etc.

Book Reading

I will finish reading Heydon Pickering’s “Inclusive Components – Accessible Web Interfaces, Piece by Piece”. I need to go back to his other book and Adam Silver’s book to work through the examples a bit more. Below are the other two other books I’m referring to.

Form Design Patterns – A Practical Guide to Designing and Coding simple and Inclusive Forms for the Web by Adam Silver

Inclusive Design Patterns – Coding Accessibility Into Web Design by Heydon Pickering

My next book to start reading is “Tiny Habits: The Small Changes that Change Everything” by BJ Fogg.

Blog Posts

I need to start outlining a few more blog posts and maybe even start the first draft.

My more significant issue is figuring out the best way to link to all the books I read last year. I don’t want to link to Amazon. But I know money is tight for some, so the lower prices and free shipping with having Amazon Prime will help. If I would I need to figure out a code for an organization/charity, I would like the earned money would help them. So need to figure that out before posting that post.

More research is needed. Any suggestion would be appreciated.

Odds and Ends

Other things that need to get done over the three days are:

  • Sending out some bills
  • Daily walks
  • Laundry
  • Cleaning the house, especially the kitchen, to make room for new spices and other utensils
  • Etc.

I might even start some sorting or items that I no longer use to donate them or get rid of them. I know where I want to donate all the clothes and the like, to Martha’s Table in DC.

Someone from the DC Code and Coffee group mentioned they are willing to come to Northern Virginia to pick things up with their car. Since they live near Martha’s Table, it wouldn’t be hard to drop them off for me.

Lots to Do But Not Enough Time

That’s a lot to get done while also relaxing some, but at least I have a game plan. If I don’t start on things, I won’t get any of it started or any of it done. Here’s to slow and steady work at the list above.

Any suggestions to help with any of this, please leave a comment.

Veggie Stew

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Over the weekend (Saturday), I made a veggie stew. It might even be vegan, but I would have to check the ingredients on a few labels.

Let the Chopping Begin

I started out dicing up three medium-sized onions and got them cooking down in my cast iron skillet. I used two good olive oils to help soften them up. While the softening up was happening, I peeled and chopped up a head of garlic from the farmer’s market.

Ingredients

Once the garlic was in the pan, I added some salt, pepper, and spices. The spices were curry powder, cayenne, chipotle, smoked Spanish paprika, and Ancho chili powder. I then added dried basil, thyme, and oregano along with many turns of finely ground Szechuan peppercorns.

I let the spices cook a bit to intensify the flavor. Before adding the pound of Rancho Gordo heirloom Classic Cranberry Beans to my large stainless steel pot (16 quarts?).

Soaking Beans and Wild Rice

The dry Rancho Gordo beans started soaking three-hours before I started chopping my vegetables. I also soaked half a pound of Trader Joe’s wild rice separately.

Okay, it was probably between 14 and 15 ounces of bean because I put 50 of them in a small envelope in my wine cooler. The reason being I wanted to see at some point if I could grow my own beans.

Slow Cooking

I added the beans and then made sure they boiled for five minutes. Then turned them down to a simmer. I then went to read some more, lying on my sofa. About every twenty minutes or so got up to check on the beans and other vegetables and stir them. After about an hour, I added the soaked wild rice and it’s water to the pot.

Stirring While Reading and Writing Blog Posts

More reading, and I think outlining a blog post or two along with more stirring.  After another hour or so, I added in a 12-ounce package of Anson Mills Slow Roasted Farro. Before adding the farro, I made sure to presoak it for an hour or more.

Over the next hour or more, I let the beans, the wild rice, and the farro slowly cooking. I added the following a 4 ounce can of Trader Joe’s Fire Roasted Diced Green Chiles. Then I added a 13.75-ounce jar of Trader Joe’s Corm and Cile tomato-less Salsa. Followed later by a one 15.25 ounce can of Wegmans No Salt Added Whole Kernel Crisp’ N Sweet Corn.

At some point in all of this, I cooked up 10-ounces of Impossible Burger in my cast iron to then added to the pot too.

Oops, I forgot I chopped up a medium-sized head of fennel and cooked in my cast iron pan, and added it in at some point to my veggie stew.

All this needed time to meld together and get tasty.

Extra Notes

For the spices, I probably put in two tablespoons of each, give or take in a very large pot. I learned over time; I can add hot sauce for added flavor and heat later. Instead of putting n to many hot spices in, that got hotter as the water evaporated.

Leftovers

So now I’m eating it most days for one meal. I need to put some in the freer for later if there is any room.

Here’s to more large batch cooking on a slow Saturday to have good food and lots of leftovers.