Category Archives: Writing

2024 Reading List with Lots of Books about Food

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2024 was my year where I read six books about making or cooking food, and one about compost, which helps grow food.

In 2025, I need to read a few more books by Edward Carey, Silas House, creativity, and cooking.

My Yearly Plan

Each year, the plan is to read a book a week, and this year I managed two books a month. It’s not bad for thinking I was going to spend less time reading this year and more time learning on YouTube and other websites. I spent too much time watching creators to see what was going on in their lives, more than the ones teaching me things or letting me learn from them.

Again, from mid-November/Thanksgiving until the end of the year, I attempted to finish up a handful of books I was partway through, along with some shorter/more straightforward/easier-to-read books.

The short, easier-to-read ones are between 120 – 150 pages and smaller in size. So I can read them in a few days or a day, depending On how much time I have. The others are 250 – 400 pages and are more involved, and I need to pay more attention while reading them.

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 light reading or have time to read through something a bit denser that needs more attention, I can.

My List of Books I Read in 2024

My list of books is in the order I read them.

  • Edith Holler – Edward Carey
  • The Hobbit – J. R. R. Tolkien
  • Steal Like an Artist – 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative – Austin Kleon (re-read)
  • Show Your Work -10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered – Austin Kleon (re-read)
  • Keep Going – 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad – Austin Kleon (re-read)
  • Start with Why – How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action – Simon Sinek
  • The Botany of Desire – A Plant’s-Eye View of the World – Michael Pollan
  • Crying in H Mart – A Memoir – Michelle Zavner
  • Persepolis – The Story of a Childhood – Marjane Satrapi
  • Persepolis 2 – The Story of a Return – Marjane Satrapi
  • The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck – A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life – Mark Manson
  • Desert Oracle – Volume 1 – Ken Lake
  • Compost – Transform waste into new life – Charles Dowding
  • Never to Small – Creative, compact, and joyful ways to design and live – Never to Small Magazine
  • It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be. – The world’s best-selling book by Paul Arden
  • Dignity – Desert Oracle Books Joshua Tree, Calif. – Ken Lake
  • Everything is F*cked – A Book about Hope – Mark Manson
  • The Bean Book – 100 Recipes for Cooking with all Kinds of Beans – Steve Sando with Julia Newberry
  • Feck Perfuction – Dangerous Ideas on the Business of Life – James Victore (re-read)
  • The Crossroads of Should and Must – Find and Follow Your Passion – Elle Luna (re-read)
  • Do Breath – Calm your mind. Find focus. Get stuff done. – Michael Townsend Williams
  • Finding the Mother Tree – Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest – Suzanne Simard
  • Diet for a Small Planet (50th Anniversary Edition) – Frances Moore Lappe
  • Do Smoke – A modern guide to cooking and curing. Jen Goss and Scott Davis (NOTE – I finished the last 26 pages on the morning of January 1st and was too tired to stay up on New Year’s Eve. )

Total Books Read

I finished the year strong and managed to read 24 books.

More Learning from YouTube

Again this year 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.

My Reading Plans for 2025

Here’s to reading about a book every week to two weeks in 2025.

In 2025, I plan to continue to spend more time learning how to shoot, edit, and add special effects/graphics to videos to start my YouTube channel. It didn’t turn out that way last year, but I need to put more effort into it in 2025.

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

2022 Reading List for the Most Part

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2022 started well, reading-wise until I was notified mid-March that I would need to move because the landlord’s children were selling the house after their parents passed away. So with the need to quickly move after 19.5 years in my place, I had to stop reading for a month and a half or two.

That’s a whole other story for a different blog post about the need to move.

My book list is missing a few books I read before the move since I hadn’t written them down. I had placed the books in a separate pile but have yet to find them since they are likely still in a box I have not unpacked.

Total Books Read

I finished the year strong in December and managed to read 21 books.

The list includes a few digital JavaScript books I read with my remote JavaScript book club.

My Yearly Plan

Each year I typically hope to read a book a week and tend to get close by finishing the year strong, starting around Thanksgiving. So again, this year, the plan is to read a book every week as in previous years, but it will likely be a book every two weeks on average.

NOTE – I’m typically reading a half dozen or more books at any one time. Sometimes I get what I need out of a book after only reading the first part, or I realize the book’s not for me, so I stop, or there is another book I’m more interested to read/finishing at the time.

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

My List of Books for 2022

  • Stay Curious – How We Created a World Class Event in a Cowshed – The Do Lectures the First 10 Years – Do Lectures
  • Playing with FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early): How Far Would You Go for Financial Freedom? – Scott Rieckens
  • The Side Project Report – Observation and Enquiry – Do Lectures
  • The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck: How to Stop Spending Time You Don’t Have with People You Don’t Like Doing Things You Don’t Want to Do (A No F*cks Given Guide) – Sarah Knight
  • This Book Will Teach You How to Write Better – This Book is: Short, Effective, and Sort of Offensive. but You Will Write Better after Reading It. – Neville Medhora
  • Omnivore’s Dilemma – A Natural History of Four Meals – Michael Pollan
  • A Million Miles in a Thousand Years – How I Learned to Live a Better Story – Donald Miller
  • Let’s Make Ramen! – A Comic Book Cookbook – Hugh Amano and Sarah Becan
  • Let’s Make Dumplings! – A Comic Book Cookbook – Hugh Amano and Sarah Becan
  • Cook Korean – A Comic Book with Recipes – Robin Ha
  • The Creative Habit – Learn It and Use It for Life – Twyla Tharp
  • A Year in Tokyo – an Illustrated Guide and Memoir of 13 Magical Months Spent Exploring the City of Ginkgo Leaves – Christy Anne Jones
  • In Defense of Food – An Eater’s Manifesto – Michael Pollan
  • What Did You Get Me? Puzzling out a Present on a Walk through the Park – Matthew Oliphant
  • The Independent Farmstead – Growing Soil, Biodiversity, and Nutrient-Dense Food with Grassfed Animals and Intensive Pasture Management – Shawn and Beth Dougherty
  • The Richest Man in Babylon – George S. Clason
  • Think and Grow Rich – Napoleon Hill

Homesteading/Farming Book Club

  • The Rooted Life: Cultivating Health and Wholeness Through Growing Your Own Food – Justin Rhodes
  •  Polyface Micro: Success with Livestock on a Homestead Scale – Joel Salatin

Remote JavaScript Book Club

  • Eloquent JavaScript, 3rd Edition: A Modern Introduction to Programming – Marijn Haverbeke
  • Mostly Adequate Guide to Functional Guide

NOTE – I had planned to put them in the order I read them, but with the move, I’m still missing a few.

I’m Learning More Through YouTube

I continued watching more YouTube to learn about cooking, starting a small farm, shooting videos, storytelling, starting a YouTube channel, etc.

More Reading in 2023

Here to more reading in 2023 than in 2022.

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

How I Write My Blog Posts

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I thought it would be interesting to write a blog post on how I go about writing a blog post. It’s so I can see how it changes over the years, which I know it has over the years.

Where Do I Save My Ideas

The first thing I do is come up with ideas for the blog posts and then write them down. I place them in SimpleNote.

What I Do with My Ideas

For the posts I deem worthy of writing, I then outline them some more in SimpleNote. Some of that is done during my lunchtime or after-work walks. I do some outlining then too. I like thinking through how I want to say something in the post and work through how best to phrase or order my thoughts?

Once that’s done, I tend to throw those parts into something SimpleNote too.

Next’s It’s on to WordPress

Next, I use WordPress to write the first draft of my post. During my writing process, I try not to edit as I go besides maybe fixing some spelling. I want to be able to get the idea out of my head.

Editing Drafts

Once I’m done with the first draft, I then open up the Hemingway application. Usually, I use it, more importantly, to break up my run-on sentences from the first draft. The Hemingway application is useful to me to tell me the following type of things.

  • How many complex and hard-to-read sentences there are.
  • The number of words, sentences, and paragraphs.
  • The reading grade level, etc.

Once I’m done with Hemingway, I paste the text into Grammarly, and then I do more editing. Grammarly does a better job of grammar checking. It even does a better job with spell-checking than the Hemingway application.

I repeat that process once or twice more between the two applications.

Once I feel like I’m done, I then paste my text back to WordPress to read through what I wrote as a whole. More to read through it to make sure it’s understandable and is logical.

When I’m happy with things, I then add categories or tag words in WordPress. Then I will add headings where it needs to be broken up the long sections of text.

Cooling Off Period and More Editing

I let the posts sit for a couple of hours or till the next day before reading it over again. I then reread it and do more editing if necessary.

If I end up changing things, I use both Hemingway and Grammarly to check the updated parts of the post. I tend to want to double-check things.

When the Post is Done

Once all that’s done, it’s time to create any links that need to be added. I don’t want to have to re-add them if I add them too early.

Then it’s time to publish my blog post.

Posting Everyday in January, 2021

In January 2021, I published a post every day. I found people tended to read my posts if I tweeted about them around noon or early afternoon on weekdays. On weekends it depended on what the post’s subject was if there were more readers, according to the Twitter statistics.

No Real Statistics and Future Posts

I don’t have any official numbers on how many people read my posts because I took Google analytics off my website and blog years ago. I did that, so Google wasn’t tracking everybody that would come to my website or blog posts.

Now I looked to post at least once a week and maybe two a week or a total of five or six posts a month.

More Blogging and Any Suggestions

So here’s hoping this was useful to all that red to get a better understanding of my process.

If you have any suggestions for other writing applications that might make writing blog posts easier. Please leave a comment.

Blogged Daily in January

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In mid-December, I thought it would be interesting to see if I could write a blog post every day in January.

After looking at my blog, I noticed it had been almost two years since I last posted (late January 2019). Before that, I wrote one post in July 2018 and nothing in 2017.

Posting Daily

Posting every day allowed me to write a bunch at first about things from 2020 and the pandemic. Along with some things I wanted to say and others that came up.

Part of the issue was I tended to write longer posts with example code. Which needed to be coded semantically and accessibly, of course. So it took a long time to write them and then post them if I ever did. So I stopped for the most part.

Shorter Blog Posts

So I decided the posts would be short. In my mind, that meant 500 to 1,000 words. It seems most of the blog posts in January 2021 ended up being between 300 and 600 words on average.

The longest post was the first one on January 1st at 926 words. The shortest one was 197 words about a week ago.

What Were the Numbers

I went back and wrote down the number of words for each post in January. The total words I wrote were 14,789 for an average of 477 and some change per day.

NOTE – I only had to add all the words per day up three times to get totals to match twice.

It’s Tough Blogging Daily

After writing a post every day for a month now, I’m not sure how Austin Kleon and others find the time to post daily. Or have ideas most days. Occasion they skip a day or so. Either way, I have found it to be hard to do every day. It’s a lot of work to do it more than a few times a week.

Posting Weekly

After posting every day for a month, I found it took about an hour to two hours daily for each post. Some days three hours if I was working on more than one psst.

Meaning I would come up with an idea or two, outline them, maybe even write the first draft. Or the next day, finish the post and edit it. Then post it or if I was writing on the weekends or had the time started one for a few days in advance.

I think spending four or five hours a week writing a post or two would be good.

Doing so would give me eight or ten hours back. That I had been using to write, edit, and post for other things like time to read and learn to improve my skills. Say in JavaScript, CSS Grid, etc. Or maybe cooking, coding, relaxing, etc.

Or even spending time thinking about what I want to be when I group.

Extra Learning

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With having or, more importantly, making time during the pandemic, I decided to use my time to take some classes and learn more. It helped getting rid of my cable TV in the fall of 2019.

Many Different Classes

I attended a few Creative Mornings Field Trips. They were about drawing and art, along with two different ones on making tortillas (corn and wheat). Another one had to do with creative writing.

Other classes were Marcy’s Sutton’s “Front-End Accessibility Masterclass.” It was a great class on how to make accessible HTML and CSS along with improving it with JavaScript when building websites and applications.

Food Related Classes and Books

Another event about the food I enjoyed in 2020 was the 2020 Fall Southern Foodways Symposium: Future of the South. That ran on Saturdays in October (3rd, 10th, 17th, and 24th) from 9:00 SM to noon central.

I have been learning about growing my own food, small scale farming, etc. I even purchased a fermenting class from a YouTube homesteaders channel I watch. It was a great class, and I’m looking forward to making more of my own ferments. I did a few ferments before I took the classes, but they didn’t turn out as well as I expected.

I’m looking forward to all the fresh veggies from the farmer’s market in the spring and during the summer too.

I read two books on fermenting too.

  • The Fermented Man – A year on the Front Lines of a Food Revolution by Derek Dellinger
  • The Noma Guide to Fermentation: Including Koji, Kombuchas, Shoyus, Misos, Vinegars, Garums, Lacto-ferments, and Black Fruits and Vegetables by Rene Redzepi and David Zilber
  • Do Preserve – Make Your own Jams, Chutneys, Pickles, and Cordials by Anja Dunk, Jen Goss, and Mimi Beaven

I even spent time learning about food, more specifically beans.

  • The Rancho Gordo Heirloom Bean Guide by Steve Sando and Julia Newberry
  • Cool Beans – The Ultimate Guide to Cooking with the World’s Most Versatile Plant-based Protein with 125 Recipes by Joe Yonan

Reading Creative and Comic Related Books

I have been reading many creative books, with many of them being graphic novels on making comics. Here are a few of those books.

  • Whatcha Mean, What’s a Zine? – The Art f Making Zines and Mini-comics by Mark Todd and Esther Pearl Watson
  • Elements of Fire – A Comic Anthology of Color! edited by Taneka Stotts
  • Cartooning – Philosophy, and Practice by Ivan Brunetti
  • Glenn Ganges in The River at Night by Kevin Huizenga
  • Drawing Book of Faces by Ed Emberley

One Odd Book

I even read a book on bee-keeping, which will help me when I get my own plot of land to grow food.

  • Do Bee-keeping – The Secret to Happy Honeybees by Orren Fox

Here’s to More Diverse Learning

So as you can see, since the beginning of 2020 and into 2021, I have been all over the place attempting to learn new things.