Continuing in the style of last week I spent most of today reading my Instapaper backlog and listening to podcasts. Good day. Here are the highlights:
Spent the evening with my Kindle, a few cups of tea, and my most recent items from Instapaper. The highlights of my reading list for the night:
Ian Beck’s post the other day inspired me to jot down some notes here about what I recently read. Similar to Ian, I am a binge reader of sorts. There are months that go by where I hardly crack open a book. Other months I will finish a half-dozen.
Before I moved this site to WordPress.com I had a custom post type that listed out which books I recently completed in a special page template. Since that is no longer, here is what has kept me interested recently.
A relatively easy read but superbly interesting. Matthew Crawford writes about his experiences in life as a mechanic and at a think tank. The guiding philosophy behind the book is one I agree with.
I just finished this the other day and loved it. I had heard good things from others and the book did not disappoint.
This has the benefit of being a 7-part series. I have been a Stephen King fan since 5th grade but I really think this is his finest work. I started the series a couple times before but this time I finally have consistent time to finish it. Since August I read volumes 3-5 and am about halfway through volume 6 now.
The Dark Tower is a wonderful mix of futurism and western fiction with a few dark twists thrown in. Handily the first volume is short and easy to read. I would encourage anyone to give that a read. If it hooks you the series just gets better from there.
Fairly interesting. Extremely fast read. This was decent but not great. I would recommend reading it and then listening to John Siracusa tear it apart in “The wrong guy” (pt. II).
Michael Pick recommended this to me at our Budapest meetup. It was fascinating. If you don’t mind non-linear fiction with a bit of imaginary world construction I cannot recommend it highly enough. Possibly the best piece of fiction I read this year.
If you are interested in ideas around managing teams this is a good one. Yes it is from the 1960s, but the advice is solid. Unlike some other business books it focuses on the concrete with digestible advice that actually gives you something to take back to your work.
Information consumption also has a consumption chain, just like food does. Most news, for instance, comes from a set of facts on the ground, that get processed, and processed and processed again before it ends up on your television set boiled down into chunks for you to consume. But it also gets filled with additives— expert opinion, analysis, visualizations, you name it— before it gets to you. If this was food, a vegan would want none of it. They’d head straight to the data, to the source, to the facts, and try and get as much of that additive business out of their way.
Clay Johnson – Why Infovegan. via Daniel.
The idea that someone can program our consumption is becoming obsolete, and fast. The front page of the paper disappears in a digital world, where there is no front page–merely the page I got to by clicking on a link from a friend.
Seth Godin – The extraordinary revolution of media choice.
So sad and so true:
No app built for reading starts with the premise that the publisher has done an acceptable job.
Brent Simmons – The Readable Future.
A reader is for engaging with information; it’s a tool for consuming, managing, and using knowledge. In addition to presenting new information to consume, I also want it to pay attention to, infer insights from, and make accessible in an evergreen matter what I’ve already read. For me, this presents the pinnacle of personal information management — an intelligent tool that can reinforce what I already know and help guide me towards what I need to know.
Daniel Bachhuber – “Phone” is to the iPhone as “RSS reader” is to ?.
Pub Rules. In a follow-up of sorts to the quote I posted yesterday Brent Simmons writes about what he would do if in charge of a publication. I think it will only be a matter of time before we see someone try this with a large-scale site. I bet that when they do they’ll supplant whatever the main source is for that community. The trick will be sticking to these principles as the site grows and not becoming a bloated mess of “business opportunities.”
Don’t let your drive for advertising dollars undercut your purpose:
I made the mistake of going to a website today. It’s understandable, of course — everybody does it, from time to time — and I’m sure I’ll forgive myself, eventually.
I don’t mean just any website, of course, I mean a publication. A place where a business publishes interesting things that I like to read.
I couldn’t hit the Reader button in Safari fast enough. In fact, I couldn’t hit it at all, so stunned was I by the flickering colorful circus the page presented. It was like angry fruit salad on meth.
Brent Simmons – The Pummeling Pages.
