Poor Charlie's Almanack

I don't care particularly about Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger: I don't think that I care about money enough. Does this make me naïve? At any rate I like what Stripe, who has published the latest edition of Poor Charlie's Almanack, has done with the website. They don't call it an ebook, and it doesn't come in a downloadable .epub file or anything—but it's an ebook.

John Gruber's right about the sorry state of ebooks. I don't mind reading books on my Kindle, but the certain quality to physical books that makes them really memorable, to me, is missing when I read digitally. I like reading on my Kindle, but it doesn't move me the way a real book does.

I wish that there was a platform, an opportunity, for books to be published like this: with attention to typography, with pictures and hyperlinks. I wish I cared about Charlie Munger and I wish I cared to read this silly book, because I want to spend more time with multimedia reading experiences like this. These feel like worthier alternatives to paper & glue than the spartan XML documents we got.

(Requisite complaint about how it spins my computer CPU up. I liked it better when Gruber was taking potshots at web developers.)

Sam booked tickets a while ago to see Mary Beard speak about her new book, Emperor of Rome. Sam's always been fascinated with Rome (the empire, that is; we could take or leave the city) and is a fan of Beard in her own right, so we snatched up tickets early.

I haven't read the book yet (though it's on my list, and Sam managed to snag an autographed copy), but Beard's thesis during the talk was that Roman emperors were, while extraordinarily accessible to regular folks, also themselves regular folks—fallible, idiosyncratic, hopelessly diseased—doing their best to hold onto power. The idea of Roman emperorship, in effect, was to "through autocracy, turn democracy into a sham."

At the end, there was time for a few questions—none generated much controversy but they were all well-asked and worth asking. Whether any of what she wrote could be a reflection on current leadership is, I suspect, a question she wouldn't have answered.

As part of this year's review, I wrote a little bit about how I'd been tracking which books I'd read on a website called Oku (originally Readng), but that I'd been a little underwhelmed by the application in general and that I was going to start keeping track of my writing on this website instead (along with everything else).

For that reason, and to prevent me from losing my record if Oku ever shuts down, I'm moving that list of read books over here. So without ado:

1. Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
2. The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
   
3. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
   
4. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
   
5. Child of God by Cormac McCarthy
   
6. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (re-read)
   
7. A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines
   
8. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
   
9. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
   
10. No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
    
11. Crucial Conversations by Gregory, Grenny, McMillan, Patterson, and Switzler
    
12. The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien
    
13. The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien
    
14. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
    
15. No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai
    
16. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
    
17. Touching the Void by Joe Simpson
    
18. In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami
    
19. The Arrest by Jonathan Lethem
    
20. Story of His Life by Geronimo
    

I'd set myself a goal of reading 20 books in 2021, and I made it—so next year's goal is 25.