Now: 3 - 9 March 2025

Thursday was maybe the second or third Nice Day of the Year—a pleasure. Doors were opened and washing was hung out on lines across the neighbourhood. The solar panels booted back up and charged up the battery downstairs to like full power. The grass and the trees and the hedgerows and thickets all across East Durham came alive and started booting pollen out into the hazy sky and pretty much disabled me from like 10am onwards.

Then at the weekend we had a couple more nice days; on Sunday I even went for a run in just a t-shirt. The Boston Marathon (not that one) is looming and I want to make sure that I’m prepared, so I’ve been out pretty consistently as the weather has gotten better.

A bit of sweat and fresh warm air feels like just about the only thing keeping me together, mentally, at the minute. I’ve gotten to the point in my career where I’m starting to butt up against the limits of my background: yes I can read Shakespeare (with annotations) but no I don’t have the muscle memory to keep track of Turing machine states in my head. I can understand—and handle—feeling out of my depth, but reading through historical computer science A-level exams, or trying to figure out logic puzzles, makes me feel like I’m in a whole nother body of water, in terms of out of my depth.

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I’ve given up YouTube for Lent, which is one of those things that only 30ish-year-olds in 2025 do, because 30ish-year-olds in 2025 have impulse control problems related to YouTube Shorts. In February I spent probably more time than I want to know about watching 22-second clips of men laying concrete or traffic accidents on UK roads. I’ve lost that time for good, but the Lenten Spirit of Jesus Christ is going to help stop me from losing any more time in the future.

As a result I’ve gotten back into books; that’s right I’m back baby, I’ve put Dhalgren behind me and I’m reading for pleasure again. I finished Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell this week and I’ve moved on to Michael Schur’s How to be Perfect, which has been… middling. Maybe a bit less rigorous than I’d like it to be. Oh and Sam and I are reading Hamlet, which is a lot more dramatic and a little bit more funny than I remember it being. Anyway the point is that without the distraction of rapid-fire content about two-handed greatsword technique I’m back to staring at marked slices of tree for hours on end, hallucinating vividly.

I'm of the firm belief that if you're going to read Shakespeare, you should read with annotations. Shakespeare interjects too much context, and indeed sometimes writes things in such a roundabout way, that the text alone winds up only revealing part of the picture. Or at least it does for me.

But annotated Shakespeare tends to be the domain of books that you have to go out and rent from the library, if the library has them at all—and there's no way of determining whether the annotated edition you're getting is any good.

Genius.com, however—yeah, the rap lyrics website—hosts a bunch of Shakespeare plays, and the more popular ones even have pretty good, comprehensive annotations! Problem solved. Here's Hamlet.

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.