I might have to steal this great idea for 2024.
And with that, I just finished a full year with Ryan Holiday’s daily stoic journal. What a process. 2022 was hodgepodge, stochastic, and inconsistent. But once I got going, keeping it going became a major focus of my daily habits this year. 📚
Year in books for 2023
Here are the books I finished reading in 2023. My official count is lower than actual, most on account of a few re-reads. (I read Shakespeare’s Sonnets to the big kids three times this year, eg.) still, a bit short of my goal of 26 books. That’s ok. Most of what I read is online articles, PDFs, and stuff like that. And I’m happy with this list.
Here’s to next year.
📚2024 War and Peace book club, Footnotes and Tangents, Substack
I’m joining, come do it with me! We start tomorrow, one chapter per day.
Now playing, Stakes is High
Want to read: Beyond Revenge by J. B. Minton 📚
JB is on Substack. Never heard of him before, but now I’m hooked. This one is near the top of my 2024 queue.
Is anyone using Music Board? Seems like a Letterboxd/Goodreads for music. Are there better or just interesting alternatives?
🎥🎵 Adeste Fideles, Gaby Moreno (YouTube).
Still a very underrated musician, and her christmas album even more so.
🎥 Linus and Lucy: with the Frank Granelli Trio, YouTube
Gestrin (piano) and Fisk (bass) struggling to leep up, but the master makes it look easy.
Finished reading: How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell 📚
📰 This Corner of Texas Was Remote. Then Instagram Found It., WSJ.
For decades, this quirky cluster of trailers, hippies and a ghost town was a lonesome one, in a remote corner of Texas near the Mexico border, on the outskirts of one of the country’s least-visited national parks.
Now, the glass of scores of shiny new casitas glitters against rust-brown mountains.
First time watching Home Alone for the big kid. 📽
How it started…
How it’s going…
… and to all a goodnight. 📷
Veni Veni Immanuel, English and Latin (YouTube)
No post-Mass photo this year, but merry Christmas everyone!
The story of Christmas through masterpieces of painting (Culture Critic, thread on “X”).
Midnight in Arizona, which means it’s Christmas Eve. All my love and best wishes to each and every one of you, reading in your timelines or on my blog. Merry, merry Christmas.
The disdain for Substack is misplaced. It continues to be one of the best sources of good writing on the net. I encourage skeptics to consider Elle Griffin’s essay on the matter.
American Achilles in the War on Terror
John J. Waters interviews Emily Wilson at RealClearDefense about her new translation of Homer.
The arc of history demonstrates the activity of warfare is always changing; weapons, technology, and troop formations are constantly in flux. But the condition of war, how people experience combat, remains largely unchanged.
Excellent interview.
Moving my Academic website (from Github) to Hugo is my 2024 project. I need to find some readings on porting or writing a custom theme so that the home page is a landing page, the blog is in the background, and supports Maxjax for the (very rare) use of LaTeX.
Anyone who has advice, hit me up.