Mostly books but also some other things.
Finally reading The Count of Monte Cristo
I bought a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo from my local Half Price Books when I was in high school. It remained on my shelf for all of high school, and I donated it (probably back to Half Price Books) when I went to college. Last month, over 15 years after I first bought the book, I finally read The Count of Monte Cristo. My first impression of the book was that it was boring. I thought it would be a lot more swashbuckling than it was – a tale of revenge! Perhaps I was also mixing up The Count of Monte Cristo with the author’s other famous work, The Three Musketeers. Even though I had a hard time getting into the book, once I was in it, I loved it. It’s a slow burn revenge plot – scenarios take years (and many chapters) for the Count of Monte Cristo to set up, but the final reveal is always incredible.
Using an LLM to revamp my site
This is a meandering post about my personal experience using Claude to redesign my site and my broader takeaways on using LLMs for technical projects like this. Note that Claude is just the LLM I happen to be casually using already – I have no affiliation and I also didn’t spend any amount of time trying to pick the “best” LLM for my project.
Reading Trollope for the first time
After years and years of seeing Trollope books in used bookstores and thinking “I should read those someday,” I finally read The Claverings in October 2024. I chose this specific book to be my foray into Trollope because it was a standalone book (not part of a larger series like the Chronicles of Barsetshire) and the plot seemed similar to the kind of stuff I already like in Victorian literature (basically, marriage plot with a twist). While I’m glad I read the book and enjoyed parts of it, I found it overlong and depressingly patriarchal. I’m honestly surprised by the rave reviews on Goodreads.
Managing library books on the Kobo Libra H2O
This page describes how to set up a library account and manage library books on the Kobo Libra H2O device using OverDrive functionality. This page does not cover the Kobo app, another tool you can use to check out books to both the app and your e-reader.
A disappointing dnf
I was excited to read Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop because I thought the premise (woman quits high-stress job to run a bookshop) was fun and cute. It took me two weeks to read the first 60 pages before I decided to call it quits. I’ve read reviews that call Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop “comforting” and “gentle” but I just found it boring. Everything felt too long, too clique, and too general. I read some reviews that mention that the characters’ backstories are revealed later. I’ve read books where that progressive revelation really works, but here I just wasn’t compelled enough to stick around for the reveal.
A great setup and disappointing payoff in Admission
I recently read Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz. It’s my third book by Korelitz; I’ve also read The Latecomer and The Plot. Both of these books feel like the best kind of literary fiction – they’re long, but not just long. They’re expansive but not overlong, long enough so I can really relax and revel in the story, but not boring at all. They take their time building up the circumstances and plot, and going into the backstories of characters, and then things start to unravel and build and it’s great! I found both of these books so satisfying to read and expected something similar from Admission.
Disagreeing with the NYT’s best books of the 21st century
I read the New York Times’s new list of best books of the 21st century and I definitely shouldn’t have read it right before going to bed because it got me worked up. I can’t believe that some of my favorite books and authors aren’t on the list. I’m frustrated that some books that I think are way overrated made the list.
Leaving fairyland behind: on rereading books from my childhood
I reread books a lot. The mark of a good book, in my opinion, is one that I know I will reread. Rereading is a weird thing, though – sometimes I reread a book and I love it so much more than I did initially (examples: Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights). Sometimes it’s more gradual, and each time I reread a book I like it more and more (examples: The True Deceiver, Free Food for Millionaires). But I’ve sometimes had the experience of rereading a book and liking it less than the first time or just feeling like the book didn’t live up to my memory of it. I felt this way recently about Anne of the Island, the third book in the Anne of Green Gables series. In the book, Anne leaves Prince Edward Island to go to college in Kingsport, Nova Scotia. The book wasn’t as good as I remembered it being, and I also remembered some key scenes, scenes that were important to my overarching narrative of being A Reader as a child, flat-out wrong.
Reading as a new parent
I had a baby in April and, predictably, barely read anything during the first month. After that, I’ve mostly returned to my typical pace of four books a month. Reading right now looks different than it did before the baby – and I expect it will change even more as the baby gets older and more active! For now, though, I’ve shifted to reading on my ereader instead of physical books, and to reading longer books and series instead of shorter books.
2024 reading recap
Stats:
In search of a good western book
Ever since I randomly found the book The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig at the Half Price Books closest to my Minnesota hometown, I’ve been on a casual quest to find another “western” book that’s as satisfying.
A beautiful book, you were not
I’m a little bit embarrassed about how much I like Conversations with Friends and Normal People, the first two books by author Sally Rooney. I think this embarrassment comes from a variety of places. Sally Rooney is a super popular author, and I sort of resent that I really like an author who a lot of other people like. I want to have more alternative, subtle taste in books! Her books are also pretty melodramatic. They’re all on-and-off relationships and lack of communication and existential crises. I like this angst, but I’m also a little ashamed that I like this angst – it feels like something I should have grown out of. Anyway, because I liked Sally Rooney’s first two books so much, I was really excited to hear she had a new book coming out – Beautiful World, Where Are You. I was so excited in fact, that I preordered the damn book back in June. (It came out in September.) I’ve never preordered a book in my life.
Some thoughts about the books I read in May and June 2022
The worst book I read recently was Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which provoked a landmark obscenity trial in the UK in 1960. Some critics think D.H. Lawrence’s writing style was influenced by his tuberculosis, which he died from two years after publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Apparently, tuberculosis can cause a heightened emotional state and also impotence, which matches up pretty well to my personal beef with the book: I found the prose insufferably flowery and the characters flat and annoying.
Buy Nothing groups in Mountain View and San Mateo
I moved from Mountain View to San Mateo at the end of March. In anticipation of my move, I joined my Mountain View neighborhood’s Buy Nothing group in order to offload some of the things that I didn’t want to pack up and move – things like clothes I no longer wore, books I read and didn’t like, some cheap IKEA furniture that I longer needed, and various items of an old roommate that I’d never gotten around to getting rid of. The Mountain View Buy Nothing group I joined was extremely active – multiple people expressed interest in almost everything I posted, and I was ultimately able to rehome a lot of items. I was surprised how great doing this felt – less profit driven than donating to Goodwill, more “useful” than bringing to the recycling center, more personal than posting on the free section of Craigslist, and more altruistic than selling on eBay (not that I could sell things like miscellaneous light bulbs anyway).
The books I read in April 2022
…in chronological order.
The books I read in February and March 2022
…in chronological order.
Kindred didn’t pander to me
I loved the book The Help when I was in high school – it takes place in the 1960s and the protagonist is a white woman who writes about black maids working in white households. It’s not a terrible book, but it centers on a nice white woman who helps black people (who don’t really need the help in the first place) and then profits off of it. I liked the book because it was readable and the characters were overall compelling, but even more so, I liked it because it pandered to me, a white reader.
The books I read in January 2022
…in chronological order.
The books I read in December 2021
…in chronological order.
The books I read in November 2021
…in chronological order.
The books I read in October 2021
…in chronological order.
Third-person omniscient narration in Free Food for Millionaires
Min Jin Lee uses third-person omniscient narration in Free Food for Millionaires, a book I read in July and haven’t been able to stop thinking about. A lot of books use this style – Middlemarch and The House of Mirth, for example, both narrate the stories and thoughts of many characters. (Middlemarch is, incidentally or not, Free Food for Millionaires protagonist Casey Han’s favorite book.)
Don’t sleep, there are tons of boring linguistic details
I recently finished Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle, an autobiographical account of Daniel Everett’s time as a Christian missionary to the Piraha (a small Amazon tribe), his analysis of the tribe’s unique language and linguistic structure, and his subsequent “deconversion.” There weren’t a TON of boring linguistic details – just a little too much academic theory for me. I thought I was going to read a travelogue/ethnography with a sprinkle of linguistic details. What I got was approximately half that, and half critical theory. But that’s okay.
I didn’t like Mexican Gothic, but a lot of critics did
I didn’t like Mexican Gothic, but a lot of other people did. I was so excited about the premise: a gothic novel in 1950s Mexico! I thought, “maybe this will be sort of like a new twist on Jane Eyre.” Yeah, it wasn’t. I was disappointed.
The House of Mirth and The Awakening have so many similarities
I read The House of Mirth and The Awakening almost back to back (one book in between – Susan Choi’s Person of Interest) unintentionally, but I was totally struck by how similar the two books are. The Awakening was published in 1899, while The House of Mirth was published just six years later in 1905. The protagonists, Lily Bart and Edna Pontellier, are also incredibly similar (and, interestingly, almost exactly the same age – Edna turns 28 during the course of The Awakening; Lily is 29 when The House of Mirth begins) – both are in rather precarious positions because of both their own actions and their own yearnings for something more than conventional social life, and both end their own lives because they are unable to find fulfillment through men and society and unwilling to conceive of a life outside of those constraints.
I like e-readers now
I’ve never been a fan of e-readers. I’m put off by the prospect of paying for a book that only exists on a device, especially when the price of e-books approaches or exceeds the cost of physical books (especially the used copies I tend to buy). I also just love physical books – the weight and feel of them, the experience of reading, the look of books on my shelf.
American Woman considers how radicalism can produce ambivalence
American Woman is a fictionalization of the Patty Hearst kidnapping and aftermath – specifically, it focuses on the time between the SLA robbery of a sporting goods store in May 1974 and her arrest in April 1975.
Normal People is about shifting power dynamics, not love
Normal People is about the power dynamics that are present inside and outside of a romantic relationship and how they shift over time (over years and also over moments) because of the relationship itself, external factors, and individual factors like insecurity and mental health.
Elantris has a great plot, but a disappointing love interest
Elantris is the first book I’ve read by Brandon Sanderson, an author I keep hearing about from a lot of different people.