When I saw that @ayjay was reading Matthew B. Crawford’s book Why We Drive, it inspired me to revisit Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, particularly since I’ve started woodworking this year. I read the original article when it came out in 2006 (seventeen years ago!) and was thrilled by it and the book that followed. Rather than completing the re-read, though, I’m moving on to The Word Beyond Your Head, which may be more relevant to what I’ve been thinking about lately.

So Cory Doctorow’s new book is about an accountant?? I’m in. To be fair, it’s a book about a forensic accountant, those Humphrey Bogarts of the accounting world that the rest of us can only admire.

Finished reading The Green Man by Kathleen Basford. Actually, there isn’t a lot of text—mostly great pictures of Green Man and related architectural decoration. These are a few of my favorites.

If all goes as planned, I am three days away from visiting Muir Woods, so I’m reading this in earnest. Very good so far.

Thanks to Austin Kleon for telling us there was a word for this: tsundoku. I work at my kitchen table, so here is the pile that sits just behind my work laptop.

I really enjoyed looking through this collection of random pairings of books from Robert van Vliet’s library. There’s something very appealing about his method.

Started reading Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. 📚 Quoting Seneca, Charles Eisenstein, and Marilynne Robinson all in the introduction? He’s singing my song.

Washington Post: “An 8-year-old slid his handwritten book onto a library shelf. It now has a years-long waitlist.”

I received my order from Half Letter Press, which focuses on booklets and independent publishing. Check them out, lots of interesting stuff there.

I love books and lists - and book lists most of all. This post by Mario Villalobos brought two books in particular to my attention: How to Write One Song and How to Resist Amazon and Why. I’m listening to the former on audiobook (via Audible - so much for resisting Amazon) and reading the latter as an ebook through my local library. As I opened up How to Resist Amazon, I noticed that the publisher Microcosm is based in Portland, OR which my family and I visited in June 2021. One of the best vacations we’ve ever taken. Absolutely fell in love with the parts of the state we were able to visit.

Microcosm, it turns out, publishes/distributes a lot of zines, which I’ve taken an interest in lately. So naturally I bought the zine version of the aforementioned How to Resist Amazon plus their zine superpack.

Sometimes the internet doesn’t suck.