Programmer's log. Epoch time 1673892179099. Rain has been pouring down in the Bay Area. We've already hit the limit for annual predicted rainfall and it's only halfway through January. We've had a few rare hours of calm weather over the last couple of weeks, so the dog and I have been taking every opportunity to soak up the sunshine...
Hi all,
This is a digest for my blog Simulated Annealing. Reach out with thoughts on Twitter @vivqu or by replying to this email.
Side note: I'm considering moving this newsletter to Substack or Buttondown. I'm not planning on adding any subscription fees or other fancy features, but I believe those platforms have a nicer newsletter editing experience.
I originally chose TinyLetter for the extreme minimalist approach to sending emails. Unfortunately, I've frequently found that this platform's editing tools are broken or have an awkward UX design. TinyLetter was acquired by Mailchimp in 2011 and relaunched in 2014, and while it's not being shut down, it's clearly not being actively improved. The last tweet from @tinyletter was in July 2020 about an outage. It's not a good sign to me that the co-founder and CEO had to write an open letter in 2018 clarifying to users the future plan for TinyLetter, which was in effect, "nothing is changing." The implication also is that, probably, nothing is getting better.
In any case, I'm debating which email platform to migrate this newsletter onto. Don't be surprised if a future email gets sent from a different platform! ✉️
Recent posts:
Holiday book gifting
How to recommend books so people will actually read them
The turn of the year is the time when book readers everywhere pull out their reading lists. Major news publications publish articles rounding up the best books of the year. People review how many books they finished compared to their new year’s resolution goal. Countless blog posts and email newsletters are sent out with subjects like “Books I Read in 2022.” For a brief few weeks in December and January, there is an endless stream of book recommendations that flood email inboxes, landing pages, and social media posts.
The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022 has at least 200 titles on it. I tried counting all of them but I got tired of counting when I reached 170…
I’m an eager participant in the yearly book recommendation ritual. One of my favorite things to do at the end of the year is to review everything I’ve read, making complicated charts on my reading trends and ranking my completed books against each other. This data analysis is easy since I’m one of those people that meticulously tracks my reading habits. At this point, my book tracker goes back ten years and includes 250 finished books (and counting!). From this massive record of book details, I feel confident in recommending the very best titles to anyone who asks.
A graph of my yearly reading statistics since 2012 that compares completed fiction vs non-fiction books. I finished 47 books total in 2022, a personal best!
On the other hand, I am also conscious of book content overload. My unread book list is infinitely expanding and it gets an especially huge chunk of new rows at this time of year like clockwork. I’m an especially fast reader but even I still can’t keep up with all the books on my backlog. It’s hard to prioritize new book titles, even from people who I respect and know have reading tastes very compatible with mine. I have an ever-increasing stack of purchased books waiting to be read, reminding me of the deep backlog. By the next time I’m at the bookstore or library, weeks have passed and I have forgotten which titles have been recommended to me.
A few years ago, I discovered a better way to recommend books with my friends & family: doing an annual book gifting tradition. This method cuts through the endless books-of-the-year lists and reduces cognitive burden.
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Hit me up with your thoughts @vivqu. See you later, alligator! 🐊