by James Wallace Harris, 12/5/22
I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos about organizing personal information using note-taking apps, computer programs like Notion or Obsidian, writing in fancy notebooks using pens, etc. Tonight I even started writing a Python program to track the books I want to read. Then I said, “fuck it, this is too much trouble.” I decided to come up with the easiest method I could think of to get the job done. Whenever I read a book review in the many best-books-of-2022 articles I find on the web this month, I’m just going to take a screenshot and put it here.
Last year I picked 23 books from 2021 that I wanted to read in 2022. So far, I’ve read 8. This year, I’ve tried to be less ambitious. So far I’ve only picked 8. Of those, I have access to them from these sources:
Scribd:
- The Candy House by Jennifer Egan
- Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
- Goliath by Tochi Onyebuchi
- What We Owe the Future by William MacAskill
- The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan
This makes me want to keep my Scribd subscription which I was thinking of giving up.
The Candy House is also available on Libby from my library but with a long waiting list.
The other three I will have to buy from Audible:
- Beyond the Burn Line by Paul McAuley
- A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys
- Weapons of Mass Delusion by Robert Draper
I’ll probably add more to my 2023 TBR list as more best-of-the-year lists are published, but for now, let’s see how I do with these eight.
JWH
Auxiliary Memory 
Jennifer Egan is one of those authors whose books always sound interesting to me, and yet I never actually make/take the time to read. This one sounds very intriguing, to be sure.
I’ve tried several different apps/programs in the past to track things, help make work more efficient, etc. and I find that the fly in the ointment for every one of them is always me…I just don’t find anything to which I stay committed. Probably the closest thing to long-term use is that I’ve used Evernote most of the year, though I doubt I use it in the way it is intended. By and large it is just a large, color-coded Post-It note, the way I use it, though in that vein I have found it to be helpful to add anything work-related that I need to attend to and the fact that it stays there until I check it off at least keeps me somewhat on track.