Hey Siri, play playlist “Run 2”.

Instead of your most frequently played playlist named “Run 2”, which is full of your purchased music, and which you listen to all the time, and which is cached locally on this Apple Watch… I’m going to download a random song named “Run 2”, which you’ve never listened to, and which is performed by a group you’ve never heard of.

Incoming 7D93FD96 59BB 4CBC A3DD D71A7C4DECC1.

Maybe I shouldn’t have started testing iOS “Sound Recognition” with “Siren” enabled right before watching 🎬 Die Hard.

📚 I read some books in November!

  • 🎧 Tribe by Sebastian Junger
  • 🎧 The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace
  • 📚 Wisdom from the Road by Bob Wells
  • 🎧 Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace
  • 🎧 Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
  • 🎧 A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
  • 🎧 Wool (The Silo Saga) by Hugh Howey
  • 🎧 Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

And so I read Infinite Jest again. Then when I finished it for the second time I immediately started over at the beginning. I’m fully aware of the irony. I may have a problem.

📚 I read some books in October!

  • 🎧 This Is Water by David Foster Wallace
  • 🎧 Doctor Zhivago by Borìs Pasternàk
  • 🎧 The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
  • 🎧 The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy

📚 I read some books in September!

  • 🎧 Scarcity Brain by Michael Easter
  • 🎧 Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
  • 🎧 The Apple II Age : How the Computer Became Personal by Laine Nooney
  • 🎧 Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier by Arthur C. Brooks & Oprah Winfrey
  • 📚 How to Live in a Car, Van or RV by Bob Wells
  • 🎧 Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Infinite Jest might just be my favorite thing I’ve ever read.

📚 I read some books in August!

  • 🎧 Things That Matter by Joshua Becker
  • 🎧 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
  • 🎧 Frozen in Time by Mitchell Zuckoff
  • 🎧 Slow Horses by Mick Herron
  • 🎧 Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff
  • 📚 In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
  • 🎧 13 Hours by Mitchell Zuckoff
  • 🎧 Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert
  • 🎧 Right Thing, Right Now by Ryan Holiday

📚 I read some books in July!

  • 🎧 The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien
  • 🎧 The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien
  • 🎧 The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
  • 🎧 Dune by Frank Herbert
  • 🎧 Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert
  • 📚 Magic Pill by Johann Hari
  • 🎧 Children of Dune by Frank Herbert
  • 🎧 Above the Clouds by Kilian Jornet
  • 🎧 Everything That Remains by Joshua Fields Millburn & Ryan Nicodemus
  • 🎧 Stolen Focus by Johann Hari
  • 🎧 God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert
  • 🎧 Love People, Use Things by Joshua Fields Millburn & Ryan Nicodemus

📚 I read some books in June!

  • 🎧 The Impossible First by Colin O'Brady
  • 🎧 Pegasus by Laurent Richard & Sandrine Rigaud
  • 🎧 Free Time by Jenny Blake
  • 🎧 Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline
  • 🎧 Dark Wire by Joseph Cox
  • 🎧 Kleptopia by Tom Burgis
  • 🎧 The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
  • 🎧 The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

📚 I read some books in May!

  • 🎧 Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
  • 🎧 Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
  • 🎧 Born Standing Up by Steve Martin
  • 🎧 Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough by Lori Gottlieb
  • 🎧 Chip War by Chris Miller
  • 🎧 Decluttering at the Speed of Life by Dana K. White
  • 🎧 Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport
  • 🎧 Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World by Bruce Schneier
  • 🎧 A Thousand Brains by Jeff Hawkins
  • 🎧 Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids – and How to Break the Trance by Nicholas Kardaras, PhD
  • 🎧 Good to Great by Jim Collins

I generate this list from data stored in the app Sofa. The recent major version update of this app wreaked havoc on my JSON processing script. Hopefully the file format doesn’t change again for a while now that I went through the trouble of updating my script.

📚 I read some books in April!

  • 🎧 Xenocide by Orson Scott Card
  • 🎧 You Are Why You Eat by Dr. Ramani Durvasula
  • 🎧 Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis

The first 26 books I read this year had titles starting with letters A-Z sequentially. This was an interesting challenge. I found books for each letter, though I must admit some of them I wasn’t very excited about (a few with good reason). Here’s a few stats that, interestingly, all contain the number 19:

  • 19 nonfiction, 7 fiction
  • 19 first time reads, 7 re-reads
  • 19 male authors, 7 female authors
  • 19 audiobooks, 6 eBooks, 1 paper book

After finishing, I considered making a second pass at the alphabet, and I also considered moving on to books whose titles started with numbers. In the end I decided I had too much of a backlog in my reading list, so I’m just going to start working through those books. Here are the other books I read in April:

  • 🎧 Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card
  • 🎧 The Last Shadow by Orson Scott Card
  • 🎧 Breathless by David Quammen