Category: reading

Review | Tales from the Open Road (We’re the Russos)

Tales From the Open Road: The Adventures and Misadventures of RV Living (We're the Russos Book 2)
We’re The Russos Book 2

First, a disclaimer, Joe, and Kait sent me a Kindle version of the book. They didn’t ask me to review it here and my review is my own. Tales From the Open Raod: The Adventures of RV Living is Joe Russo’s second book. The first book Take Risks: One Couple’s Journey to Quit Their Jobs and Hit the Open Road was book one. I’ve already reviewed that book here in 2018 and you can read the review by clicking on the link above.

I’m a big fan of the Russos. I’ve been a subscriber to their YouTube channel since before Joe’s first book. As you can guess from the titles of the books, they are a couple from Los Angeles that quit their jobs, bought an RV and started traveling the US. This, however, as Joe explains in the most recent book was not early retirement.

I recommend reading the books in order as the first book does a good job of covering the period when they decided to make this leap. This second book goes into how. It covers the trials and tribulations of driving and finding parking for a large RV. And it also begins the story of them looking for a smaller RV. While there is a path forward mentioned in the book, we don’t actually find out in the book what happens next, but for all the YouTube followers of the Russo’s we already know how that story ends.

Joe’s writing flows well and while simple really works for me. It’s a fun read and I really liked getting to know more of the details as a YouTube follower I didn’t see all the behind the scenes information that Joe shares in the book. My only complaint is that I wish there was more in the book. More details and more of the class B journey. That said I think it takes tremendous bravery to share your story in a book and even more to share it on a medium like YouTube where the Internet trolls will offer unsolicited feedback on everything that makes it into a video.

Regardless of what the Russo’s do next, I look forward to following their journey on YouTube and in print!

Review | New Minimalism: Decluttering and Design for Sustainable, Intentional Living

New Minimalism: Decluttering and Design for Sustainable, Intentional Living
New Minimalism by Cary Telander Fortin, Kyle Louise Quilici

I picked up New Minimalism by Cary Telander Fortin, Kyle Louise Quilici from my local library. The book describes a middle ground between “I live with only 4 things” and hoarders.

As you can tell from all the links and extra books listed I really enjoyed this book. I’m recommending it to my wife next. I think she will find some real nuggets that will help her.

I enjoyed the practicality. The tagline for the books is:

Your external space reflects your internal state. What does your home say about you?

Cary Telander Fortin and Kyle Louise Quilici

Some notes from the book that I want to remember are:

Philosophy books:

Websites:

Simple Wardrobes:

Environment:

Design Books:

Design Websites:

A Bit of World Culture | A River in Darkness

A River in Darkness: One Man’s Escape from North Korea by Masaji Ishikawa

A World Book Day purchased for free on Amazon in order to read books from authors that are outside of the US. I was excited to read this book from an author born outside of the US and written about a country I will probably never visit. As you might imagine from the title the book was very sad. It made me even more thankful for all the things I have and fortune to be able to provide for my family. It would be interesting to see what else has happened to Mr. Ishikawa since the book was published.

The 172 page book was originally published in 2000, but I think the fact that it was a featured book on World Book Day and the fact that it was free, really helped the sales. It currently has 25,500 ratings at a 4.26 rating on goodreads.

The author tells of his impossibly difficult life in North Korea and his eventual escape from the oppressive country. I gave this book 4 stars.

2018 in Review | My Year in Reading

In 2018, I read 28 books. My goal for the year was 50 books. How did I miss my goal so badly?

Books Read by Month

As you can see in November I didn’t read any books and there were 6 months were I only completed one book.

Obviously, we can see where I went wrong here. Pretty plain and simple, I had a few months where I really drove my reading and finished some books. Especially, March, May and June.

I just didn’t do a good job here. But let’s take a look at the data from a different direction. I have been making note of the nationality of the author, in an effort to try to read books from people outside of the US. I did not do well on this either. Only 21% of the books I read this year where from outside the US.

Okay, but how about gender. Did I read more books from female authors? Slightly better here. 32% of the books I read this year were written by a female author. A good improvement over last year at 24%.

What is my binding of choice? What format do I prefer to read in. E-books was the clear winner here with 10 (36%) e-books written. I think this makes sense considering that I was challenged to find time to read this year. By making it easier for me to read anywhere, I was able to squeeze in more reading.

Totals

Now for the big numbers. I read 5,724 pages. I also listened to 2,914 minutes or 48.5 hours (just over 2 days) of audio.

I spent $24.30 on books this year. The library saved me $225.36! Use your local library!

Year over year

For the last 4 years my reading has taken a plunge! This is a trend that I don’t want to continue. I really need to do better in 2019. That is one of my New Years resolutions. Wish me luck! I will set my Goodreads goal at 45 books in 2019 and do my best to hit that number.

Lastly, I will leave you with a list of the books that earned 5 stars from me in 2018:

Reading the Books You Already Own

Library
Library by Flickr User Stewart Butterfield

This post goes along with The Purge post I did a bit ago. I read an article by Laura Sackton of Book Riot this morning. In the article, she mentions the exact problem I have. Most of the 706 books left on my Goodreads to-read shelf are books I already own. I just can’t seem to get to them. Sometimes like Laura I pick something up at the library that looks interesting. Other times I buy something from Amazon for my kindle. Still others, I’m given a book to read from a friend or family. Plus there are always books coming monthly from Book of the Month.

With all these enticing things coming my way, my to-read shelf is overflowing. I really want to read all these books! In the article, Laura suggests treating your shelves at home as a library. You have your big bookshelf as the circulation books, main library books. Then you have a hopefully smaller bookshelf with all the books you have on hold. These are the books you will be reading next. I like this idea, but I don’t have my books organized in this way. I’m not sure I can get myself to do it either.

I’ve been trying not to get any more books. When we go to the library now, I stick with the kids and don’t visit the adult section of the library. I stay upstairs where there are only books for children. I’m going to let my book of the month subscription expire for now so I have time to catch up on the ones I have received but not had time to read. The new rule for me is that I always need to be reading something from my own shelves.

How do you keep on top of the books you already have at home? I’d love to hear your suggestions in the comments below.

The Purge

KonMari-ing my books
KonMari-ing my books by Flickr User: Kars Alfrink

I want to read more.  When I get in this mood and I’m totally pumped to get reading more.  You would think that I read right?  Well, sometimes you can’t.  If the kids are all over the place I can’t read, I have to stop every few seconds to do something.  Not that I mind.  I love my kids, but it is not the best way to get through a book.  So sometimes, when I’m psyched to read, but I can’t actually read, I spend time on Goodreads.  It is the facebook of reading.  The social site for readers.

I have been on there more frequently in the past few days, and I take a look at the number of books read and the number of books I want to read.  This is scary.  I’m upside down on my numbers.  While it is encouraging to know I have no lack of books that I want to read, I would really like my read number to be higher than my to-read number.  As things stand now I’m at 717 to-read and 595 read.

This is after a few hours of purging already.  I didn’t write anything down, but my to-read number before the purge started was around 760 or 770.  That means I purged around 23% of the books on my to-read pile already.  What did I drop from the to-read shelf?

Goodreads Finding Duplicates
Goodreads Finding Duplicates

My first stop was finding duplicates.  I didn’t know that Goodreads had this tool, but it was there when I went looking for it, so no idea how long it has been there, but it made dropping the duplicate books very easy.  I had about 25 duplicate books.

Then I started to go through my to-read list book by book.  This is the super frustrating part.  As I look through the list I keep seeing books I don’t remember adding.  Why did I add this?  I click on the book to look at the detail page.  No friends have read this and like an idiot, I didn’t put anything in the recommended by field.  SO frustrating.  The next step is the read the synopsis and figure out if I still want to read this book, if not it’s gone.

This is how I’m purging or if you like “pruning” my Goodreads to-read list.  I’m about halfway through my shelf now.  I’m hoping to get that 717 number down to something that is more manageable.  On the bright side, I’m spending so much time on Goodreads that I found this beauty of a 404 page:

Goodreads 404
Goodreads 404

Tiny Town of Hobart, New York and it’s 5 Indie Bookstores

Wm. H. Adams Antiquarian Books
Wm. H. Adams Antiquarian Books by Flickr User: Watershed Post

Above is one of five bookstores in the very tiny town of Hobart, New York.  This town of only 400 people has five independent bookstores.  The one pictured above, Wm. H. Adams Antiquarian Books actually has a website!  The little town of Hobart with all of its .5 square miles is about an hour west of Albany, NY.

I first discovered about this little town from a post on from Atlas Obscura a great website with lots of really cool lesser known stuff.  The exact kind of thing I loved covering when I was producing History Podcast.  Atlas Obscura also has a book for you to read, how convenient.  I actually discovered the website only after I heard about the book.  It’s one of those big tomes that you read slowly and savor.  I’m reading it slowly, an article here and there and I also signed up for Altas Obscura’s daily emails with lots of cool stories like this one.

Atlas Obscura
Atlas Obscura

Man, these folks that started the bookstores in Hobart are smart:

help himself unwind, he taught himself classical Greek.

To help himself unwind.  Who does that now?  I sit down and think, man I need to relax, I’m going to binge on Stranger Things.  But those in Hobart relax by teaching themselves to read the Illiad in classical Greek!  Geez!  I  wonder how different the story comes across.  Nevermind, it will never happen at least not for me.  My Gosh!

This is Diana and Bill the founders of the store above.  It gets better though:

translated Hippocrates in his spare time

Yep, in his spare time!  Wow!  The Atlas Obscura article is a well-written piece on how the town came to have all these bookstores.  I recommend it to my readers as I myself enjoyed it very much!

Displaying Books Backwards

Books Backward
Jessica & Milo

My four-year-old daughter often repeats this mantra at the table during dinner,

“I don’t like that.”

She exactly captures my feelings about this newish trend to display books backward. Two things about the image above (you can click on it to see an article from Apartment Therapy on this new trend), first how can you tell which books are in there?  Second, these are in a fireplace, my goodness, have some respect people!

I mean there is one level of disrespecting books, e.g. dogearing, and then there is this next level hatred of books we see here.  It’s a big deal too this has been going on for at least a year and its a trend.  What has happened to my book lovers, you can’t think this is okay?!

Books Backward Bookshelf
The Kissing Booth Blog

I will admit, it looks nice, okay it does, but it still doesn’t make sense.  Why hide the books like this.  How can you admire the book spine art?  How can you find the next book you want to read or re-read? On Neatorama, they did an article and a poll:

Displaying Books Backwards Poll
Displaying Books Backwards Poll

And yes my vote was with the 643 votes saying it is an abomination.  What are your thoughts?  Am I off my rocker?  Or are you with me?  Brothers and sisters, stand strong, we can fight this awful trend!

2017 in Review

My daily profession is as an analyst, so I’m really into numbers.  This is going to be a very number-heavy post.  First, I should mention that without my reading log it would take me forever to put this post together.  The reading log helps in a lot of ways.  It helps me understand what kind of books I’m reading and why.  If I am diverse in my reading or not.  Links to my reading list are on the left side of the site.  I’ve had a reading log since 2015.  Let’s dig in.

Something that may not be that important to everyone, but is important to me is how much I spent on the books that I read this year.  This isn’t how much I spent on books this year, but how much I spent on the books read this year, an important distinction. The total costs of the books I read in 2017 are $486.36.  This is how much it would cost (MSRP) to grab the same book in the same format from Amazon.  However, I spent $0 on my 2017 books read. I get a lot of my books from the library, which is a big way that I keep the costs of books down.  43% of the books I read in 2017 came from the library, the single largest source of the books I read.  Library savings alone was $295.50.

2017 Books Source
2017 Books Source

Another very important but small number is the total number of books that I read this year.  That number is much smaller than I wanted it to be this year, only 37.  Other numbers that I would consider a miss was on the diversity side of things.  Only 24% of the books I read were written by female authors. 

Author Gender
Author Gender

I most frequently read on my kindle.  This is how many of my friends gift me books.  46% of my reading was done on a kindle.

Binding
Binding

Audiobooks were close behind.  I listened to 5,313 minutes of audiobooks or 89 hours, or 3.7 days. I count pages on kindle as actual pages to make these next numbers easier.  I read 7,018 pages in 2017.  The average book length was 242 pages.  The shortest book I read was 36 pages, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.  The longest was When Paris Went Dark at 480 pages.

5 Stars
5 Stars

And now the part you have all been waiting for.  Here is the full list of all the books I thought worthy of a 5-star rating.  Out of 37 books only 11, 30% reached this coveted placement.  I’m linking to the review for each of the books below so you can learn all about them before diving in.

About Video Creation

I did it!  I finally did it.  Last night I watched a video from Peter Likes Books.  In the video, Peter convinced me to just jump in.  The video is shaky and you can see me glancing at my notes.  It is also heavily edited which I know will come across as you watch it.  I have a tripod and a good DLSR that does video, but I didn’t use it.  On the next video, I will try to use that setup, especially if I will just be standing there talking to the camera.

For this video, I used an iPhone 7 Plus.  It’s shaky because I’m holding it myself the whole time.  While I do have a Kindle Oasis unboxing out there on youtube, it is not on my Jason Reads channel, which I did research to figure out how to start today.  Recording the video only took about 5 minutes.  I did write up some notes before I started.  This may have backfired as I kept looking down at them.  It probably took me about 30 minutes to edit the video.

If you have tips for me to implement for my next video please leave them in the comments below.  I will for sure be using a tripod if the next video permits.  That should help a lot.  If you liked the video please subscribe and give it a thumbs up!

Here is Peter’s video which convinced me to just do it!  Thanks, Peter!  You’ve got a new subscriber!