January Reads and Other News!
What did Bram read in January?
Giants by John Stauffer
A fantastic dual biography of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln and how their distinct lives collapsed into each other as they propelled through the mid-1800s of the United States.
The author makes the point that what really elevated both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass was the same thing: an innate desire to study and improve oneself, to become self-made men.
Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille
I picked up this book because I was curious if it was depraved, as the online reviews suggested that it was.
It was pretty depraved, but what was most horrific about the book wasn't the violent sex acts—it was the world in which they lived that allowed for those acts and were complicit to the uninhibited actions of the main characters.
Arifueta: From Commonplace to World's Strongest (Vol 2)
I was disappointed by this book. I liked the first volume because it talked about the development of the main character and how he became strong from being weak by eating, basically. But this book was just not at all interesting. He was already too powerful, and the flatter parts of his character really shone through as opposed to the world.
In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki
As technology and globalization both maximize and minimize the space of design, this is a book about how we embed ourselves with artificial technologies that remove the natural aesthetic beauty from our lives. It's kind of a precursor to minimalism from a bit of a cynical, pessimistic perspective.
Set in the context of Western technology being introduced into Japan and the author's disdain for what was lost.
The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
Now that a few weeks have passed since I finished The Prince of Tides, I can say that I didn't really enjoy it. It was a long book about a very broken family from the South, set both in the South in the past and New York City in the present. I'm always a big fan of reading books about New York City, but this one was just kind of a miss for me. There were some moments that I enjoyed, but overall it felt kind of meh.
The Great Bridge by David McCullough
A nearly day-by-day detailing of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. I've been fascinated recently by the tales and stories of engineers that aren't told (or appreciated at least) in my modern world that's motivated by entertainment and political celebrity than the technologies and the culture of the people who build them.
I appreciated the work that Washington Roebling (god tier work ethic) and his wife Emily Roebling put into the Brooklyn Bridge, both as a beautiful artifact of architecture that one gets to see every day as they cross to or from Brooklyn on the train, but also as a testament to all of the different kinds of technological developments that were happening during the Gilded Age on the backdrop of corruption from Tammany Hall actively stealing from New York's population, and underpaying and not paying attention to the health of employees because they were immigrants and they knew they could get away with it.
Other News
- I released my first app on the App Store, BookTalk. It's a reading companion app for iOS that lets you capture thoughts, quotes, and insights as you read — using your voice, camera, or keyboard. You can download it for your iPhone here!
- I've been in what can only be described as a manic state of software development. Thanks to the launch of tools like Codex, XCode 26.3 and Claude Blocker, my development speed has just increased exponentially. So much so that the limiter has almost caught up with the amount of ideas that my brain pumps out around software. I don't know when or if this will end, but I'm having fun and enjoying the ride while it lasts.
