2022-01-01: 2021 Book Reading in Review
In 2021, I finished and reviewed 43 books, yet another (tiny) increase
over 2020 and once again the best year for reading since 2012 (which was
the last time I averaged 5 books a month). The year got off to a good
reading start and closed strong, but once again had sags in the spring and
summer when I got behind on reviews and fell out of the habit of reading
daily. This year, at least, the end-of-year catch-up was less dramatic;
all but two of the books I reviewed in December were finished in December.
The best books I read this year were Naomi Novik's magic boarding school
fantasies A Deadly
Education and The
Last Graduate, which I rated a 9 and a 10 respectively. Memorable
characters, some great world-building, truly exceptional characterization
of a mother/daughter relationship, adroit avoidance of genre pitfalls, and
two of my favorite fictional tropes: for me, this series has it all. The
third and concluding book of that series is my most anticipated book of
2022.
My large reviewing project of this year was a complete re-read of
C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, starting with my
1000th published review.
As you can see, I have a lot of opinions about those books; they were a
huge part of my childhood, and I'd been talking about writing those
reviews for years. They were the longest reviews I've published and,
unusually for me, full-spoiler reviews, and they took up a lot of my
reviewing energy for the year. Of the seven books in the series, I was
pleased to see that The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and
The Magician's
Nephew held up and are still very much worth reading. The Voyage
of the Dawn Treader, in particular, is an exceptional sense-of-wonder
fantasy novel with a story structure that remains rare.
The best non-fiction book I read in 2021 is a prosaic choice that's only
of specialist interest, but JavaScript: The Definitive Guide is precisely the type of
programming language manual that I look for when learning a new language.
It taught me what I was hoping to learn when I picked it up.
Honorable mentions are a crowded field this year; I read a lot of books
that were good but not great. Worth calling out are Arkady Martine's
A Desolation Called
Peace (sequel to the excellent
A Memory Called
Empire), if for nothing else than Three Seagrass; Micaiah Johnson's
impressive debut The
Space Between Worlds; and Becky Chambers's last Wayfarer novel,
The Galaxy, and the
Ground Within. On the non-fiction side, Allie Brosh's
Solutions and Other
Problems is a much harder and sadder book than the exceptional
Hyperbole and a
Half, but it was still very much worth reading.
This was another year spent reading mostly recently-published books,
without much backfill of either award winners or my existing library. In
2022, I hope to balance keeping up with new books of interest with
returning to series I left unfinished, award lists I left only partly
explored, and books I snapped up in earlier years and then never got
around to.
The full analysis includes some
additional personal reading statistics, probably only of interest to me.
2022-01-15: DocKnot 6.01
This release of my static site generator and software release manager
finishes incorporating the last piece of my old release script that I was
still using: copying a new software release into a software distribution
archive tree, updating symlinks, updating the version database used to
generate my web pages, and archiving the old version.
I also added a new docknot update-spin command that updates an
input tree for the spin static site generator, fixing any deprecations or
changes in the input format. Currently, all this does is convert the
old-style *.rpod pointer files to new-style *.spin pointers.
This release also has a few other minor bug fixes, including for an
embarrassing bug that required docknot spin be run from a package
source tree because it tried to load per-package metadata (even though it
doesn't use that data).
You can get the latest release from CPAN or from the
DocKnot distribution page.
2022-01-17: DocKnot 7.00
The recent 6.01 release of my static web site generator was kind of a
buggy mess, which uncovered a bunch of holes in my test suite and
immediately turned up problems when I tried to use it to rebuild my actual
web site. Most of the problems were Unicode-related; this release
hopefully sorts out Unicode properly and handles it consistently.
Other bugs fixed include processing of old-style pointers in a spin input
tree, several rather obvious bugs in the new docknot release
command, and a few long-standing issues with docknot dist that
should make its results more consistent and reliable.
I also got on a roll and finished the Path::Tiny transition in DocKnot, so
now (nearly) all paths are internally represented as Path::Tiny objects.
This meant changing some APIs, hence the version bump to 7.00.
For anyone who still does a lot of Perl, I highly recommend the
Path::Tiny module. If you
also write Python, you will be reminded (in a good way) of Python's
pathlib module,
which I now use whenever possible.
You can get the latest version of DocKnot from
CPAN or from its
distribution page.
2022-01-19: DocKnot 7.01
Continuing to flush out bugs in the recent changes to my static web site
generator.
I had missed some Unicode implications for how output from external
programs was handled, and also missed Unicode decoding of the output from
Pod::Thread, since Pod::Simple always encodes its output even if that
output is to a scalar. I also missed an implication for how symlinks were
handled in Path::Iterator::Rule, causing docknot spin to fail to
copy files into the output tree that were symlinks in the input tree.
Both of those bugs are fixed in this release.
I also fixed a minor output issue from the \size command, which was using
SI units when it meant IEC units.
You can get the latest release from
CPAN or from the
DocKnot distribution page.
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