My first story has been published. It is a historical fantasy set in Colonial Boston during the Golden Age of Pirates. Rachel is an orphan and a thief. She’s pressed into the service by the Governor of Massachusetts to spy on the pirate Anne Bonny. There are sea songs, magic knives, and a Shanty Man.
Read it free, here: https://intrepidusink.com/the-shanty-man/
Well, this is a bit late. I was going to write this the week after Christmas, but events (good ones!) intervened.
Mostly for myself, I wanted to summarize my 2023 reading. As you probably know, I make a social reading app called Bookship, and I use it to track my solo reading as well as my group / book club reading.
I’m also writing a book. It’s medieval historical fiction, set during the time of Richard the Lionheart. You can follow along on my Substack, where I’m writing specifically about the history of the period:
Richard the Lionheart – A Medieval Newsletter | Mark Watkins | Substack
An exploration of Richard the Lionheart’s world and era, from his childhood in France to the Crusades in the Holy Land. Click to read Richard the Lionheart – A Medieval Newsletter, a Substack publication. Launched 2 years ago.
As you might imagine, I read a lot of medieval books this year, both history and historical fiction. A lot of those books require deep focus and aren’t necessarily ‘easy reads’. So, I also did a lot of lighter reading, as that was what I had the energy for. Surprisingly, even modern novels found a way to make pointers to what I’m working on. Here’s the fun stuff:
I finally got around to reading Dune Messiah, the sequel to Dune. It is nowhere near as long as Dune but it is a fun read. But I don’t think it has the power of Dune. (<Checks notes> Apparently I read this book in 2009 but I literally had no memory of that. Ruh-rho). I re-read Count Zero, perhaps my favorite of William Gibson’s cyberpunk/ sci fi novels. I also re-read Declare, by Tim Powers, another of one of my favorite novels, an espionage / supernatural combo. Seriously. I seem to have done a lot of re-reading last year.
In books I had NOT read before :), I read many mysteries, including Knots & Crosses by Ian Rankin, a re-read of The Blackhouse, Peter May’s unbelievably good book set on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland, and his Extraordinary People. This last book, though a modern mystery, popped up some fascinating medieval details that dovetailed with my work-in-progress book. Two Nights in Lisbon by Chris Pavone was a quick read, enjoyable but leaving no lasting impression. Knots & Crosses was my first Ian Rankin book and it was good quick fun.
https://www.thehawaiiproject.com/book/The-Transmigration-of-Bodies–by–Yuri-Herrera–191405
Yuri Herrera’s The Transmigration of Bodies is a wonderful, fun, short, hallucinogenic masterpiece of a novel of a pandemic. Short, fantastic.
I also managed a re-read of The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien. This time, my reading was forensic – I was trying to understand the nature of the power of his writing. That is probably a separate post someday. In a similar vein, and for a similar reason, I re-read Patricia McKillip’s Harpist in the Wind trilogy: Harpist in the Wind, The Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia A. McKillip, and Heir of Sea and Fire. These books are masterpieces. If you have not read them, they are worth your consideration.
The Whispering Muse by Sjón and The Last Song of Orpheus by Robert Silverberg are fun, myth-driven works. The Sjón book, in particular, is short and easily digested.
Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes, is a devastating novel of Vietnam. It’s also very hefty. It is a commitment, but it’s worth it if you want a real sense of what the Vietnam War was like.
I’m in a book club. :). We read many books widely praised in the press and the book universe, and frankly, many felt very average to me. I think my reading tastes have (unsurprisingly perhaps) diverged from what the New York Times, the London Review, and BookTok all think are great books. Sorry, The Candy House by Jennifer Egan, I could not even finish you. Nuclear Family by Joseph Han was a bit better, and at least it was grounded in Hawaii where I live, but I struggled with that as well. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka was uneven but very good in spots, and as I’ve been to Sri Lanka I found it a bit easier to maintain reading momentum.
The thing I love about book club, besides the people themselves, is that it gets me reading books I would not otherwise read. See No Stranger by Valarie Kaur was touching, but I had trouble sustaining attention; the message of the book was solid but it often felt repetitive. We read Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, probably the most controversial book published in many years. I have mixed feelings about it. I found it (as an adult) a touching memoir of someone with a lot of pain in their life, who struggled with being different. But I also totally get why conservative school districts did not want it in their schools (grade school libraries? really?). I’m glad I read it, at least I know what all the fuss is about.
Two standouts for me from book club were Hawaiki Rising by Sam Low, which covered the Hawaiian Renaissance and the history of the Hōkūleʻa, and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which I had not read since high school.
As I’m writing a book and have never done it before, I’ve also been reading books about writing, mostly by authors I admire. On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner, The Art of Fiction by James Salter ( a writer I especially admire), Writing Tough Writing Tender by my friend Kelly Simmons, and Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin all gave me interesting perspectives of one sort or another.
Works in progress: I’m currently in various stages of reading The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene, Ironfire by David Ball, and a WWII book, The Thin Read Line by James Jones.
The bulk of my reading time this year has been medieval. Essex Dogs, by the well-known popular historian Dan Jones, is an earthy, grim take on the Hundred Years War. Company of Liars by Karen Maitland is a riff on the Canterbury Tales, with a cast of interesting characters and a lot of medieval backdrop. 1356 by Bernard Cornwell covers the Battle of Poitiers, also during the Hundred Years War.
In the general medieval history category, A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester is very famous. Tom Hanks says it is his favorite book. It made me crazy, it is so wrong about the medieval era. More on that here. Try Mortimer’s A Time Traveler’s Guide to the Medieval Era instead.
I read a number of contemporary histories of the Third Crusade, written during or shortly after the Crusade, many of the books I read not for the first time:
My constant companion this year was The History of the Holy War by Ambroise, translated by Maryanne Ailes. It was written by a French cleric/jongleur/minstrel, Ambroise, who was on campaign with Richard. Great fun. Well, not fun really, it’s pretty grim, but it is an amazing first-hand history of the Third Crusade. Also: The Itinerarium of Richard de Templo and The Annals of Roger de Hoveden, also both first-hand accounts of the Third Crusade (I produced eBook editions of these last two works that are available on Amazon, details here). And The Life of Saladin, by Baha al-Din, a compatriot of Saladin who was with him for much of his life.
The History of William Marshal by Nigel Bryant is a wonderful contemporary history of “England’s Greatest Knight”, William Marshal. It was written just after the Marshal died, and its discovery in 1861 (not that long ago) is something of a historical miracle.
In modern works of history, about Richard, I read:
Richard I by John Gillingham, The Troubadour’s Song by David Boyle, Richard The Lionheart by David Miller, and Richard the Lionheart by W. B. Bartlett. About Saladin: The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin by Jonathan Phillips and Saladin, by Geoffrey Hindley.
General histories of the Crusades I found particularly interesting: How to Plan a Crusade by Christopher Tyerman, a study of the logistics of getting tens of thousands of men across the ocean and supplied for war for many years. The Crusades Through Arab Eyes by Amin Maalouf provides a welcome balance to the Christian-centric histories we often read of the Crusades, and The Siege of Acre by John D. Hosler is an in-depth study of one of the most famous battles of the war.
I also found time to make an edition of the Arthurian Lays of Marie de France for Standard eBooks. The stories are good fun, particularly if you’re interested in Arthurian things. And they’re FREE!
Lastly, I read bits and pieces of Nicholson’s Women and the Crusades, King John by W. L. Warren, Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs by Adrienne Mayor, The Once and Future Sex by Janega, Crusaders by Dan Jones, and probably a dozen other books about various aspects of the Crusades.
Standouts: Brave New World. Hawaiki Rising. The History of the Holy War. Count Zero. The Transmigration of Bodies. Gender Queer. The Harpist trilogy. Declare. Matterhorn. All well worth your time if your tastes run that way.
Haven’t written here in awhile, been busy with Richard the Lionheart over on my medieval blog, here: https://medieval.substack.com. But I just finished reading Brave New World, the first time since high school, and thought I’d post a few thoughts.
As a dystopia, BNW provided plenty of food for thought. Drugs and sex and infinite distraction as the defining characteristics of how people are controlled. The echoes of today’s modern society are hard to miss. The presence of science as a driving force in society is pretty overpowering. The invention or Huxley’s near-invention of soma, helicopters, sex-hormone drugs, and other science seem ahead of their time.
The erasure of mother, father, family seem to lead to a well-behaved, polite society. Which is, on reflection, a bit odd, as the last 50 years or so would suggest the breakdown of the family seems to trend to the reverse. I suppose with enough soma everyone becomes well-behaved.
I found the intensive Shakespeare quotations and allusions interesting for a time, although it seemed a bit much by the end.
There is an old saw about civilized vs. savage people, that a savage man has a much easier time acting civilized, than a civilized man has in being savage. That might be from Tarzan, or perhaps Rousseau, or somewhere else, I can’t remember? Anyway, spoiler, that proves not to be the case here. And while I found John’s ending to be tragic, as an ending to a novel I wasn’t completely convinced. I could certainly imagine him remorseful; suicidal seems a stretch.
Perhaps it is because of my own preoccupations with the negative influence of media on our lives, and the dual and troubling issues of media censorship (left and right both!) and surveillance capitalism, I find 1984 a far more compelling and frightening novel, as a novel, than BNW, and a more disturbing dystopia. I think I am in the minority compared to most public review/criticism, which seems to favor BNW as the better book. But to my mind, BNF suffers from having little narrative tension throughout most of the book (nothing bad happens to anyone for nearly 3/4 of the book), a weirdly-shifting view of who the protagonist is, and an over-focus on society itself, rather than the characters being impacted. 1984 was grim and ominous from the beginning and I turned almost every page waiting for something evil to happen, and was often not disappointed. In contrast BNW felt more like an amusement park ride, a bit light-hearted even, until the last few pages. Interestingly, while 1984 focused quite a bit on the control of information, BNW did not focus on equivalents of the media much at all, except to mention that books were forbidden and history not taught.
Not to mention Huxley’s apparent fixation with the word “pneumatic”, which occurs no less than 15 times. 🙂 And the threat of getting sent to Iceland – I would take that punishment in a heartbeat!
Still I am glad I re-acquainted myself with it, had not read since high school. It’s good to be reminded not to drug ourselves, or let someone else do it to us!
By the way. There’s a TV show. Link.
Hot on the heels of being featured by Google (huzzah!), we’re excited to announce our new app TBR.
TBR is a fast, elegant and modern place to track your reading. The books you want to read (your TBR, To Be Read), the books you are reading, and the books you’ve read. You can also organize your books into custom lists of your own choosing.
Get inspiration by reading Book News from our 1000+ curated book news sources. TBR contains a Book News browser, essentially a curated collection of RSS feeds, with links back to the original sources. Bookship will identify books in each story and easily let you save them, remembering where you found the book.
Don’t worry, Bookship isn’t going anywhere. Bookship will always be our home for social reading.
But let’s face it, not all reading is social. And keeping track of all those books on your TBR is (for most people) a jumbled mess. A big spreadsheet. Books piled by the bed. Notes on your Phone. Samples locked away in your Kindle. Why not keep them all in one place? Searchable, sortable, book covers visible, accessible any time.
As an added benefit, get inspiration by reading Book News from our 1000+ curated book news sources, including news about the books you’re reading right now!
TBR is $4.99 (or your local equivalent), available for iOS (iPhone, iPad and Mac) and Android. Get it here:
If you are a Bookship user, once you have the app, you can sign in with your Bookship credentials and your books data will be shared and synced between the apps. Or use a new sign in, if you want to keep them separate.
There’s also a web/browser version you can use on any device with a browser: https://tbrapp.co.
Happy reading!
So, I’m working on my nearly-finished first release of my book tracking app, TBR.
Did I mention I had shoulder surgery back in January? I’ve been doing rehab exercises every day, three times a day, since January. It’s become something of a habit. But I keep reminders, because otherwise I get caught up in things and forget. I started with the simple iPhone todo list app, but awhile back I switched to the Not Boring Software’s Habits app. A game-like experience for forming habits, or as the founder Andy puts it, the World’s Most Satisfying Checkbox. And it kinda is…. animations, 3D models, and sounds. And it’s pretty. Just won one of Apple’s App Design Awards.
Face-palm. My app has no sound! (for that matter, neither does my existing app Bookship). Duh.
I’ve never done it before, so I start reading. In my head, my app is making bookish noises like a page turning, etc. As I read I learn that audio UX has similar design styles to visual design, and “Skeuomorphism” (things sound like / look like what they are), may not be the best approach for sound ux. And more importantly that sound design is another path to creating a compelling brand.
Just as there is a place for visual designers, who can create something beautiful and connective, the same is true for audio. There are firms that do nothing else, for example.
OK well I’m not ready to belly up to the bar and hire a composer, and my needs are pretty modest. So, I go digging for sound effects. Well. There’s a lot of them, and a lot of places to look. I poke around a bunch of sites (Freesound, SoundSnap, Mixkit, Artlist.io etc), talk to my son-in-law game developer, who recommends Pond5 and reminds me to make sure I get licenses for everything. “Free is free, but sometimes it’s worth paying”.
I poke around and prototype with 5 or so free sounds from different sources but realize they don’t hang together – individually good, but all different and kind of random, and the possibilities are overwhelming. I realize I need to take a step back and think about what I want.
What is this sound for? What am I trying to convey? What is my brand about? And then look for a package (a sound pack) of thematically consistent sounds.
Well, to me, books are about learning, and being transported; a means of adventure, and a place of peace and escape from all the noise out there. Youtube, Instagram, TikTok, Netflix, your job, etc. ad nauseam. I want something tranquil, restful, non-invasive, almost kind of Zen. Yeah, that’s it. Zen. I start building a soundboard, googling and listening, of some concepts that have the feel I might want.
Turns out Not Boring’s Habits used a composer named Thomas Williams. Mostly games, but some utility apps and even some short films. Here’s a soundtrack he made for a game, it’s actually nice to just listen to.
Nice. Since I’m thinking Zen, I start googling for Zen sound effects, and stumble upon Ableton, which is audio editing software, and reading their blog. I find this article. Mentions a Japanese composer, Sugai Ken, who does field recordings and integrates nature sounds into his music.
Yeah. A lot of natural sounds, pings and echos, things that could be at home in a quiet app about books. I take that as a vector and run with it.
After about a million listens to random chirps and squeaks and pings (my wife says, “What the hell are you doing over there?” :)), I stumble on a few things that feel promising.
After letting it sit for a day, seeing how the sounds feel after a lot of listens, and prototyping a bit, I feel like this one is the answer: Sound Ex Machina’s UI Sounds Musical. I found it on Artlist.io, when I go to buy it it looks like it’s $10 a month to subscribe. Fine. Go to subscribe, realize no, I need the premium version @ $15/month to get the rights. OK fine. Go again to purchase, get something that says, “Oh you want SFX?” That’s $20/month. Just enough annoyance and friction in the process to make me go looking elsewhere. I try to find their real website and see if I can buy it, it says “Down for Maintenance”. A few days later it still is. I wonder if they’ve gone under…anyway in the meantime I find a direct purchase on itch.io. Even better, the Artlist package only has ~30 sounds, but this “real” package has 300, and for about the same money. I go for it. At which point I learn that the sounds I bookmarked on Artlist have Artlist-specific names, so I have to go match up the ones I’ve chosen against the 300. No big deal, just realize, if you like a package of sounds, look for the original if you can – more sounds, better pricing, etc.
The other bit of advice all the blogs give is, don’t do too much; it gets overwhelming or irritating pretty quickly. I try to restrain myself to key actions and errors.
Anyway, after that it’s all downhill. Just integrating the code (I’m on Ionic, there’s a simple plugin for playing audio, which I use, and it’s all integrated in under a day). Oh. Don’t forget haptics too – vibrations, the “feel” of the app. I do that too. I don’t know if people will like all this or not, but the app just feels and sounds so much more real, more tactile, more professional.
Fingers crossed :).
Here’s a short sample of the sounds I’ve ended up using:
I hope you get a chance to check out the app, and our sounds. (Oh: bonus: the first sound you hear is a Ukelele, the native instrument of Hawaii where I live. Not a factor in my decision, just a happy accident.
Some background reading I found helpful as I was working on sounds:
And some sound resources, places to look for interesting sounds:
https://www.pond5.com
https://freesound.org/
https://www.soundsnap.com/
https://mixkit.co/free-sound-effects/
https://www.storyblocks.com/audio/sound-effects
https://www.artlist.io