2024 Summer Reading

It has been a crazy summer here at the Read house. It has been full of summer camps, driving kids all over the place, and trying to get some work done here and there. Here’s some of what I’ve been reading.

Book Research

My book research and writing is full steam ahead right now. Recently I’ve been listening to a lot of oral histories and working through the first complete draft of the book incorporating what I’ve found since writing the first few sections.

• Transpacific Revolutionaries by Matthew D. Rothwell: An interesting little volume on Maoism’s impact on revolutionary movements throughout Latin America. I focused on the introductory chapter and the chapter on Peru since that is my focus. I may revisit it in the future to do a compare and contrast on between Shining Path and other movements that did not break out into the open to the same degree.
• How Difficult it is to be God by Carlos Iván Degregori: Degregori has been a key figure to understanding the world that Shining Path came from. Degregori came from the same academic world where the senderistas got start and walked in a lot of the same circles as revolutionary movements of the 1970s and ’80s. He later helped lead Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
• With Masses & Arms by Miguel La Serna: A very readable history of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), Peru’s other revolutionary guerrilla movement from the 1980s and 1990s.

Links

You’ll notice that a lot of the following links are a year old. I’ve recently used Safari’s Add to Dock feature on my Mac to create a web app for Readwise’s Reader. Reader is a great app, and I’ve especially enjoyed reading it, along with ebooks, on my Boox Palma recently. However, my backlog goes back a year. Luckily, sometime recently Readwise has added their Listen feature to read articles to you out loud to their web app. So I’ve been making my way through me queue Oldest First, listening to them as I’m designing at my desk. It has been a delight to listen to things I saved a long time ago that have proven to be evergreen. So for a little while, in these posts, I’ll probably be posting some older stuff.

• Redesigning Cormac McCarthy’s Brutal ‘Blood Meridian’ by Bobby Aaron Solomon: I love process posts like this. The result is just beautiful. If only all book covers were this lovingly designed. Bobby’s entire site is beautiful. I love the well considered touches of how his image gallery opens.
• A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis by Lin Yangchen: A post about finding reasons to use the lovely Fell typefaces. I’ve used these for personal projects in the past and would love to use them again.
• Martina Plantijn design information by Kris Sowersby from Klim Type Foundry: What a beautiful update. You’ll never get me to not love a behind the scenes peak at type design.
• Personal Machines and Portable Worlds by Christopher Butler: Some compelling thoughts on how to use technology deliberately and keep them from taking over your life in ways that you regret.
• Type Revival for Film & TV by Leah Spencer over at Alphabettes: What a lovely peak into the world of type revival for film and TV. Did you know there was a job to make sure the typography of our entertainment is period appropriate? Now you do.
• A visit to the one-man computer factory by David Pierce: I’ve dreamed of something like this before and called them Appliance Computers and I think it is an extremely interesting approach to making computing hardware that is tailored to an individual’s needs.