{ "_": "Authored prose. {{token}} or {{dotted.path|filter}} is filled from summary.json at runtime (filters: num, words, Words, month, year, day, pct). No hard-coded numbers. Strings may contain . Arrays become paragraphs. shortcomings.data and shortcomings.reader are rendered from stats.json by the page, not from here.", "hero": { "kicker": "{{firstRead|month}} – {{lastRead|month}}", "unit": "books, read to the last page", "lede": "{{span|Words}} years of one reader’s life, pieced together from a Goodreads shelf and two Kindle clipping files: {{highlights|num}} passages marked, {{unfinished|num}} books begun and set aside, and one clock that ran backwards." }, "highlights": { "lede": [ "Every passage this reader ever marked on a Kindle sits on the shelf below: {{highlights|num}} of them, across {{totals.booksWithHighlights|num}} books, from the first page of each book at the top to the last. Choose any spine to read what was marked there, beside the book it came from, or search for a word to see where it lights up across the years, then read every match as a list, book by book." ] }, "pace": { "intro": [ "Most years bring a book every fortnight or so: the median year holds {{pace.booksPerYearMedian|words}} finished books and about {{pace.pagesPerYearMedian|num}} pages. Then came {{peaks.year.year}}, with {{peaks.year.finished|num}} books, more than twice the usual rate. Its busiest month, {{peaks.month.month|month}}, alone produced {{peaks.month.finished|words}}." ], "books-per-year": "{{peaks.year.year}} towers over every other year. The empty years from 2013 to 2015 are a gap in the record, and not necessarily in the reading: dozens of books were added to Goodreads later without a date.", "lifecycles": "Books rarely travel alone. Most books are finished within a fortnight of the first highlight, but several are usually open at once, and a few stay open for years." }, "habit": { "intro": [ "Every highlight carries a timestamp, and the time of day is exact even where the date is not. Together they show when, in a day and in a year, this reader reaches for a book." ], "calendar": "The longest unbroken run of highlighting lasted {{streaks.longestDaily.days|words}} days, from {{streaks.longestDaily.start|day}} to {{streaks.longestDaily.end|day}}, in the first weeks of the 2020 lockdowns. Across the record, {{streaks.activeWeekShare|pct}} of weeks contain at least one highlight.", "reading-clock": "This reader reads in the morning. {{chronotype.peakHour}} o’clock is the busiest hour, with {{chronotype.peakHourHighlights|num}} highlights, and {{chronotype.morningShare|pct}} of all morning-or-evening highlights fall before noon. The week barely changes it: on weekends {{chronotype.weekendMorningShare|pct}} of those highlights still fall before noon, against {{chronotype.weekdayMorningShare|pct}} on weekdays." }, "taste": { "intro": [ "What gets chosen, how it gets judged, and which writers are trusted with a second book." ], "rating-dist": "No book on the shelf has ever received one or two stars. The average is {{ratings.mean}}, and {{ratings.fiveStarShare|pct}} of books earn five. That says more about how books are chosen, and quietly quit, than about how they are judged. The margins discriminate where the stars do not: five-star books are marked up {{engagement.fiveStarVsRest}}× as heavily as the rest. Love shows in the margins before it shows in the rating.", "time-travel": "The shelf mixes the newly published with the long established: novels from the last few years sit beside Dostoevsky and a thousand-year-old Arabian Nights.", "topic-mix": "{{favouriteTopics.0.label}} is the backbone, with {{favouriteTopics.0.finished|num}} books finished in all (the panels show only the dated ones). Around it, the nonfiction drifts year by year between science, psychology, economics and philosophy.", "top-authors": "{{topAuthors.0.author}} has been trusted most often ({{topAuthors.0.count|words}} books), all from the undated early shelf, alongside Rowling. The dated years return instead to Taleb, Diamond and Mukherjee: writers of big, argumentative ideas.", "languages": "{{totals.malayalam|Words}} books are in Malayalam, and {{totals.translated|num}} are translations, from Japanese, Russian and Norwegian among others. Even so, the reading is mostly in English." }, "unfinished": { "intro": [ "Not every book is finished. Of the books begun on a Kindle, {{funnel.completionRate|pct}} reach a Goodreads shelf. The rest were abandoned, or are only resting. The difference is inferred from how the reading stopped, and every verdict shows its reasons." ], "funnel": "{{totals.abandoned|Words}} books were abandoned and {{totals.deferred|words}} deferred. Some of the deferred are still open; others are anthologies and essay collections, read in visits rather than straight through.", "abandonment": "Quitting happens early. {{funnel.bounced|Words}} books were dropped within the opening pages, and the median abandoned book stopped at page {{funnel.medianPageAbandoned}}. Self-help loses the most readers, followed by religion and philosophy." }, "margins": { "intro": [ "A highlight is a small act of agreement, or surprise, or recognition. {{highlights|num}} of them, taken together, sketch a mind at work. The most heavily marked book is {{peaks.mostHighlighted.0.title}}, with {{peaks.mostHighlighted.0.highlights|num}} highlights. The typical highlight is a single sentence of about {{highlightWords.median|num}} words; one in ten runs past {{highlightWords.p90|num}}, and the longest is {{highlightWords.max|num}}." ], "highlight-position": "Attention fades as a book goes on. In novels, {{attention.fictionFirstThirdShare|pct}} of highlights fall in the first three-tenths of the book and only {{attention.fictionLastThirdShare|pct}} in the last three-tenths.", "era-words": "Each era has its own vocabulary. These are the words most distinctive to the highlights of each two-year period, compared with every other period.", "highlight-wall": "All {{highlights|num}} highlights at once. Broad spines thick with ticks are the books argued with most closely; half-filled ones are the books set aside. A passage keeps its link, so one worth sending can be sent." }, "reader": { "intro": [ "A portrait drawn only from behaviour: what was read, how, and when. It is an interpretation, offered with its evidence, and not an assessment." ], "summary": [ "This is a generalist with a novelist’s spine. Literary fiction is the one constant, from Murakami and Ishiguro to Mantel and Fosse, and around it the nonfiction wanders: Becker on death, Ellul on technique, Sapolsky on behaviour, Taleb on chance. The shelf rewards ideas over instructions. The most-marked books are arguments about how the world works, not manuals for working in it.", "Three patterns define the reader. They read in the morning, and the habit holds on every day of the week. They finish what they choose: {{funnel.completionRate|pct}} of books begun on the Kindle make it to the shelf, and when a book is quit it is usually quit fast, by page {{funnel.medianPageAbandoned}}. And they collect rather than converse: {{totals.highlights|num}} highlights, but only {{totals.notes|words}} notes in the margin.", "Three surprises. The great reading year was {{peaks.year.year}}, when {{peaks.year.finished|num}} books were finished and the daily streak ran for {{streaks.longestDaily.days|words}} days. The ratings barely discriminate, but the margins do: no book scores below three stars, yet five-star books get {{engagement.fiveStarVsRest}}× the highlights. And the shelf leans {{canon.region.nonWesternShare|pct}} non-Western and {{canon.gender.womenShare|pct}} women. That is narrower than its curiosity suggests, though the Malayalam shelf and the translations push against it.", "If this reader were a book, it would be a well-thumbed commonplace book: crowded with other people’s sentences, carefully kept, and waiting for its owner to argue back." ], "journey": { "_": "Editorial. Each era's name, thesis, note, books and passage; {{tokens}} are filled from that era in stats.json journey.eras (no typed numbers). books are keys in books.json, finished or marked in that era. passage is a verbatim highlight, found by book key and Kindle location (#hl//@). Each thread has one step per era, in era order: [] for no step, then the book shown, then any others (Table view only). npm run check fails on any reference that does not resolve.", "caption": "Era names and the choice of books and passages are editorial; every number is computed from the data. Eras are the same two-year spans as ‘Words of each era’.", "eras": [ { "era": "2016–17", "name": "The mind’s machinery", "thesis": "Kahneman, Csikszentmihalyi, Frankl: {{topics.psychology.highlightShare|pct}} of the passages are about the mind.", "note": "Highlights begin in {{firstHighlight|month}}; the margins are thin.", "books": ["thinking-fast-and-slow", "flow", "man-s-search-for-meaning"], "passage": { "book": "flow", "loc": 4181, "text": "Purpose, resolution, and harmony unify life and give it meaning by transforming it into a seamless flow experience." } }, { "era": "2018–19", "name": "Systems and shocks", "thesis": "Taleb arrives, and the reading turns to how large systems behave, and how they break.", "books": ["black-swan", "antifragile", "behave"], "passage": { "book": "antifragile", "loc": 413, "text": "I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time." } }, { "era": "2020–21", "name": "The lockdown library", "thesis": "The busiest stretch on record: {{peakYear.finished|num}} books in {{peakYear.year}} alone.", "note": "No clippings survive from {{clippingGaps.0.from|month}} to {{clippingGaps.0.to|month}}.", "books": ["how-we-die", "gulag-archipelago", "zorba-the-greek"], "passage": { "book": "zorba-the-greek", "loc": 215, "text": "Happy is the man, I thought, who, before dying, has the good fortune to sail the Aegean Sea." } }, { "era": "2022–23", "name": "Institutions and cells", "thesis": "The heaviest marking of all. Ellul’s The Technological Society alone holds {{mostMarked.0.highlights|num}} passages.", "books": ["technological-society", "song-of-the-cell", "why-nations-fail"], "passage": { "book": "technological-society", "loc": 76, "text": "It is a civilization committed to the quest for continually improved means to carelessly examined ends." } }, { "era": "2024–26", "name": "The inward turn", "thesis": "{{topics.literary.finishedShare|pct}} of the books finished are literary fiction, and the margins turn to death, faith and the self.", "books": ["denial-of-death", "gilead", "steppenwolf"], "passage": { "book": "steppenwolf", "loc": 3006, "text": "You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live." } } ], "threads": [ { "name": "Technology, from promise to suspicion", "steps": [["second-machine-age", "blockchain-revolution"], ["life-3-0", "homo-deus"], ["superintelligence"], ["technological-society"], []] }, { "name": "Facing death", "steps": [["man-s-search-for-meaning", "when-breath-becomes-air"], [], ["how-we-die"], ["mirror-the-light"], ["denial-of-death"]] }, { "name": "Living with chance", "steps": [[], ["black-swan", "antifragile"], ["skin-in-the-game"], ["fooled-by-randomness"], []] }, { "name": "From “no gods” to faith as experience", "steps": [["sapiens"], [], [], [], ["varieties-of-religious-experience-by-william-james"]] } ] }, "profile": "Each trait is scored from 0 to 100 from the behaviour signals listed under it. The strongest readings are generous rating ({{profile.4.score}}) and highlighting without annotating ({{profile.5.score}}, at the collector end). Follow-through ({{profile.1.score}}) and appetite for demanding books ({{profile.2.score}}) also score high.", "caveats": [ "Read this as a sketch, not a measurement. It describes one reader, and the signals were chosen by hand and have never been validated against a psychological instrument. Choosing books already filters what can be seen: generous ratings partly mean the bad books were quit before they could be rated. Paper books, audiobooks and the Malayalam print shelf leave no highlights, so every highlight-based trait describes the Kindle reader only. Nothing here is a clinical or sensitive inference, and every score shows its working." ] }, "shortcomings": { "intro": [ "Honest accounts include their limits. These are the places where the data is thin, the method is a guess, or the reader is less than ideal." ] }, "forensics": { "intro": [ "The brief said the Kindle’s dates went wrong around {{firmware.briefSaid}}. The log says otherwise. The last trustworthy timestamp is {{firmware.onset|day}}; after that, the device clock fell back to an old date {{firmware.resets|words}} times, probably each time it lost power. The times of day stayed true; the dates did not. This appendix shows how the damage was found and repaired." ], "method": [ "The clippings file is written in reading order, so its order is the true order even when its dates are not. Wherever the stamped date jumps backwards, a new segment begins. Each segment is then shifted by a whole number of days, so the time of day is untouched. The shift is set so that the last highlight of each book lands on its Goodreads finish date.", "The method checks itself. Each anchor book is held out in turn and its finish date predicted from the others. The median miss is {{firmware.looMedianDays}} days and the worst is {{firmware.looMaxDays|words}}. The final segment has no finished books to anchor it, so its dates are bounded rather than pinned. In all, {{firmware.entriesAffected|num}} log entries were repaired." ], "redating": "Each tooth of the sawtooth is one power loss. Stamped dates fall back to mid-2021 and then climb again; the repaired dates (in rubric) run in a single unbroken line." }, "colophon": { "body": [ "Built from a Goodreads library export and two Kindle My Clippings files, the last exported on {{exportDate|day}}. Covers come from Open Library and Wikipedia; books without one get a cloth binding of their own. Display type is Instrument Serif; body type is the serif your device already has. Charts are drawn by hand in SVG. No tracking, no cookies." ] }, "pullquotes": { "pace": { "text": "Tell me what you value and I might believe you, but show me your calendar and your bank statement, and I’ll show you what you really value.", "book": "stealing-fire", "title": "Stealing Fire", "author": "Steven Kotler & Jamie Wheal (quoting Peter Drucker)" }, "unfinished": { "text": "Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.", "book": "black-swan", "title": "The Black Swan", "author": "Nassim Nicholas Taleb" }, "forensics": { "text": "Antagonism on both sides, the sense of some old wound, the details forgotten but the injury not.", "book": "promise", "title": "The Promise", "author": "Damon Galgut" } } }