Tag: BetterByDecember

A Book per Week

Once again I tracked my reading on betterbydecember.com. I completed 52 books in 2025 (see table below for the titles the dates I finished reading each book) which works out to a book per week. While not as many as in 2024, as Dogberry said in Much Ado About Nothing, “Comparisons are odorous”. Regardless, I quite enjoyed reading various each of the books.

1/6/2025The Goodbye Cat
1/24/2025Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder
1/31/2025Wind and Truth: Book Five of the Stormlight Archive (The Stormlight Archive, 5)
2/6/2025Red Country
2/12/2025The Human Division (Old Man’s War, 5)
2/17/2025The End of All Things (Old Man’s War, 6)
2/20/2025Bushido: Code of the Samurai: The Soul of Japan
2/22/2025Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome (The Lock In Series, 3)
2/25/2025Lock In: A Novel of the Near Future (Lock In Series Book 1)
3/1/2025Head On: A Novel of the Near Future (The Lock In Series, 2)
3/5/2025Collapsing Empire (The Interdependency)
3/9/2025Consuming Fire (The Interdependency)
3/13/2025Last Emperox (The Interdependency)
3/20/2025The Android’s Dream
3/21/2025The President’s Brain Is Missing
3/25/2025Fuzzy Nation
3/28/2025Agent to the Stars
3/30/2025The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien
4/4/2025Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008
4/13/2025The Seventh Function of Language: A Novel
4/24/2025Dragonsteel Prime
4/29/2025Half a King (Shattered Sea)
5/5/2025Half the World
5/15/2025The Door-to-Door Bookstore: A Novel
5/26/2025A Little Hatred (The Age of Madness, 1)
6/4/2025The Trouble with Peace (The Age of Madness, 2)
6/10/2025Half a War
6/18/2025The Wisdom of Crowds (The Age of Madness, 3)
7/19/2025A Day of Fallen Night (The Roots of Chaos)
8/3/2025Quantum Computing for Everyone
8/8/2025The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth, 1)
8/16/2025The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth, 2)
9/2/2025The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, 3)
9/6/2025Ultralight Backpackin’ Tips: 153 Amazing & Inexpensive Tips For Extremely Lightweight Camping
9/20/2025Isles of the Emberdark: A Cosmere Novel (Secret Projects)
9/25/2025Dragons of Autumn Twilight: The Dragonlance Chronicles
9/28/2025Dragons of Winter Night: The Dragonlance Chronicles
10/8/2025Dragons of Spring Dawning: The Dragonlance Chronicles
10/13/2025Black Company (Chronicles of The Black Company, 1)
10/18/2025Shadows Linger (Chronicle of the Black Company)
10/23/2025The White Rose (Chronicles of The Black Company, 3)
10/26/2025The Silver Spike: The Chronicles of the Black Company
10/31/2025Shadow Games: The Fourth Chronicles of the Black Company: First Book of the South
11/3/2025Dreams of Steel (The Fifth Chronicle of the Black Company)
11/8/2025Bleak Seasons: The Sixth Chronicle of the Black Company (GLITTERING STONE/GLEN COOK, BK 1)
11/15/2025She Is The Darkness: Book Two of Glittering Stone: A Novel of the Black Company (The Chronicles of The Black Company 8)
11/27/2025Water Sleeps: A Novel of the Black Company (The Chronicles of The Black Company Book 9)
12/8/2025Soldiers Live (The Chronicles of The Black Company Book 10)
12/21/2025Port of Shadows: A Novel of the Black Company
12/23/2025Pietr the Latvian (Inspector Maigret)
12/26/2025The Late Monsieur Gallet (Inspector Maigret)
12/27/2025Just Stab Me Now

As is my want, I like to consume in bulk read multiple books by the same author (often, but not always in a series). There were only ten books that I read in 2025 where I didn’t read another book by the same author. The table below shows a summary of the “multiple book” authors and the number of their books which I read. While Georges Simenon is at the bottom with only two books, expect to see over a dozen of his Inspector Maigret books on my 2026 list.

Author(s)
Number of Books
John Scalzi13
Glen Cook11
Joe Abercrombie7
Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman3
N. K. Jemisin3
Brandon Sanderson3
Georges Simenon2

Considering all the other things I have going on in life, I think averaging a book per week is pretty good and a cadence I hope to continue. 2026 is already off to a fantastic start in terms of reading and I hope to at least match the book per week again.

A Stroll Around Portland

The other weekend, my Wife and I wanted to go for a stroll around downtown Portland. Since we wanted to be down by the water, we decided to give the Classic Downtown Waterfront Loop Walk a try. This is a summary of our adventure:

  • Since I dislike driving downtown, we opted to take the Max.
  • The most convenient stop for us was Old Town/Chinatown MAX Station which put us at the second section of the route, but since it is a loop it doesn’t much matter where starting.
  • I’ve driven across the Steel Bridge at least once and ridden the Max over it numerous times, but this was my first time crossing it on foot.
  • The picture above is an AI-filtered selfie with the Steel Bridge in the background.
  • The weather was cold, but sunny and beautiful so we chose to not cross over the Hawthorne Bridge, but rather keep walking.
  • The OMSI provided brief respite where we were able to drink water and utilize the “all-user (gender-neutral) restroom” that is located in the hallway near the Kendall Planetarium.
  • We walked over the Tilikum Crossing Bridge. While crossing, we took another selfie with the Marquam Bridge in the background. The image below is an AI-filtered remix.
  • We checked out Poet’s Beach, but were not overly impressed.
  • As we headed north along the west bank of of the Willamette River, we started encountering various people headed to a protest.
  • A family with young kids holding signs with offensive language offered us some of their extra signs. We politely declined.
  • In lieu of participating in the protest, we walked over to Mother’s Bistro and ate a fantastic brunch. I had the Wild Salmon Hash.
  • In a highly unusual display of judicious consumption and showing extraordinary restraint, I did not get a Fresh-Baked Pecan Cinnamon Roll.
  • Without waddling too much, we made our way back to the Old Town/Chinatown MAX Station, caught a train, and made it back in time to warm down before heading to the school district Honor Band concert.

This year my Wife and I made a goal to go on more little adventures. This counts and I’m we’re tracking it on Better by December.

AI-filtered remix of The Girl Child in “concert black” after the concert

2023: Reading Like It’s 1986

Early in elementary school I was not much of a reader. I could read fine, but wasn’t really motivated to read a lot on my own. That changed for me when the family moved [back] to Belgium and I started fifth grade with Ms. Pamay.

Wendy Pamay is one of my favorite teachers of all time. She introduced me to Shakespeare as our class worked on “The Scottish Play”. We sewed frogs. We sewed books. We even sewed frog books. But the thing I remember most about fifth grade was reading. Every week we would fill out a 3×5 card for each book that we had read–along with basic bibliographic information we would also write a few sentences giving a summary of the book. Also, to earn an “A” we were supposed to read 350 pages per week. At first it was hard for me, but by the second half of the school year I was exceeding and sometimes doubling that amount. I had become a reader.

Despite learning to love reading, I didn’t enjoy filling out the 3×5 cards and recording what I read. So once fifth grade ended, I continued being an avid reader, but typically didn’t keep track of what I read beyond my memory.

After I created Better by December I decided that along with tracking things like pushups and situps, that I would also track the books I read. And so, here are the 48 books which I read in 2023 (and the date I finished reading each book):

01/07/23The Priory of the Orange Tree
01/12/23Jade City
01/24/23Jade War
02/02/23The Golden Apples of the Sun
02/13/23Jade Legacy
02/15/23The Reflection on Mount Vitaki
02/19/23The Dream Thief
02/20/23Clockwork Princess
02/26/23The Perfect Perfume and Other Tales
03/03/23Card Sharp Silver
03/09/23Prohibition Orcs
03/12/23Clockwork Heart
04/01/23War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches
04/08/23Shadow Warrior: The CIA Hero of a Hundred Unknown Battles
04/13/23Steampunks and Other Heavy Hitters
04/15/23Fiction River Presents: Sorcery & Steam
05/29/23A Kamigata Anthology: Literature from Japan’s Metropolitan Centers, 1600–1750
06/03/23The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England (Secret Projects 2)
06/08/23Tress of the Emerald Sea: A Cosmere Novel (Secret Projects 1)
06/19/23The Dark Forest
06/21/23Milky Way Railroad
06/28/23A Shameful Life
07/01/23Doomsday Match (The Dresden Codex Book 1)
07/04/23Yumi and the Nightmare Painter: A Cosmere Novel (Secret Projects Book 3)
07/21/23Death’s End
07/24/23The Funny Business
07/27/23Skeleton in the Closet: A Dragon Business Adventure
07/30/23Eat, Drink, and Be Wary: Satisfying Stories with a Delicious Twist
08/04/23The Nyte Patrol: Book One
08/06/23Lover’s Moon (Canadian Werewolf Book 5)
08/10/23Superhero Portal : An Action-Packed Superhero Origin Story (Dice Ford, Superhero Book 1)
08/12/23Fat Vampire
08/19/23The Magic Touch
08/21/23Behold the Ape
08/24/23The Hole
08/25/23Tales from the Wood: A Modern Fairytale
08/28/23Myths and Magic: A Humorous Fantasy Adventure (The Faerie King Trilogy)
09/04/23A Cat’s Guide to Bonding with Dragons: A Humorous Fantasy Adventure (Dragoncat Book 1)
09/04/23Deadlands: A Novel
09/09/23A Good Running Away (Misplaced Mercenaries Book 1)
09/13/23Just Another Day in Suburbia
09/14/23Nowhere Man
09/20/23Gardens of the Moon: Book One of The Malazan Book of the Fallen
10/07/23Deadhouse Gates: Book Two of The Malazan Book of the Fallen
10/22/23Memories of Ice: Book Three of The Malazan Book of the Fallen
11/11/23D Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II
12/02/23House of Chains: Book Four of The Malazan Book of the Fallen
12/18/23Midnight Tides – A Tale of the Malazan Book of the Fallen
Books read in 2023

I don’t have a goal to read any particular number of books. Some books I read have under 200 pages while several had over 1000 pages so I don’t consider the number of books to be too significant. Similarly, I do not track the number of pages since the amount and difficulty of content per page varies significantly between books.

Without recording things on betterbydecember.com, I probably would have guessed I’d read about 30 books over the course of the year, but now, as I did in fifth grade, I’m tracking each book I read. Reading is awesome and I am a reader. Thank you, Ms. Pamay.

Better by December

At the end of 2022 I had scheduled vacation days, but plans fell through and I found myself with extra time to kill. I generally do better when I have something to keep me out of trouble, so I built a web application.

With the new year rapidly approaching I was starting to think about goals that I had for 2023 and how to track them. I again wanted to do 10,000 sit ups and 10,000 pushups over the year. Also, my Wife and I wanted to go on 150 walks together. In addition to goals, I also wanted track other things such as the books I read and the number of days I played guitar. The hope was by doing those things I’d be a better person by the next December.

For those who might be interested in the basic architecture, here’s a summary of the various pieces I built and/or assembled:

  • I have a “december-back” repository on Github (currently the repository is private) which does most of the work for the service. I wrote that in Golang.
  • I have a “december-front” repository on Github (currently the repository is private) which provides the web user interface for the service. I wrote that in JavaScript/TypeScript using React.
  • The “december-front” project is built using npm and the resulting artifacts are stored in an AWS S3 bucket and delivered via Cloudfront.
  • The “december-back” project is packaged into a Docker image and published to a registry via a Github action.
  • Docker containers are spun up in AWS ECS (Elastic Container Service) on Fargate.
  • Route53 on AWS takes care of domain registration for betterbydecember.com and also provides all the DNS goodness and ensures requests are correctly directed to the front or back end.
  • An EC2 Load Application Load Balancer can direct traffic to one of two different regions and also takes care of all the https certificate goodness.
  • All the data is stored in a DataStax Astra database since it’s “a database I want to use“.

The web app is available at https://www.betterbydecember.com/ and anybody can try it out. It’s been over a year since the basic functionality was complete and I started using it to track my progress. I met my 2023 goals and feel like I became Better by December. Now that 2024 is in full swing, I’ve set new goals and am actively working towards becoming Better by December.