Author of The Obstacle Is the Way and Ego Is the Enemy; runs the Reading List email and The Painted Porch bookstore in Bastrop, Texas.
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Ann Wroe’s biography of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judaea–the man who sentenced Jesus to his gruesome death–was so overwhelmingly good that I could only read a couple pages at a time.
Holiday's annual roundup of the very best books he read in 2023; book links point to his own bookstore and the site discloses Amazon Associate membership.
Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.
The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.
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The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.
What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:
Hardware, services4 years
Software5 years
Podcasts, courses, other8 years
Books25 years
Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.