Episode: 4653
Title: Starting the Habit of Reading
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4653/hpr4653.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:16:03 (official HPR transcript)

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4653, for 2026-06-03
Today's show is entitled, "Starting the Habit of Reading"
The host is Thaj Sara and the duration is 00:24:59
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Thaj talks about how he's developed the habit of reading daily, and talks about books he's read."
You are listening to a show from the Reserve Queue.
This show was submitted in August 2025 to cover occasions like this
where there are gaps in the schedule.
Hey, what's good hacker public radio? This is Taj and you're hearing an episode from the reserve queue.
So you know what that means? We need more shows. Y'all know what to do.
All right, so today I'm going to talk about reading, which, how was that of interest to hackers?
But there's a little bit of a text into this. Last November, when my friend, my brother, my
hetero lifemate, Lyle from the random podcast, and I went to OLF, we talked about how he had
kind of rediscovered reading and how he was just kind of tearing through books and stuff like that.
I was a little jealous because I have always been somebody who reads very slowly. So I didn't
feel like I was good at it. And usually if I was reading something, it was for work.
So reading kind of stopped being anything that I enjoyed as a hobby. If I did read anything
for a long time, it was probably audio books that sort of became the way that I was able to consume.
The books that I wanted to read. I still did that quite often and enjoyed it. But as far as sitting
down physically reading, that was a thing that I did not do very often. A few things converged
that sort of created the circumstances to have me reevaluate this. One, I happened to just buy a piece
of technology that I really didn't want to buy, but has actually kind of turned into something
I enjoy having. For those who don't know and don't listen to your random, I am currently
training to be a pilot just for fun. And to do that, you have to have basically at this point in
an iPad. While some of the software runs in Android, there are really no good Android tablets
that have the horsepower and the requirements of things in the tablet to be useful. So I was
kind of forced to buy an iPad many. I still hate iOS with the burning passion. It is not fun
and I don't like it. But the size and form factor of this device is kind of amazing. It is in
sort of that e-book Kindle-ish size that makes it really portable and really easy. The pencil that
comes with it is really good for taking notes and stuff. And it really has replaced a lot of things
in my life. But with all that being said, if anybody has any leads on an Android tablet,
that is about this 8.8.5 inch size that has a decent amount of RAM and an internal GPS, which is
kind of the important part. I would love to switch back to Android. The iOS reading program for e-books
is okay. It's pretty barebones, but they're a much better reading apps on the Android side.
But I has what I has and so I started using it. That was one piece of technology or one thing
that sort of got me into reading. Another one was an April of last year, 2024. Humble Bundle had
a bundle of lots of the battle tech novels. I think it was more than a hundred of the battle
tech novels for like 20 bucks. And being a child of the late 80s, early 90s, me and my friends played
a lot of tabletop battle tech. And I have way too many of the rulebooks and stuff that I would like
to admit. But as much fun as I had playing the game, I always liked reading the books because
they're sort of history books for this strange, future, futuristic world. And I really got into it,
but I never got into the novels. Just again, because I even as a kid, I was not great at reading.
So I didn't really want to pursue that. So I bought this bundle. I read the first book in
sort of the battle tech novel universe and sat on it after a little bit because it took a little
bit. It wasn't part of my habits and my routines. So I let it set. Once I got the iPad and these
sort of three things combined, Lyle talking about reading, having some books that I wanted to read,
and having this device that was pretty simple that I was going to look at in every day anyways,
it all just sort of clicked and I started reading. Now, I used a technique that was, you know,
not new. This isn't some like life hacking epiphany that, you know, is out of the blue and
will help everyone. It's just a simple thing. But it was taught to me by a martial arts teacher
that just taking, make yourself do something every day for five minutes. Don't feel bad if you
don't go more than five minutes. Just do it. Worst case scenario, almost always, you can do something
for five minutes a day. And so I'm going to read five minutes a day. One of the things in the
iOS reading app that is interesting is that it keeps track of your streak of reading, which is
enough of a dopamine hit that it actually keeps me engaged. That is enough to make me go back every
day. And so not knowing when I started, I mean, I could do the math and figure out. I'm on day
172 of reading every day, at least for five minutes. Now, mostly those days of five minutes,
more like 20 minutes half an hour. It's become part of my morning routine. And if it's not part
of my morning routine because I'm traveling or something, it's my pre-bed routine. I just sat down
and I read some days or five minutes because that's literally all I have. And I'm rushing to get
done with my five minutes. But most of the time, I sat down and I actually started to enjoy it. And
I started to kind of go through books. Who knew that if I just broke it down into smaller chunks,
I would be faster at this than I thought I was and start to enjoy it. So that is sort of what set
up this world of me reading these books. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk about the
books that I've read so far. Right now we're at the end of July. So, you know, a little more than
halfway through the year. I have a goal of 20 books for the entire year. That was just sort of a random
goal I set. I'm on 13 and I'm halfway through the year. So I feel pretty good that I'll get it.
But I'll tell you about the books that I read just because some of them are nerdy and interesting.
I'm sure people here would enjoy them. And I'll also tell you about an Android app that I also
used to track my reading because I think it does a better job. And it allows me to sync that
progress between devices, which is really nice. One of the things that I found kind of interesting
about my reading habits was I knew I was going to read nerdy books. Right. That's just sort of,
you know, I'm a nerd. I know what I am, you know. I'm pretty secure with myself at this point.
I thought there would be more technical stuff involved in my reading and it really isn't.
The internet has sort of replaced that because most technical books that I would read
a web search is a better tool than reading a book. So a lot of this is fiction, which is, you know,
sort of the more nerdy stuff. And then there's some nonfiction or things that I find
of interest to hackers, but you may not. So, you know, mileage may vary. Okay. So now to the books.
I'm going to try to go in chronological order. What I've noticed is, as I started doing this,
I started reading multiple books at one. And I would switch back and forth between them. I'd read
like one chapter and one book and another chapter and another book. And so some of this gets a little
tango, but, you know, this is as close to chronological order as I can. So the first book I've
read during this time was the book mercenary star. This is the second book in the Great Death
Legion saga, which is a trilogy of battle tech books. And it's the first trilogy. And so like I said,
I'd already read the first book. I enjoyed it, but like it took forever because it wasn't part of my
habits. The second one was the first book I started this whole process with. I read it. The
trilogy is basically about the founding of a mercenary. And if you're not anywhere familiar with
battle mix, think a feudal Europe in space with giant stompy robots. And you kind of get it.
So I really enjoyed it. Like I said, it was a good follow-up to the second book or to the first book.
So, you know, mileage may vary if that's something you're interested in. The next book I read was
the third book in the trilogy, which is the price of glory. Pretty satisfying ending to that trilogy.
I know later down the timeline, we revisit these characters and at least another trilogy, I think,
and they get sprinkled in the universe throughout. So looking forward to that.
The next book was the book Piranesi by Susanna Clark. This was a book that my wife wanted to read
with me. It's a very interesting kind of surreal, magical fantasy-ish thing. I, it was pretty
in the middle for me. I liked the concept of it. I think I actually think this is a book that
would most definitely work better as a movie. The just sort of the, the just of the book without
spoiling anything is a man wakes up very little memory of anything besides the world he lives in,
but it is not our world. It is this massive building that floods constantly and it's, it's,
like I said, very dreamlike, very surreal. And to me, the plot of the book is figuring out where
he is and what is happening because breadcrumbs get laid and he meets people in this sort of
labyrinth building that we find out, you know, how this is connected to the real world and who this
man is and how he winds up here, which I find interesting. I think that that's the best part of the
book. It's only about the last maybe quarter if not less of the book. The rest of it is
sort of like world setting and mood. So I got a little bored with it, but in general, you know,
it's a decent book. Like I said, I would love to see them make a movie of this, but as I've
right now, hey, kind of bit for me. The next book I read was nonfiction. This was the first nonfiction
book. And I think I read this at the same time I was reading piranhassey. I read the book
permaculture for the rest of us by Jenny Blackmore. And for people who don't know, I really like
to garden, you know, almost at my garden, it is almost to the point where you could call out a many
farm, just because we have lots of land and I have equipment to do that. But over the last few years,
my job has been at a point where I just didn't have time to do it. So I put my toe back in this
this year to sort of like get back into it a little bit and reading books about it has sort of made
me more energized. When we get later in this, this summer spring cycle, I'm going to do some
things to set me up to plant some fall crops. So hopefully, that will go well. You're going to see
this repeat in some of the nonfiction books that I read. I've got a lot of gardening books on here.
Okay, the next book is a battle tech book, but it was not part of the bundle that I bought.
And actually, this one is very hard to find. I had to track it down using some methods that,
you know, some people may not agree with, but apparently there's some licensing rights with this
book. And it's called the Sword in the Dagger. And it is sort of in the timeline and happens
after the Great Death Legion saga, the first trilogy, and sort of in between to the books in that.
It is interesting because whatever that licensing problem was, it's pretty much disappeared off the
face of the earth, unless you obtain it through, you know, less than legal ways. So I did,
because I wanted to read it. And so far, this is my favorite battle tech book. It is very intriguing,
very sort of spy thriller, Eish, if those are all adjectives that I didn't just make up.
And basically, it has to do with one of the princes that is the head of state of one of these,
they call them the successor states, which are these giant sort of city states in space, right?
The battle tech lore, there was basically the Star League, which, you know, think,
you know, Star Trek, the Federation, like all of humans are all holding hands,
Kumbaiya, it's wonderful. That breaks apart in their the successor states. And one of the main
characters in this book is one of those leaders. And it's about another one of the successors
states creating a duplicate of that person and trying to pass it off and trying to sort of like
you serve their power. Very interesting. I'm very sad that this isn't something that is
easily available, but because for me, it's my favorite one so far. And the events that happen
in this book reverberate in the later books. But if you can't get a hold of it, you don't really
know that that's happening, which is, which is sad. One of the characters in here reappears
in the next trilogy. And it's not a main character, but he's a side character. And he has a
really close to relation to ship to somebody, but you don't really understand why. If you read this
book, you do. So I really enjoyed it. Like I said, I'm pretty sad that it's not available more
widely. Okay, next book, again, Battle Tech. Hey, you know, I got a bunch of books to get through. So
I'm going to keep reading them. Is the beginning of a new trilogy. This trilogy is the warrior
trilogy by Michael Stackbowl, which if you've ever read like old EU Star Wars novels, that's
going to be a real familiar name. And so the first book is Warrior On Guard. These are all I believe
references. I don't know. I don't, I don't do European fencing. So I don't know.
Basically, this is setting up a couple of threads, uh, leading to, again, going back,
Star League forums gets a broken apart into the successor states. This kicks off a series of what
they call this succession wars. And then there's been multiples. This trilogy sets up the, uh,
the fourth succession war. So it's, it's kind of this thing that keeps happening over and over and over again.
So far, really good. The first book is maybe my least favorite Battle Tech book I've read so far.
So this one is a little, eh, but it sets up things to go further later, which, which kind of helps.
All right, the next book is another book that me and my wife just had it to read together.
I'm a gigantic doon fan. Don't want to know how many times I've read the original six
books, but it's a lot. But I never dove into the new books, the ones that Frank Herbert's son
and Kevin J Anderson. I heard a lot that they weren't good. So I just sort of avoided them.
Again, because I didn't like to read. So I was like, whatever. But my wife and I watched the,
HBO show, Doon prophecy, which is sort of set in the same universe as the newer Doon
movies that I forget the director's name. But the, the really good ones that just came out in the
last few years. And so it is a, the, the show is set, you know, thousands of years before that.
And it sort of shows not the beginning of the Benninges are, but sort of like at the, the birth of
that. And it was an interesting show. I wouldn't say it's great, but I enjoyed it. And I think my wife
enjoyed it. But what I saw is, hey, this is based on the book. Now it was one of the, the Brian
Herbert and Kevin J Anderson books. And I was like, okay, cool. This is the excuse for me to read these.
And so I got the first one that was that the show was based off of, which was Sisterhood of Doon,
read through it. And I found myself really enjoying it. It is not the same as the original six.
And I think that that may be why people don't like it is not the same prose. It is not the same
depth as Herbert's original. But I put these on level on the level of like a really good Star Wars
book, right? And if, you know, Star Wars books have wildly drastic amount of quality across them.
But these I found really good. And they, this book specifically talks about the very beginning of the
bandages, right? And sort of how they develop power and some some characters. My one criticism.
And it's, it's kind of a weak criticism is that like, of course, we have a treaties. We have
Harkinans. We have all the, you know, the proper nouns that we will eventually have, you know,
10,000 years later. And of course, they're the main characters of these books. But when you get past
that, they're actually other characters that are more interesting in, in weird ways, I'm more fascinated
with the things around it. And so these books are, you know, basically a hundred years after
the Butler and Jihad. And so there's a lot going on that are sort of the ramifications of that.
And how people are reacting to that. And I think it's, it takes a very interesting stance on that.
So I really liked it. And I, I'm going forward and reading more of those books, which is interesting.
Okay, the next one is nonfiction as well. This one is very specific to me. I'm a martial artist
of studied Chinese martial arts literally my entire life. In the last few years, I had the
opportunity with a friend of mine to go and study with somebody who is very, very skilled and very
well-known in the world of Chinese martial arts for his sword skill. And this person has Scott Rodel.
If you look on YouTube, there are lots of videos of him sort of like showing stuff in his, his,
he's one of the few people that is doing Chinese swordmanship in any real way with live sparring
and things like that. So getting to study with him has been a real delight. I've three or four
times I get to meet with him in person and spend a few days with him, which has been really fun.
And sort of expands my Chinese martial arts knowledge. So one of the things that I wanted to do is
sort of read up on it. And he actually has translated some old manuals. And one of them is a manual
by Huanggyuan Shui. That is the fundamentals of the Wunong sword weapon. Wunong is a place that is
very renowned for their sword skills. And basically this is a translation and commentary of
that original text, which was interesting. Kind of vague but also had some real insights on how
you know sword play from this style is done. So it was pretty interesting. Maybe not interesting
to people outside of that world, but I really enjoyed it. He has several other translations
and I'm not going to try to get a hold of some more of them and read them. They're really quick
reads for me. But I do like that he keeps the original Chinese. I know enough Chinese to kind of sort
of figure things out. So if there's anything that is not clear in the translation, I was able to
go back and look at the original Chinese. So I really like that. That was nice for me. Okay.
Next we're going back to battle tech. Is the next book in the warrior trilogy? This is warrior
repost. Just sort of keeps the story going. This one to me was much better than the first one.
And it just sort of like is pushing this narrative forward, which is nice. This basically
shows the kickoff of that fourth succession worth. The last book was setting it all up. This is
the one where it's like things go down. There's no escaping this happening. So it's kind of an
interesting book. I'm assuming the next one I have it got to that one yet is going to be more of
like here is the war. We're dealing with it. So interesting to see that. The next one is another nonfiction
book. This one I believe I was reading it sort of the same time I was reading. The last battle tech
book was the cardio code. This is by Dr. Kenneth Jay. Although I think at the time he was not
Dr. He's Dr. Now. He's somebody who his materials and things were recommended to me by
some martial arts people that I really respect. And cardio has always been my nemesis. I don't
actually mind doing cardio workouts like I like running. I like doing that sort of thing. I like
jump rope. I don't hate doing it, which a lot of people do. But for me I never got better at it.
Like it was just sort of like I can do cardio, but like I didn't it didn't mean a lot to me.
And so by reading this book it's a very interesting examination of how to improve cardio
from a very scientific base. I mean a vast portion of this book is literally just research studies
and some resations of those research studies. It kind of reads almost like a dissertation. So if
you're not used to sort of that world and that sort of language it's it's could I can see it being
very dense. But for me it was really really interesting. And I've started to take some of these things
into my own training. And hopefully I'll see some benefit. I did the first test and then I'm
kind of doing a cycle and then I'm a test again and see if I if I made any any progress.
Another nonfiction book that we're going to do is the urban homestead by Kelly Kweeney or Kween
or something. I'm not sure how you say it. I'll put it in the show notes. This is basically just
a gardening book on how to do gardening in small spaces. There wasn't a lot in here that was new
but as a reference book this is kind of interesting. There's there's a lot of things about
high density gardening that is different than what I've I've done. I've grown up in sort of a
farming community. And so you know you sort of do those traditional practices. And as I'm
exploring this on my own I'm looking more at regenerative or sort of like I read the primary
culture book. I don't I don't say I do permaculture because that can get kind of culty. But I
am taking lessons from these books. And so this was interesting probably not my favorite. But
there are some resources in the book that I will probably reference going forward. All right back to
Dune. I read the next book in the trilogy. So there's a trilogy of those three books that made
up the the one that the show was based off of. And the sisterhood of Dune is what the show said
it was based off of. The next one is Min Tats of Dune which basically just keeps that story going.
The first one did sort of have a focus more on the sisterhood. But it also talked about
you know the beginning of the navigator killed the beginning of the Min Tats, the the beginning of the
Sword Master's like all these groups that become important in the Dune universe. And so for the next
one the Min Tats become sort of the focus. I really really enjoyed this. I like the Min Tats as an idea.
And the way that some of the ideas of that and how it's interpreted later are subverted by its
genesis are interesting. I'm kind of looking forward to eventually going back and reading the original
trilogy was sort of this stuff in my head to see how it colors it. Because I think it will.
I think it definitely will have an impact. So I really like that one. It's definitely something
that I'm going to enjoy knowing moving forward. Okay. And the last one I read during this period
is the book. How to grow more vegetables by John Jevon's. This is sort of a fundamental text
for a lot of people in sort of the generative agriculture space. It is based around the idea of
this grow bio-intensive movement and sort of their principles and how they work land in a certain
way to make it more efficient. They use a lot of you know quantitative metrics to figure that out,
which I like. But it also has some weird stuff in it that I don't don't 100%
jive with or think that that's a thing that actually matters. But there is a lot of stuff in here
that I'm definitely going to pull and use. And it is sort of made to be a reference manual. I mean,
there is a narrative to it and you can read it and sort of learn things. But really it is it is
super focused on you know this book you will use the charts in it and the layouts and things like that.
So I'm glad that it is in my toolbox. Now there was some things in there that I had never heard
before, but really a lot of it was just reinforcing things in new ways that I had already heard.
And so it gives me some tools to use moving forward growing stuff. So that's the end of the
books that I have for this first half of the year. Hopefully I'll come back and do the second half.
But I do want to talk about the application that I use on Android to track my reading because
I think that it is way better than anything else that I have seen. So the Android app is called
Open Reads. And essentially it has when you open it up it has three different pages that you can
look at. The first one is finished. When you finish a book it puts you know the cover of the book
on there and so you can just sort of scroll through and see the books that you've read over this period of
time. You have another panel which is in progress. These are the books that you are currently reading.
And then you have a four later. So if I see a book that I really want to read like if I'm out of the
book store or if I'm just like at the library or something I can add it to my list and remind myself
to go back and do it. My four later is gigantic because I'm like that. But it does a really good
job of tracking reading. You can go ahead and tell it you know when you started. When you finish
how much you read and so it keeps pretty good statistics and you can go into the statistics and
learn lots of things about like how you have read. So you know I can look and see how many pages
I finished in each month. You can tell you how many books I read. The total number of finished pages
which is 3,704 which if you told me then in six months I would have read you know close to 4,000 pages.
I would have told you you were insane but I have. So that's kind of nice. It tells you your average
reading time for a book. Your average reading time per day. Your average number of pages per day.
Or average number of pages for a book. Excuse me. It tells you your longest book. Your shortest
book. Your fastest read. All these sort of things which I find interesting. You know I don't know
that it actually does anything but makes me feel better about the choices I made. So for me it's an
important tool to kind of keep me on the track I'm doing. So my suggestion to everybody is like
go read a book. Go do something fun. Find something silly. I mean literally read a page a day. If
that's what it takes don't worry about how fast you read. Don't worry about how many books you read.
It's a snowball. When you start it'll pick up. So with that good luck everybody. Hopefully I'll
see you in six months and we'll talk about the other half. Bye.
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