puf.io

Book covers as a source of happiness

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For most of my life I’ve been a reader. As a child, I would go to the library at least once a week, often twice, and each time I would go home with the maximum number of books I was allowed to check out.

It all started with physical books of course, of the dead tree type, but that changed when we moved continents. We couldn’t reasonably bring all the books we owned with us, so we had to get rid of many hundreds of them. This was before Little Libraries were a thing, and I hated having to get rid of so many of the beloved books.

Discovering e-readers

For a few years I read (many fewer) books electronically on cramped, small LCD devices. Luckily, I then discovered e-ink - a passive, low-power display technology, perfect for electronic books. I got my first e-reader in 2009: a Sony Reader PRS-505.

When I switched to using a Kindle in 2011, you had two options for what the device would display when not in use: you could get your Kindle with a discount and it’d show ads, or pay more and it’d show a random stock illustration.

👆 This is an example of an ad I saw, I didn’t actually buy this specific book. 😅
👇 A stock illustration from someone else’s Kindle, as I never paid for the ad free version at that time.

I never really minded the ads. Though many of them were for romance novels, I also got some interesting reads from them. But then in 2021 Amazon updated the Kindle firmware to allow the non-ad versions to show the cover of the book that you’re reading. It was my favorite tech thing of that entire year!

It turns out seeing the book cover, on my nightstand or elsewhere, was a small happy moment for me; one that I’d missed since switching to Kindle e-readers.

Tracking my reading

I am still an avid reader. In recent years I read on average just over one book per week. And while I very much enjoy the reading experience, I have a lousy memory. Most of the time I’d be hard-pressed to tell you the three most recent books I finished, even when I likely very much enjoyed them.

This is one of the reasons I track my reading meticulously on Goodreads and on https://puf.io/books. One thing I love on Goodreads is seeing a tableau of books I recently read.

👆 The covers of the 20 most recent books I finished before publishing this post

Being a reader of e-books, this is the closest I will ever get to having a shelf of books that I have read. Seeing it makes me happy.

E-ink devices

Over the years, I’ve also become lightly obsessed with e-ink screens. I order more devices with e-ink screens than I actually need, and then end up trying to find a use for them.

I have multiple of most of these and e-recycled many more

Recently I got some Picpak devices, which are cute, small, color e-ink devices. The screens can show only black, white, red and yellow. So while they are promoting them to show photos, you’ll see that the photo selection on their boxes is… optimized for the display: none of these pictures show blue or green.

That makes sense, and I even got some pretty good photos on it myself. But it takes more effort than I’d like: selecting photos with necessary color palette (so without much blue/green), cropping them to fit the 4x3 aspect ratio of the devices, uploading them through the (finicky) Picpak app. It all works and the result is great, but I wasn’t sure how often I’d be doing this.

Then somebody posted what they had done with their Picpak devices to r/eink and I immediately knew that I wanted that too:

Look at the vibrant, solid yellow and red on these screens.

I set up one of my Picpaks to display today’s weather, through the Tesserae companion server for driving e-ink screens.

Then I started playing with what else Tesserae could do, and had it send one of my favorite recent book covers to another Picpak.

The gorgeous book cover for The Martian Chronicles on a monitor and an e-ink device

And suddenly I knew what I wanted: to have a Picpak show the cover of a book I am currently reading or have recently read, and then show different ones during the day.

Automatically showing a recent book cover

So I built, or rather I had Claude Code build, a solution that updates my red Picpak at fixed times to show a book cover. Claude wakes up at those times, determines what book cover to show from my Goodreads RSS feeds, resizes the image, and pushes it to Tesserae to show on the Picpak. The Picpak device wakes up once an hour and grabs the current cover image from Tesserae.

As you might expect from something vibe coded like this, it’s overly complicated, even after three iterations of telling it what to fix and clean up. But… it works.

I now see a different cover image at various times of the day, which automatically updates with my Goodreads status.

As you can see above, the images aren’t always great, and the Picpak screens are rather dark and muted. But even then, every time I glance at this little screen, I am reminded of a current or recent book, and that brings a smile to my face.

For those who are really curious, e-ink screens are notoriously slow to update and color e-ink screens are by far the worst of that. There is lots of room for improvement and recently there have been some promising breakthroughs, but… here’s the update cycle for my Picpak.

![](https://i.imgur.com/omsrKQ3.gif)

That’s 20+ seconds for one full refresh. 🤯

Luckily, normally this just happens automatically once per hour, and I’m not waiting for it. It’s just a happy moment when my eye glances by the little screen and I see yet another book I recently read.

The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life - Ian Bogost (Rating: ★★★★☆)

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I first discovered Ian Bogost through his writing about games, shortly after he became “internet famous” for creating Cow Clicker, a satirical Facebook game about… clicking cows. He now writes for The Atlantic and has just published the book The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life.

The book is about finding joyful moments in everyday life, mostly by reconnecting with the physical world. It starts with recognizable examples, like tracing the edges of a sofa cushion with your index finger, feeling the diagonal ridges on modern paper coffee cups, or shifting gears in a manual-transmission car. The second part of the book focuses on how we lost so many of these moments through digitization, automation, and what Bogost calls dematerialization. The final part shows examples of how to reclaim that sensory life.

The Small Stuff is a relatively thin book, but as I often find with books built around a single central idea, the entire idea could have fit in a single essay or a series of blog posts. In fact, Bogost is currently exploring many of the same ideas in an eight-week newsletter series for The Atlantic. But finding joy in everyday experiences is something dear to me, so I enjoyed reading the book despite that.

The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials #1) - Philip Pullman (Rating: ★★★☆☆)

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Golden Compass has been showing up in my (automated) recommendations for a long time, so I decided to finally read it. It’s the first book of Philip Pullman’s acclaimed His Dark Materials trilogy, published between 1995 and 2000.

The book follows 11-year-old Lyra, who is being raised by scholars in an Oxford college. In Lyra’s world, every human has a dæmon - an animal-shaped manifestation of their soul that is always with them. This bond between human and dæmon is key to the book’s central conflict. When Lyra and her dæmon Pan uncover an abduction conspiracy and learn the unsettling truth about her parents, they join up with Lyra’s gyptian friends and travel into the Arctic to rescue her friend Roger and other abducted children. Later, Lyra unintentionally provides the means to open a bridge to another world, and the book ends with Lyra and Pan crossing into the other world.

From start to finish, this book is a real page-turner. The story progresses at a rapid pace, and there are twists and turns every few chapters. That makes it a very easy read, but at times I found the story lacked depth. The witches, the aeronaut, and the college staff all seem fascinating, but we learn relatively little about them. And though we discover more about the background and motivations of some of the main characters, they mostly remain the same throughout the book. With more character development and a stronger sense of the larger story, this would have rated higher. It’s a fun, fast-paced story, though, so I am eager to see what the second book, The Subtle Knife, brings.

The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury (Rating: ★★★★☆)

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Martian Chronicles is a collection of standalone stories about humans colonizing Mars. The stories form a loosely connected multi-year chronicle tracing the arrival of the first expeditions through the eventual abandonment of most human settlements. While the book is classified as science fiction, Bradbury shows little interest in scientific explanation or plausibility - and Mars functions more as an imaginative backdrop for his stories.

Some of the stories are pretty poetic, others are humorous, and some explore human connection. One of the first stories, “The Earth Men”, describes the second expedition to Mars and how their experience is assumed to be a hallucination by the Martians, who proceed to explain away whatever evidence the crew provides to the contrary. Another standout to me was “The Long Years”, about a man who creates android replicas of his deceased wife and three children. These androids are not the sci-fi type, but to me felt more like golems built by a man to recapture what he lost.

Although some elements (like the romanticized treatment of the native Martians and racial and gender stereotypes) have aged poorly, the stories overall held up well for me. It’s light on the sci-fi aspects, but it offers - as one would expect from Bradbury - emotionally charged, atmospheric storytelling in an imaginative setting.

The Land and Its People: Essays - David Sedaris (Rating: ★★★★☆)

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I mostly know David Sedaris from the fact that he once wrote about the Dutch Sinterklaas phenomenon in Six to Eight Black Men, and we have that book in a cabinet, but The Land and Its People is the first book of his I’ve read. As is typical of Sedaris, it’s a collection of his essays ranging in length from 5 minute narrations to almost half an hour.

The essays are anecdotal accounts of David’s experiences at home (in New York nowadays), and during his travels around the world. They’re all told with his characteristic wit and snark, and often center on his family and friends and his experiences with Duolingo (🦉). While Sedaris’s writing is easy to absorb, many of the stories are about affection, grief, mortality, and the difficulty of being a decent partner, sibling, or friend.

I listened to the audiobook of The Land and Its People, assembled from live recordings of Sedaris performing the essays at different live appearances. Sedaris’s narration made them even easier to consume. Nothing earth-shattering, but quite entertaining.

Wind and Truth (The Stormlight Archive 5) - Brandon Sanderson (Rating: ★★★★☆)

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Although I discovered Brandon Sanderson’s writing relatively late and still have plenty of his prolific output to explore, I try to limit myself to one of his books per year. That’s because the books in The Stormlight Archive series are all very, very long and tend to disrupt my reading schedule. Wind and Truth clocks in at 1,330 pages, the longest in the series so far - and it marks the end of the first half of what’s meant to be a 10-book series. 🤯

The Stormlight Archive series is set on storm-ravaged Roshar, where warriors, scholars, rulers, and magical Radiants try to unite humanity while confronting ancient enemies, political backstabbing, and personal trauma. Wind and Truth covers a span of 10 days during which Dalinar, leader of the human coalition, prepares for a decisive contest with the god Odium, while all of his allies wage battles of their own in different places and planes.

The build-up to the final confrontations is, long but very eventful, which feels like a recurring issue throughout this series. The writing is good and engaging; there’s just so much of it! This could easily have been two decent-sized books, which feels like a common theme for the series too. I regularly wished that Sanderson had taken a similar approach to Awaken Online, with a main story arc and then side-quest books that further explore specific characters and their adventures.

Wind and Truth is a solid entry in the series and a good capstone to the first main story arc, but I am also somewhat glad to be done with it. I might at some point explore some of Sanderson’s other writing in the same Cosmere universe.

A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction - Terry Pratchett (Rating: ★★★☆☆)

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A Blink of the Screen is a collection of 32 pieces of short fiction by Terry Pratchett. The oldest story, The Hades Business, dates from 1963, when STP was 13, and the newest, Sir Joshua Easement: A Biographical Note, is from 2010/2011. The shortest piece in this collection is a two-page poem, The Secret Book of the Dead, and the longest is the novella-length The Sea and Little Fishes. Each piece has an introduction, usually by Pratchett.

About a third of the pieces are set in Pratchett’s Discworld universe and feature some of its most (in)famous characters. But even some of the non-Discworld stories have connections to his other works. For example, Rincemangle, the Gnome of Even Moor is clearly an early (shorter) version of Truckers. Turntables of the Night features a version of Pratchett’s personified Death, and the barbarian in Final Reward reminded me of Cohen the Barbarian (who actually does appear in Troll Bridge).

Much to my surprise, I didn’t enjoy this collection as much as most of Pratchett’s other works. Most likely, his short stories are just not my thing. In fact, the longer the short story, the more I enjoyed it. The Sea and Little Fishes was the clear standout for me, but I also liked the opening story, The Hades Business. Stephen Briggs’s narration is excellent, as usual, and Michael Fenton Stevens handles the non-Discworld pieces well.

Mount Sutro Open Space Reserve

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Mount Sutro Open Space Reserve is a park/forest in the center of San Francisco.

Since it’s right between Twin Peaks and Golden Gate Park, visitors to San Francisco often ignore it. Even a local friend recently asked me about this new-to-her park, which was a good reminder to revisit it this week. :-)

Keep this map handy for reference

The main thing you’ll notice about the reserve is its dense forest area, most prominent on the eastern side.

It’s a lush area of eucalyptus trees that can grow up to 200 feet tall, and lots of underbrush (I saw ferns, blackberries, and all kinds of ivy) rolling over the hills. All this greenery captures the fog and leads to a pretty constant dampness right in the middle of the city.

Mount Sutro has over 5½ miles of trails, most of them for intermediate to advanced hikers. Most popular is the 1.1 mile intermediate level Historic Trail, which steers close to the outer perimeter of the reserve, neatly avoiding the steepest climbs/descents. It still had plenty of incline though, so come prepared!

I started the Historic Trail from the entrance on Stanyan street (right off 17th street). Don’t let the pic scare you off, it’s only a few steps until you’re done with stairs and right in the middle of the forest. Mind your step though, as things can be slippery due to the humidity.

When I was there, there were “dollhouse” structures on a few tree trunks.

Instead of “simply” following the Historic Trail, I switched over to the North Ridge Trail to make it to the summit of Mount Sutro (at 909 feet), where you can find a Nike missile control site (decommissioned, of course).

Don’t forget to stop and admire the views of the city, and catch your breath on the way up

From the top, I made my way back down via the West Ridge Trail to the Historic Trail, which I followed to the Quarry Road, and then past the nursery to the Clarendon Trailhead. This was around 2 miles and took about an hour, during most of which I was soaked from both sweat and the fog. 🌁😅

Since I forgot to take a picture from Clarendon, here’s the view from 17th and Clayton.

What’s your favorite part of mount Sutro open space reserve? Let me know at any of the links at the top 👆

The Correspondent - Virginia Evans (Rating: ★★★★☆)

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Correspondent is an epistolary novel, which means it is a story written in the form of correspondance.. It is narrated through the letters and emails to and from the retired, reclusive courthouse clerk Sybil van Antwerp.

The book has a few main storylines about Sybil’s upbringing, her own family life, and her professional life. For the majority of the book, she comes off as very selfish and defensive, but by the end of the book, all the storylines have come together and she finds some resolution to the major traumas in her life.

I found the story itself rather simplistic and the wrap-up a bit too sudden and smooth, but the execution through letters and emails is very well done. The almost-full-cast narration (some narrators take on multiple roles) is well done and really supports this epistolary format, but I found some of the ethnic/regional character accents a bit too in-your-face.

The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It's Too Late - Cory Doctorow (Rating: ★★★★☆)

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been reading Cory Doctorow’s books since 2017, when a friend recommended Little Brother. Little Brother was indeed right up my alley, so I’ve been reading many of Cory’s works since, often through his Kickstarter campaigns. Since 2022 he’s written a string of non-fiction books about big tech, including what happens when a few players control both supply and demand in a market (Enshittification), and now about dealing with the impact of AI.

Cory also writes a daily blog on pluralistic.net (recommended), which is where I first encountered the reverse centaur metaphor used in this book’s ridiculously long title: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It’s Too Late¹².

In Cory’s AI metaphor, a centaur (a human head on a horse body) is when a human uses AI (these days, in this context, that’s mostly LLMs) to do some of the more boring or mundane stuff in their life. A reverse centaur, then, is when you let the AI do the driving, and a human only does the things that the AI can’t do. This leads to a horribly dystopian world, exemplified by micro-managed Amazon delivery drivers and call-center employees, and lots of tech workers being laid off because their bosses think their jobs can be done by AI.

Since I read Cory’s blog about 30% of the time, the themes and even the wording in the Reverse Centaur’s Guide were very familiar, but it was (as always) good to read it in a more condensed and better edited format. My main criticism of Cory’s recent non-fiction works has been that it’s heavy on warnings and problem diagnosis, but seldom offers concrete solutions for those problems. As the title suggests, this book does offer more solutions and has a section on what we can do with the leftovers once the AI bubble bursts, but it’s still more limited than I’d like. I found the book a good, entertaining overview of the current state in the AI landscape/bubble, how we got here, the motivations of the main players, and some high-level likely outcomes in the coming years. I doubt it’ll be the last Doctorow writes on this topic, and I’m here to read future installments.

Footnotes

I find Cory’s (undoubtedly intentional) use of a long dash in the extended title hilarious, given AI’s propensity for using them. ↩
I read this book before its official publishing date (June 23), because Cory shipped it to his Kickstarter backers early. ↩

Dungeon Crawler Carl (Dungeon Crawler Carl #1) - Matt Dinniman (Rating: ★★★☆☆)

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I first spotted Dungeon Crawler Carl (DCC) in bookstores in the early 2020s, and started seeing more and more of it over the years, while also getting recommendations for it from friends. The DCC LitRPG series consists of 8 books so far, and will likely finish at around 10 books. Peacock also recently ordered a TV adaptation of the series, to be produced by Seth MacFarlane’s studio.

Dungeon Crawler Carl is set in the present day or near future, in a universe where Earth is being harvested by aliens and the surviving humans are put into an intergalactically televised dungeon crawl. As you can guess from the title, the protagonist is named Carl and together with his ex-girlfriend’s cat (Princess Donut) he tries to survive the crawl, while exposing the cruelty of its system.

As is common in the genre, Dungeon Crawler Carl mixes nail-biting fight scenes with exploration of its broader universe and social commentary on both our real world and DCC’s imagined universe. It’s a fun, punch-packing page-turner, and while it didn’t fully live up to the hype for me, I will gladly continue reading the series.

Comparison with Awaken Online: I’ve been reading (and reviewing) the Awaken Online (AO) LitRPG book series since 2023, and it’s hard not to compare it with Dungeon Crawler Carl (DCC). The AO canon consists of 15 books by now and I’ve devoured all of them, so this comparison may be a bit preliminary - take it for what it is! :-)

Book 1 of DCC felt a bit more lightweight to me than the first book of AO (Catharsis) did. DCC puts its protagonist on a rollercoaster that he somewhat more passively rides while providing passing commentary, while in AO book 1 the protagonist right away makes (and struggles with) some really philosophical choices, like choosing to play the VR-based game in AO as an evil character, and what that says about both the person and our perception of good versus evil.

The later books of AO dive more and more into such philosophical topics, which I love. If DCC stays on its MAD Magazine-like course, I’ll gladly keep reading it, but if it also dives a bit deeper, I might rate it higher as the series progresses.

Mr. Kiss and Tell (Veronica Mars #2) - Rob Thomas and Jennifer Graham (Rating: ★★★☆☆)

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This is the second - and so far last - book about a private investigator in a Southern Californian coastal town. The books are based on a TV-series starring Kristen Bell, and are set between the Veronica Mars movie and its 2019 revival season. Mr. Kiss and Tell follows a few months after the events of The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line, with Veronica now working alongside her dad at Mars Investigations.

Veronica is hired by the Neptune Grand hotel to investigate a brutal assault, and the case leads her into the familiar Mars territory of wealth inequality, crime across class lines, corruption at the sheriff’s office, and Veronica’s complicated love for Logan.

I love how this book picks up an annoying loose thread from the TV show: whatever happened to Grace Manning (Meg’s younger sister)? Unfortunately the book’s main plot didn’t grip me very much, and Veronica herself is all over the place - in an annoying way. Wallace and Mac also feel too much like caricatures this time around. The narration by Rebecca Lowman was fine, but a notch below Kristen Bell’s narration in book 1. I really hope that the final season of the TV show (which is set a few years after the events of this book) finishes up the series in style.

Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity - Lawrence Lessig (Rating: ★★★★☆)

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Lawrence Lessig is a well-known Harvard Law professor, digital rights pioneer, and founding board member of Creative Commons. He’s written a number of books on the subject of digital rights, and 2004’s Free Culture covers the history, the early-2000s landscape, and the potential future of copyright and its impact on our culture.

Free Culture describes how copyright law, media ownership, and digital technology shape what people are allowed to create by sharing, remixing, and building on others’ works. Lessig identifies four forces that constrain our actions: the law, social norms, the market, and architecture. Through these forces and many examples from recent and older history, he argues why copyright law has drifted away from its original purpose (as set out in the U.S. Constitution).

The book shows its age, as it covers peer-to-peer sharing as its main contemporary technology example, though we’ve had many other disruptive technologies since. Still, I loved reading it as a broad historical overview and a snapshot of its time. In a more personal section, Lessig covers the Supreme Court case Eldred v. Ashcroft. His side’s loss in that case helped shape and motivate Lessig’s work with the then-new Creative Commons system.

Aan het einde van de oorlog - Bert Natter (Rating: ★★★★☆)

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Aan het einde van de oorlog (“At the End of the War”) is a historical novel by Bert Natter set during a single day near the end of World War II in and around a Nazi concentration camp. It won several literary prizes in the Netherlands, and is only available in Dutch for now, but translation rights have been sold.

The story is told as a long sequence of personal perspectives from dozens of different characters, including SS officers, camp staff, prisoners, and their families. In its 640 pages, the book gives a minute-by-minute account of the concentration camp’s final day, with many of the events told from different perspectives.

I found this a very interesting, fresh take on a deservedly well-covered period of history. Hearing the same events told from many perspectives gives it breadth and depth, as did seeing how some of the characters evolve in this short but hectic period. An easy four stars.

The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line (Veronica Mars #1) - Rob Thomas and Jennifer Graham (Rating: ★★★★☆)

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Veronica Mars TV show, about a teenage private eye in a SoCal town, ran from 2004-2007, and was the first major role for Kristen Bell. A feature film (that really felt like a double-episode of the show) was released in 2014, and there was a final season in 2019. Between the movie and the final season, two books were released, the first of which was The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line.

The book picks up right after the events of the film, and centers on the disappearance of two girls during Spring Break. Veronica, now in her late 20s, takes on the case as her PI dad is recovering from a car accident. The story goes through all the usual loops and misdirections one can expect in a Veronica Mars story, before she neatly uncovers what really happened to both girls.

I’m reading the books because we’re watching the TV show, and in viewing order the books fit right between the movie and the final season. This likely would have been a solid three-star (nice page-turner, but nothing to make it stand out) if it weren’t for the narration by Kristen Bell. It makes sense that she’s the best person to voice Veronica herself, but there are also parts in the book where her portrayals of Mac and Wallace are eerily recognizable from the show. Fun read!

Tooth and Nail: A Steampunk Sleeping Beauty (Mutants and Modified #3) - C.I. Chevron (Rating: ★★★☆☆)

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Tooth and Nail is the third book in the Mutants and Modified series that takes inspiration from classic fairy tales but then puts them in a late Victorian steampunk era. The result is fast-paced YA pulp, but I enjoyed the books so far.

In Tooth & Nail, we follow Aurelia, one of the evil stepsisters of book 1 who turns out not to be evil after all - and she’s a vampire. 🧛‍♀️ According to the cover, this book is inspired by Sleeping Beauty, but that’s a pretty thin veneer and it’s more about vampires and gargoyles than princesses in castles. Of course, like her (step)sisters in books 1 and 2, Aurelia also finds her love interest - and together they fight against the evil German organization that her stepmother is part of.

The initial mystique from book 1 about how things work in this steampunk universe is wearing a bit thin by now, but it’s still fun to see other characters or races from traditional lore being put into an unusual environment. The overindulgence in (eyelash-batting) romance keeps this from being a 4-star read, but I immediately put book 4 on my Kindle to read at some point - which is something the author probably cares more about. 😄