What I've Been Reading

I tend to read multiple books concurrently. At any given time I'm into 3 or 4 different books. I find this lets me choose what sounds good at the time, rather than being forced to read a certain book even when I'm not in the mood. Here's what I've been reading lately.

Grow a Little Fruit Tree by Ann Ralph

This is my second time reading through this one. It's about growing fruit trees in small spaces. According to this author, with proper and aggressive pruning, you can grow fruit trees on normal stock spaced only 6 feet apart. Conventional wisdom says they should be as far apart as they will be tall. For an apple tree for example, that's 25-35 feet. With her method, you never let the tree get very tall, you cut off the main leader at however high you want it to be. This way more energy is given to growing fruit, so you end up with smaller, more productive trees. After my initial reading, I decided to put her method into practice and planted 7 trees in my front yard last spring. I'm interested to see what happens with them this year.

I Am Error by Nathan Altice

This is a look at the creation and inner workings of the Famicom and NES systems by Nintendo. It's been very interesting to see not only some of the history of these systems, but also looking at the code behind some of the classic games. So far they've gone in depth on Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros, and The Legend of Zelda. I'm amazed at how much they were able to cram into relatively little memory. They did this largely by building maps of granular components, and reusing them in various ways throughout the game. Pretty fascinating stuff.

Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

This series of essays was apparently the genesis of the concept of "mansplaining", though that wasn't the original intent of the author. It all came about when a man at a party was trying to speak authoritatively and condescendingly about a topic without realizing the woman he was explaining it to was the one who wrote the book he had read on the topic. She was put off by this and decided to write about it. This isn't a POV I'm exposed to very often, which is why I'm reading it.

The Mystic Rose by Stephen Lawhead

I only just started this, but it's the third and final book in a series. The first one followed a Celtic noble who joined the Crusades and strove to recover a holy relic, while the second was about that same Crusader's grandson on a similar journey. This third one seems to be about the grandson's daughter trying to figure out who murdered her father. Lawhead seems to have a love for historical British fiction, as he's written about the Middle Ages, Dark Ages, the Celts, and the Crusades. I've enjoyed this series so far, and hope this book ties everything together nicely. There's been a parallel thread going in the early 1900s as interludes throughout the first 2 books, so I'm interested to see how everything relates together to the main story thread.