Why
Although being an avid reader, I’ve never thought about writing down what I’ve read. Instead, I reread books just in case I forgot. A few years ago, I started to think about writing a blog to document my reading journey. At first, I tried using mind mapping technique from Tony Buzan—which was time-consuming. It took weeks to create detail map of a book, and you can’t revise its content on mobile. So I gave up after a few books.
Knowing the fallacy of our mind, I knew I had to, but kept procrastinating for years. Then 2020 happened.
Using principles in How to Take Smart Notes, I started writing with a few principles in my mind:
- Write with my own words, not just paraphrasing the authors in book summaries
- Create an “external memory” that I can revise anytime on my phone, hence WordPress.org
- Organize my knowledge about design, learning, parenting, psychology, history, language, literature,… to find gaps and…
- Expand my perspective , challenge my perceptions and build better mental model about the world.
What
With those in mind, this site serves as my external memory for my future self (and my daughter).
- Posts are my writings about designing, parenting, reading and learning,…
- Summaries are my book summaries, mostly non-fiction. I only read classic fictions which don’t need review.
- How to Raise an Adult? is my collection of books/guidelines/principles for raising my daughter.
- 2020 2021 Reading Challenge are my Goodreads reading challenges .
For summaries, I tried to distill every book in under 10 minutes for future revisions, but better the book, longer the summary.
- must read, multiple times
- should read at least once
- there are better books
- skip it
- avoid it
How
My writing is barely readable, so I use WordPress with GeneratePress theme, Elementor as editor (which is bloated) and UberMenu 3 for menu. For optimization, I used WP Rocket, Imagify and Autoptimize. I also hosted Google & Fontawesome locally. For content plugin, I mostly used Shortcodes Ultimate, Fixed TOC, Tufte CSS for sidenotes.
Disclaimer
There is no ads, affiliate, tracking nor cookie (except Cloudflare’s _cfduid for serving cache, which will also be deprecated on 10 May, 2021 ) on this site. Links to external sites are for convenient only.
I tried my best to give credit to contents copied from other website. But if you don’t want me to, drop me a message at LinkedIn.
This site is published under Creative Commons license, feel free to share or adapt as you wish.