walls.corpus

By Nathan L. Walls

Themes

As with 2024, I’m expecting a good amount of reading on the following topics:

I’ll get a better shape of the themes a few months into the year.

Currently reading

Yes, I have way too many books in progress to meaningfully make headway on all of them.

Completed

Art Fundamentals: Theory & Practice 7th Edition, by Otto G. Ocvirk, &c

Best American Essays, 2022, edited by Alexander Chee

The Visual Toolbox, by David duChemin

Some additional notes on this below.

Mountain Light, by Galen Rowell

Mountain Light and The Visual Toolbox were written 30-plus years apart from each other and in that time, photography moved from film and predominately manual focus cameras for Rowell’s book to full digital cameras with several modes of autofocus in the time of duChemin’s. The lessons and guidance on making good images over that span of time is more stable than the technology. Both books have valuable lessons.

David duChemin’s book is very solid for diving into a few different sections at a time and working with select nuggets of lessons at a time. Rowell’s book is both less and more technical, and, personally, the more artistically inspiring of the two.

The Third Pole, by Mark Synnott

Between this book and Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer, and I don’t ever need to attempt climbing Everest. In particular, frostbite, falling over cliffs, getting trapped in low oxygen environments in bad weather, sudden death…

I look at Google Earth and I can see the amazing views that being high up on the mountain would provide, they are flat out amazing, but yeah, a minimum of two months away from home, several tens of thousands of dollars, and a very non-trivial chance of death or maiming. Pass!

Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman

I expect I’ll have more to say about this book after some additional time digesting it. But, in short, this book from the mid-1980s is prescient about the present media and political landscape.