walls.corpus

By Nathan L. Walls

Books read in 2026

Total Read

Five, as of Feb. 18, 2026.

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

Carryovers:

Completed

History Matters, by David McCullough

The book, edited by his daughter Dorie McCullough Lawson and Michael Hill, is in four parts: “Why History”, “Figures in a Landscape”, “Influences”, and “On Writing”. Each part is distinct to itself, but they are all related. Some common themes and phrasing show up across the different pieces. They are a mix of essays, addresses, remembrances, interviews, and tributes.

Throughout, what comes through about McCullough in the writing is the respect he has for his selected subjects, the drive he has to present those subjects well, and the joy he had in the work and journey.

Some keys from across the book that are sticking with me:

I picked up a good number of other recommendations of reading material to look into further. I have McCullough’s Brave Companions on our library shelves already, and plan to look into his biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Truman. But, also, Barbara Tuchman’s work, and Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny are both works I’ll likely dig into later this year.

Agent Running in the Field, by John Le Carré

A fun and entertaining read.

Published in 2019, Agent Running in the Field is Le Carré’s last novel published prior to dying in 2020. This is my first Le Carré novel. A long time ago, I started either Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or Smiley’s People and young teenage me wasn’t able to get into them. I’ll have to give them another try.

Effective Shell, by Dave Kerr

Completed: Jan. 17, 2026 Source: Website Format: Website

Over the past couple of years, there’s been a big push in software development toward using large language models for work. I have been using them for work also in a variety of ways, starting with chat-driven assistance and moving into some rudimentary agentic workflows.

One of the interesting benefits of observing the answers to questions asked is seeing how an LLM decides to solve a given prompt. At least for the sorts of questions I ask, a lot of solutions end up being unfamiliar uses of existing command-line tools and shell scripting.

That’s nifty because once I’ve iterated into a workflow that works, it’s easy to land a durable shell script to address similar issues in the future.

That’s all background for reading Effective Shell where my goals are to reacquaint myself with using the shell beyond what I ordinarily do. I’m as likely as not to write a Ruby script where I need to, but, sometimes, a plain Bash script that calls a series of commands in a simple loop is all that’s needed.

On Muscle, by Bonnie Tsui

A series of interconnected looks at muscle, lifting, anatomy, physicality, culture messaging, family, recovery, adaptation, resilience, memory, and healing through physical movement.

Pairs well with last year’s read of Casey Johnston’s A Physical Education.

Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee

A family history stretching across the 1900s in Korea and Japan. Like reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in 2025, this was a slow read, usually a chapter at a time in the evening.

Completed: Photography and Art

I decided that books that are primarily image based won’t count against my “reading” goal, so I’m going to enumerate these separately. Textbooks, critiques, and similar will still go on the main list.

Other Thing, by Craig Mod

A nearly entirely photographic companion work to Mod’s Random House edition of Things Become Other Things, itself a working of a photography-focused art edition by the same title.

If I recall correctly, Mod went back to various spots in the Kii Peninsula and primarily shot film in the months ahead of the Random House edition of Things Become Other Things release.