A new decade, and a new chance to get back to reading even more. Last year, in 2019, I kept a log of every book I read. My initial goal was to read a book a week, which I missed by more than half.

This year, I’m setting more achievable goals. Anyway, this article is primarily for myself, to remember what I read during the year and how I felt about it, but if you’re interested, feel free to follow along!

1. A Tale of Sand

By Jim Henson, Jerry Juhl, and Ramón K. Pérez

As you can tell from this image alone, A Tale…

The Onlooker did as onlookers do: looked on. Of course, there were a great many onlookers here, but only one Onlooker, as far as we’re concerned.

Anyway, this Onlooker, face hidden deep in the harsh shadow cast by the overhead work lights, is cloaked in, of all things, a cloak (in this day and age?), making it right impossible to tell whether he (or she) was a him (or her), or something else entirely.

All we can see, as we look on from our position of privilege, is a pair of metallic silver eyes, inexplicably bright, standing out from the…

Apple has a feature where folks who use reading glasses or are otherwise vision-impaired can adjust the text size on their devices. I’ve seen it called dynamic scaling, or simply font scaling, and it’s a great feature that’s really important for people to be able to use their devices properly.

That being said, I couldn’t find a succinct and accurate explanation of how work with this feature in React Native. …

“STOP.”

The voice carried an authority that I’d not often heard. It was the voice of a man who knows his place in the world.

But, it didn’t belong to a man. Not a fully grown one, anyway. The cloaked figure that stepped in front of me was small, thin. He couldn’t have been much more than a boy.

Blood obscured my vision. I tried to blink it away, but my eyelid was too swollen to comply. I struggled to push myself up on aching arms.

“Leave him be,” the voice echoed forth.

My ambushers chuckled uncomfortably, unsettled by the…

I was attempting to use firestore.getAll() to input an array of references and get them all back at the same time in my web application, but it kept throwing errors. I couldn’t find an easy answer to this, so I wanted to put this out there if you’re running into the same problem.

The situation is this: for some technical reason, the .getAll() method does not work on web.

So the solution is to use a native JavaScript function—Promise.all()—which basically wraps up a bunch of promises, waits for them to resolve, and only then will resolve itself. …

The morning sun drew her silhouette in gold. Light hung off her like a tailor-made dress.

In fact, having not seen where she had come from, it seemed to me that she appeared from within the sunbeams themselves. But it couldn’t be.

Ironic, that at this, my most desperate hour, the storm would break, lightning and darkness giving way to the most beautiful sunrise I had ever laid my eyes upon. And the woman, more beautiful still.

I laughed to myself, or as close as I could manage, given the splitting pain in my side. Clutching the torn fabric of…

Shattered armor. Blurred vision. Lost sword. Pain.

Blood. Mine? I’m not certain.

Through the ringing in my ears, I hear the sound of dying men. Not something one ever grows accustomed to, though I’ve heard it often enough.

Sunrise cuts through the fog in my eyes and drenches the field in flowing golden light. It’s ethereal, soaking into the atmosphere, reflecting from broken steel all around.

Half heaven, half hell.

Aftermath. I’ve seen this sight far too many times. Felt these feelings far too many times. Numb. Angry. Afraid. Desperate relief and great sorrow.

Though I fell a thousand men…

This article contains a review of each book I read throughout the year, in the order of completion.

I’ve been utilizing my local library quite a bit and trying to get back to reading a lot more. If you have any suggestions of books you love, let me know!

If you’re interested in seeing what I’m reading in 2020, you can follow my new post here.

1. An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

By Hank Green

After reading all of his brother John’s books (author of The Fault in our Starts) a few years back and being a fan of Hank through YouTube, I was eager to…