I have been amazed on a daily basis by the quality of the Citizen Soldiers and D-Day audio books I've been listening to by Stephen Ambrose. For many people, history is a subject concerned with the memorization of disjointed facts, names, and dates, but Ambrose makes it personal. He has an incredible ability to weave together stories from interviews, letters, and official records into a captivating narrative that tells the bigger picture. It's history from the bottom up, just like those involved would tell it to their children and grandchildren.

Learning the Allied invasion of Europe took place on June 6th, 1944 is much more memorable when you hear from soldiers who boarded ships on June 5th only to endure twenty-four hours of seasickness while the invasion was delayed a day due to bad weather. The often incredible acts of heroism are more easily understood when you read letters home saying soldiers were most concerned about letting down the men who had become like family to them. You start to see individuals among the millions of soldiers when you hear stories like about the paratrooper who jumped out of the plane and dropped a baseball on which he had written "We're coming for you, Hitler." And you get a genuine feel for the young men wanting to fit in and show solidarity when you hear about one pre-invasion squad shaving their heads bald and seeing the practice spread to thousands of men.

Stephen Ambrose sets the standard for how history should be written.

My What I'm Reading page now has some stats for 2005 on the right side. I'm pleased with finishing thirteen books and eleven audio books, but not with the fact that I slacked off in the second half of the year. The large version of my average reading rate graph (which always shows the past twelve months) has a noticeable decline after mid-summer.

I hope to read more consistently in 2006. My goal for this year is around twenty books and fifteen audio books. Megan even got me a little LED reading light for Christmas so I can get a few more pages in at night without keeping her up.

Today I made a few additions to my web site that RSS readers might not have noticed.

First, I fulfilled one of the goals I mentioned a while ago for my What I'm Reading page. I added a graph (click here for a large version) that shows the average number of pages I've been reading per day. It's a simple average of the number of pages in the book divided by the number of days between when I started the book and when I finished it. Not doing any reading for a few days gets averaged in just as reading a hundred pages in a day does.

Second, I released a python script I wrote called IMAPImport that imports email files into an IMAP server. I recently used this to restore my Cyrus IMAP mail server after the hard drive crashed.

And finally, I put a new page up on my web site that shows my current Amazon.com wishlist. Who knows, maybe you're feeling generous today... :)

Ok, that's it. After getting my new Linux server finalized, my web site updated, and some stuff done around the house it's finally time for bed.

Thanks in part to the handy RSS.NET library, I now have an RSS feed for books I'm reading. The link to the feed is here and it can also be seen on the right side of my homepage. Now I just need to get some book reviews written...

I've been busy working on the "What I'm Reading" section of my site. I just added a link to view all the books I've read. I've only entered my four most recent books so far, but I'm planning to go back and enter older ones soon.

Currently, I enter a book's ISBN number into my system and the book's info and cover image are retrieved using Amazon's excellent web service API. My system stores the ISBN number, title, author, number of pages, the date I started the book, and the date I finished the book, but I'm planning to add a spot for ratings and comments, too. Ultimately, I'd like to be able to compute some statistics and maybe even generate a graph for how much reading I've been doing.

More posts will follow as I complete more features, but now it's time for bed. The only problem with working on my book tracking system until midnight is that now I don't have any time left to actually do any reading! :)

I just added a new sidebar to the main page of my blog called "What I'm Reading". This section is the first visible result of my new system for keeping track of the books I read. It's pretty basic so far and just shows the cover of the book I'm currently reading with a link to the book on Amazon, but more features are on the way!