My Favorite Productivity Tools

Staying organized in a world full of distractions is tough, but I’ve found a way to make it work for me without losing my mind. My system is a mix of digital tools, gamification, and good old-fashioned pen and paper to keep me on track. If you’re looking for a way to stop doom scrolling and focus on getting more personal projects done, here’s how I use Habitica, Focumon, Hobonichi, Notion, and the Eisenhower Matrix to stay productive without burning out. I would also recommend checking out my previous article on utilizing RSS feeds to escape from apps with infinite scroll. 

The way in which I use these tools may not be the best way to go about using them, but I hope that sharing how I use them can open up new ideas for you in which you can use them. 

Habitica, formerly Habit RPG, is an app that essentially gamifies your daily to-do list. The party system helps add an additional level of personal accountability since during quests you can cause damage to the rest of your party if you fail to complete your tasks. Discord servers for individual Habitica parties over the years have led me into several communities that have persisted long past the original parties themselves, where users support and encourage each other while also holding each other accountable. If you’re struggling with motivation, having a group to check in with helps big time.

Here is what my Habitica task board has looked like in the past,
in order to give you some ideas on how to best use the tool.
(Click to enlarge)

One of the drawbacks of Habitica is that longer drawn out tasks don’t always reward you the same way that smaller tasks do. Chunking your tasks is one strategy to address this issue. You can also set the difficulty for different tasks, but the variation in rewards is not much. What I’ve found to be helpful in this case is to use the site Focumon in conjunction with Habitica. 

Focumon is like the Pomodoro Technique but gamified, breaking work into short sprints with quick breaks. This keeps me focused without turning me into a burnt out zombie. Focumon is great for deep work - writing, coding, brainstorming, cleaning, and even working on this blog. This tool works really well in conjunction with Habitica because it rewards you for much longer tasks that are difficult to chunk in a way that feels better than how Habitica handles them. Nothing in this article is promotional, and if it were, it would be clearly labeled as such. However, if you do want to start using Focumon, please add me (@Carm_GeDK) as a referral on your Community Page so that I can get some extra in-game items.

Habitica and Focumon work really well for recurring tasks that come up through the week. For appointments, deadlines, and one-off tasks: I stick to using my Hobonichi planner. The Hobonichi planner is simply a Japanese daily planner. However, in all my time using daily planners since elementary school, it's simply the best one I have used. They're compact and minimalist - which as a result makes them highly customizable. They're also incredibly high quality - which means they stay in excellent condition after a year of daily use and extensive travel. The planners do tend to be pricey, but the annual purchase price has always more than paid for itself with how organized they've kept me.

I used to use Google Calendar, but got freaked out when they started showing me specific images for my appointments. For example, my dentist appointments would should an image of a tooth and toothbrush, which meant that Google parses the information that you put into the Calendar application. While Google says that they will never use Calendar data to advertise to you, if they are lying here, it’s not like it would be the first time they did; even if that is not the case, what's stopping them from changing their policy and retroactively parsing your data for marketing purposes in the future? They already have always done this with your email… 

I've used Hobonichi planners for years now.

I’ve used Hobonichis for four years now. While I tend to use it for one-off task management, please note that the way I use it is very rigid and maybe even an unimaginative way to go about using your Hobonichi yourself. I’d recommend checking out the subreddit r/hobonichi to see all the imaginative ways in which people do use their Hobonichis. Many people, for example, use the planners for journaling and drawing.

Notion natively supports organizational tools like Kanban boards, database tables, and lots of other pre-built templates that are free. I find that Notion is the best way for me to keep track of notes over a long period of time. I do still tend to take a lot of notes with pen and paper, because note-taking is how I tend to best learn. But in Notion, I track blog post ideas I haven’t gotten to yet (since it allows me to quickly add notes on my phone or computer as new fleeting ideas come to me), as well as films and books I have yet to read, all my music lesson notes with links to class videos, questions for my instructor that arise throughout the week, and a list of new songs I want to learn or have already learned.

Notion also includes an AI tool that quickly allows you to generate all of those organizational tools efficiently. For example, you could quickly create a Kanban board with a list of all your long term project Notion pages listed. In less than a minute you can have a Kanban board that tracks all of your projects and what status they are in. (I’ll likely make a further instructional video on how to do this in the near future.) If this AI functionality is ever removed from Notion, or put behind a paywall, just about any free AI or LLM tool can do this for you with Notion, it’s frankly just convenient to have the tool available inside the application. 

Eisenhower Matrix from Wikimedia Commons

The Eisenhower Matrix helps me figure out what actually matters. Prioritizing is half the battle, and applying this matrix to all my work keeps me from wasting time on low-impact distractions, and helps me focus on bigger-picture impact rather than one-off tasks. 

I didn't want to host an image of someone else's work, but here is a link to the specific Eisenhower Matrix image I have posted on my wall behind my desk.

Building a Better Online Experience: RSS is More Useful Than Ever

Algorithm-driven content littered with advertisements, astroturfing, bots, and global tracking cookies have made RSS feeds relevant again. Repeatedly, on social media, I see users complaining about the enshitification of the Internet and that the Internet isn’t what it used to be. My answer to this complaint is that if your online experience in the 2020s is primarily via the algos, you have no place complaining about the enshitification of the Internet, because all of the content you consume already is shit. Furthermore, it’s never been easier or more accessible for anyone to create a website, estore, or to have a digital presence. In his book The Pathles Path author Paul Millard argues that “the Internet has handed people the means of production” and I agree with this sentiment: Is the internet slowly being privatized? Absolutely. Is it easier than ever before to have an estore or self publish? Absolutely. Yes, that means your estore or personal enterprise won't immediately be as successful, but that's the trade off.

As long as you are in an algo stream, you are being manipulated. This is especially evident on platforms like Facebook, where engagement is driven by content designed to provoke a strong emotional reaction, often within the first two to five posts in your feed. Social media sites like Reddit are also not immune to misinformation. For example: here is an image that was reposted again, again, and again on Reddit the week that I started writing this post. It contains a photoshopped image of a worker being arrested by ICE while wearing a Latinos For Trump shirt. Today most of the top comments point out that the image was fake, this was not the case on the day that the image repeatedly made it to the front page of the website.
 

 

 

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) will allow you to have a stream of news and information similar to your Reddit feed, Facebook feed, and whatever other social media sites that you’re stuck with using. The difference is that your RSS feed will be built by you outside of the ecosystem of any one website. Instead of being based on any algorithm, your feed instead will be based on how recent the content is - if that's how you configure your feed to work for you in the first place. What I am getting at is that using an RSS reader is one way in which you can unenshitify your Internet experience.

Over the past few months I found that as I fell back on more smaller dedicated communities, resources, and websites; my time online is a lot more engaging and interesting. In a recent interview, Mark Zuckerberg reflected a similar sentiment in his recent Joe Rogan Interview about 37 minutes in. My warning when engaging in smaller online comunities is to make sure that you don’t fall into an echo chamber. A good way to avoid this pitfall is to keep in mind that if you find yourself agreeing with everything that a person says, that person is probably swindling you. Subscribe to and keep an eye on media that you are skeptical of and feel like you should keep an eye on, but be sure to prioritize your mental health first. Also, focus creating online communities of people you already know: bring together your friends and neighbors into group chats and Discord channels. Build connections.

I personally use a reader called Feedly, but I'm open to other RSS readers if anyone suggests one that works better for them. Open RSS seems to have a similar ethos to what I am expressing here. Below are some examples of things that you can plug into an RSS reader to inspire you. Many of these services can just be added to your RSS reader app by searching for them in the app without having to follow the below steps.

News:
I follow aggregate tech news sites Slashdot and Boing Boing, making my own RSS feed an aggregate of aggregates in a way. Furthermore, it's going to be important to follow individual writers and contributors as legacy media continues to fail and decline in quality. I suggest following Ken Klipinstein on Substack. Every Substack newsletter has an RSS feed that allows users to subscribe without needing an email address that can be accessed by adding /feed at the end of the URL.

NPR Podcasts also have RSS feeds, which can be accessed on the NPR website's podcast pages themselves:

In most RSS readers you can also set keyword filters for you name, company, revelant topics you are interested in, etc.

Sports:
I follow RSS for specific teams that give me news updates for example:
https://www.pff.com/pff-rss

Blogs:
Bruce Schneier is a leading cybersecurity expert, cryptographer, and author who writes about digital security, privacy, and government surveillance.
Here is the RSS link for his blog.

I am now dedicated to operating an RSS feed for this site.
Here is the RSS link for this blog.

Messaging:
Many RSS readers will now follow Telegram and Signal channels. This can be helpful when you follow someone on one of these apps and it's how they primarily get news and updates out.

Podcasts:
Usually, at least one of the streaming platforms that distributes podcasts you listen to will natively be supported by the RSS reader of your choice.

Youtube:
The Subscribe feature on Youtube notoriously does not work.You might miss out on new content or live streams from your favorite YouTubers simply because their latest video never appears on your subscription page, or you don’t receive a notification. Many RSS Readers will natively support Youtube channels just by you providing the URL to the Youtube channels that you want to follow.

Steam feeds:
The news page for any game on Steam has a link for an RSS feed. This allows you to get patch updates for games directly in your feed.

GitHub Release Feeds:
Repo releases:
https://github.com/:owner/:repo/releases.atom
 
Repo commits:
https://github.com/:owner/:repo/commits.atom
 
Private feed:
You can find Subscribe to your news feed in dashboard page after login
https://github.com/:user.private.atom?token=:secret

Repo tags:
https://github.com/:user/:repo/tags.atom

User activity
https://github.com/:user.atom

Open RSS also provides Github RSS feeds:
https://openrss.org/blog/github-rss-feeds

Weather:
The National Weather Service offers weather updates via RSS. For example here is the RSS feed for Albany:
https://www.weather.gov/rss_page.php?site_name=aly

What I've Read in The Second Half of 2024

 Inner Gold - Robert Johnson

Inner Gold is an  exploration of the concept of psychological projection; where individuals attribute their own thoughts, feelings, and traits to others. Rather than use projection in a negative way, as it usually is in today’s discourse, Johnson talks about how we will project positive aspects of ourselves onto others that we ourselves are unable to handle. Johnson uses Jungian psychology to explain how recognizing and reclaiming these projected elements can lead to personal growth and deeper self-awareness. The book is pretty brief but deeply insightful; it makes complex psychological concepts accessible and practical for readers seeking self-improvement and a better understanding of their inner selves. I highly recommend this book out of everything I read over the past six months.

Earth To Moon - Moon Zappa

Moon’s memoir paints a whole new side of Frank Zappa that is missing from public perception and will change what his legacy is. Moon discusses growing up and how her father was largely absent between his touring and obsession with writing music, and her mother who was a full blown narcissist.

I grew up in a household EXACTLY like what is described in that book; one narcissist parent and one checked out parent while being the oldest child of three. I was told life's not fair when my parents were cruel, I was responsible for raising my siblings, taking care of my parents emotionally, and was shamed for not prioritizing anyone in the family before myself. It's uncanny how similar my experience is to what I read in this book. The twist is that I read Frank Zappa's autobiography multiple times as a teenager. I loved the chapter about him being a parent because he sounded so reasonable and down to earth. I wished that I lived in the household he described in that book. I guess Moon does too...

Something that stood out to me before reading this book is that Moon did an interview on Mark Maron’s podcast. Around the 1:01:13 timestamp Moon talks about this dipshit LA yoga anatomy class where they get cadavers donated to science so that they can pick up and handle the organs, and then immediately talk about going to Burning Man. After hearing about this yoga class I got unenrolled from being an organ donor in California.

Batman: White Knight - Sean Murphy

I made a mistake by reading this graphic novel / comic, the mistake being not to take reading recommendations from Reddit. Users there said that this series put the Batman / Joker dynamic on its head by making Batman the bad guy and the Joker the good guy. This really isn't the case and there wasn’t much in this series for me: the story is geared towards adolescents. I liked some of the art but a lot of the plot points felt like they were taken out of a scenario a  group of kids came up with while playing in their backyard. A major plot point is that there are giant transportation tunnels under Gotham City that no one know about even though an army of workers was brought in to make these giant tunnels. Bruce Wayne’s father is shown to have done business with the Nazis but Bruce is not aware of this probably because of how Batman could be portrayed. Black Lives Matters is portrayed as a media manipulation rather than a grassroots movement.

I would instead recommend The Dark Knight Returns, animated by Frank Miller which depicts a Bruce Wayne who is aging out of the Batman role or The Killing Joke.

Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser

I first read this book in high school, I borrowed it from a friend’s house after I saw it sitting on a bookcase in their basement, and I forgot how much of an impact this book had on me. The investigation around Colorado Springs helped me understand that while growing up in Springfield Massachusetts did kinda suck, there were plenty of other places in America that were a ‘whole lot worse; that the stroads with Mcdonalds, Wendy’s, and Taco Bell were strategically planned.

Fast Food Nation is still a really good book. While it tries to end on a high note, it hurts to think how much worse off the US is when it comes to health, labor, and the wealth of its working class people. While I came back to this book to remind myself why I need to curb some unhealthy eating habits that I picked up during lockdown, I was surprised at how much of a contemporary realistic American slice-of-life book this is. In terms of eating, I remember my takeaways from this book being that pink ground beef is such much more worse for you because almost all of the bacteria in the meat is introduced during the processing process and that one fast food hamburger can include the meat from a dozen to hundreds of different cows. It’s a beef slurry patty.

The finer details is that ecoli is caused by feces. When you get bad food poisoning because of eating undercooked beef, it’s because there is either shit in your meat, or the cows themselves were living in shit before they were slaughtered. When you get food poisoning from veggies, it's because the vegetables grew downstream from a meat processing plant, and absorbed ecoli from runoff water from the plant. The symptoms of poisoning from ecoli in adults can include shitting and pissing blood, and it’s even more dangerous for children. There is a sentence in the book that says “the spillage rate at the gut table can be twenty percent”. Meaning that when they remove the intestines from the cows in the slaughterhouse, the insides of the intestines spills out onto the carcasses of 1 out of 5 of the other cows.

Because of this book I tend to eat a lot more poultry and fish though I know that industrial farming for birds and fish are not great either. I try to buy all my beef farm-direct. I love hamburgers, but it’s hard to get someone to sometimes understand why I won’t eat it if it’s pink inside. In high school, after reading this book, I ate a hamburger from Texas Roadhouse and even though I ordered it medium, it was all pink inside and delicious. I figured that 1) Texas Roadhouse was probably quality and 2) I was too chickenshit to send it back and that first bite was so good. I got more sick than I’ve ever been from food again. I didn’t shit or piss blood but for years the thought of the smell of Texas roadhouse turned my stomach upside down, our family went back some time after and I just ate the rolls and peanuts. Years later I’m standing at Benders in San Francisco ordering food. I order a medium burger (the sign said local grass-fed beef, who knows for sure though) and the guy in an English accent says “why do you do that to yourself? We grind the meat ourselves”. I guess he knew what I was talking about, but I couldn’t roll the dice anymore than I already was by ordering ground beef.

The TB12 Method - Tom Brady

After having spent the last few years focusing on weight lifting instead of cardio, I was finding that despite going to yoga classes and stretching regularly before and after exercise, I was more stiff that usual. Reading this book helped me understand that by making my muscles more dense and big I had optimized my muscles in a way that really didn’t accomplish what I wanted to do when distance running. I can now see how Brady’s concept of pliability plays into orchestrating your body’s physical health and it’s something that I am still working into my daily workout routines.

This is a really great book for anyone who invests in their health and body. Granted some of the habits and advice given is likely more suited for an adolescent than an adult. Some suggestions were interesting: Brady advocates for a plant based fiber rich diet and that Brady recommends sleeping in “bio-ceramic” sleepwear (also called recovery wear) and says that he is trying to figure out how to wear it all the time.

There are some great recipes in this book as well as suggested resistance training exercises that you can do yourself. It’s mostly basic exercises with resistance bands. Practicing pliability fully requires working often with a trainer who is trained in it, which I think is out of reach for most people in terms of both cost and logistics.

Cult of The Dead Cow - Joseph Mann

Cult of The Dead Cow is a written history of the eponymous hacking group. I voraciously read a lot of the text files they had posted when I was a teenager and the book describing the CDC as a labyrinth is right on the nose. This book revealed that Beto O’rouke was a member of CDC, though he was more of a creative writer than a hacker. It also revealed that the federal government used the CDC remote access tool BackOriface in international operations.

Just like how the book It Came From Something Awful draws a straight line from Rich Kyanka creating Something Awful to Donald Trump getting elected president, this book draws a straight line from the Grateful Dead to the existence of this hacking group - whose members would go on to proliferate in just about every major tech company. The member Mudge is now the CIO of DARPA. One member contributed heavily to Windows XP Service Pack 2 (maybe in 2024 that doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it was at the time. Windows XP was an awful product before SP2). The group's name may sound funny, but their existence has more than one fingerprint on the lives of anyone who has ever accessed the Internet. Funnily enough, you could consider this book a prequel to both It Came From Something Awful and Mindfuck.

WizzyWig - Ed Piskor

The titular character, as well as the story in general, is a composite of hackers throughout computer history. I would recommend reading Accidental Empires, or The Art of Deception instead of this. I had read the first volume of this comic when Boing Boing posted about it sometime in the early 2010s. I was looking forward to reading the remaining volumes of this comic when they came out, but I never got around to them when they eventually came out as life caught up with me.

With the recent news of Ed Piskor killing himself after being accused of sexual misconduct, I figured I might as well put a pin in this series as I was interested to see the direction the story went. The story in the book exaggerates injustices against real life hacker Kevin Mitnick that don’t need to be embellished. The only humor in the book is really just being crude for the sake of being crude. I don’t really find floppy dicks compelling, especially if they don’t have any relation to the story. If you’re interested in learning about hackers I would recommend just sticking to primary sources, there’s plenty of talks that Mitnick himself gave and plenty of recordings of the Off The Wall radio program out there. There’s nothing new or interesting in this book unfortunately.

Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson

As a cyberpunk book, Snow Crash does what Neuromancer did when it came to predicting the direction of computer technology is/was heading, but in a more contemporary way than Neuromancer. The book at times is a little too edgy, the way that Stephenson writes a teenage female protagonist in the face of the threat of sexual assault is cringe. However, I genuinely think that Snow Crash is a seminal work that defines and influenced the way we think about the internet and virtual reality today. The way that Stephenson weaves Sumerian history and lore into the story offers insight into bronze age influence on language, philosophy, and our myths that exist today without the usual interference of Abrahamic religions.

The Parable of The Sower - Olivia Butler

I read this book after Snow Crash, I had mentioned to a coworker that I was so surprised at how well Neuromancer and Snow Crash predicted the current state and direction of computer technology; I wanted to find an even more recent cyberpunk book that would continue to do the same thing. He recommended this book… The Parable of The Sower is not that book. After the first 100 pages, I was of the mind that The Parable of The Sower is post apocalyptic young adult fiction for the children of people who donate to NPR. I was getting the impression that the book was very derivative; it wasn’t until I looked at the publishing page of this book and saw that it was written in 1993. The reality of the situation is that this book was ahead of its time and all post-apocalyptic fiction after it has borrowed from it either directly or indirectly. As a result I would put this book at the top of my post-apocalyptic fiction recommendations, over Alas Babylon and The Road.

Polls are a 20th century tool in the 21st century

    In the information age you cannot honestly get a representative polling sample of anything other than "people who are willing to take surveys". People who take surveys are weird. I know this because I take surveys. And after college the only job I was able to get was to sit in an Abt SRBI call center in Hadley Massachusetts where I had to conduct Pew Research surveys asking women about their pap smears; the more honest answer as to why I take surveys is that I have a penance to pay.

    Accuse me of using the availability heuristic. Having worked in a research call center, I can tell you that the people who take these surveys are not reflective of average Americans. They are people who still have a landline phone. They are the people who are so lonely, bored, and senile that they will send thousands of dollars in Google Play gift cards to scammers with foreign accents. They will talk to anybody that will listen. You'll save more lives doing survey calls than you will working the crisis line, believe me, I've done that job too. 

    In the 21st century some surveys are still only conducted on landlines as a way to guarantee that the person that is being rang is physically in the place that they are being surveyed. Think of all the people you know that have a landline and actually answer it. All of the people you know that's had a Nelson Box in their house. Do those people, even if you actually even know any, reflect an accurate sampling of America?

     The second cohort of data you're getting in your polling is bad actors. There's nothing stopping an individual from using tools like Selenium and Beautiful Soup in conjunction the Chat GPT API to automatically fill out surveys online. Heck, you can do the same exact thing on phone lines. Here's a quick example I whipped up using an AI vendor:

For what it's worth, I time-boxed for myself an hour to configure and coach the LLM as well as record the audio. With a little more time this LLM could do much better. This kind of work is literally not worth any one individual's time outside of tinkering. But if someone has a vested interest in manipulating polls? This is money on the table.

   While individual bad actors do exist, they typically represent a smaller portion of the overall sample. It wasn't unusual for someone on the phone to respond to your questions while being completely unserious or dismissive. I remember an older colleague once sharing a story about how "sometimes you just do what you have to do to get the job done", which ended with her telling me about a time where she got a guy to finish a whole survey even though she could tell that he was pleasuring himself on the call. The most you could hope for is to note that the survey taker was disingenuous or likely messing with you, but that was it. It wasn't the survey taker's jobs to triage the data, however when's the last time you saw a public election poll that listed the sample size and notes on why certain responses were excluded from the data?

    The absence of clear information about research methodologies in most election polls suggests that these polls are more of a media-driven product designed for public consumption than a reliable source of objective data. This lack of transparency turns polls into a form of entertainment or narrative shaping, where their primary function may be to engage audiences, influence perceptions, or reinforce certain viewpoints, rather than to provide rigorous and unbiased insights into voter behavior.

Further Reading: The Problem with polls.

What I've Read Halfway Into 2024

The Woman in Me - Brittney Spears

 

This book made me realize just how in the limelight Brittney Spears has been in almost my entire lifetime, because I realized I was aware of just about every aspect of her life as I read through this book despite never really being a fan. This book is heartbreaking.
 

Kill It With Fire - Marianne Bellotti

 

I bought this book solely because of the cover and identifying the dumpster fire on the cover as being the place I was working at the time. It was happenstance, but this book is really good. It provides a framework for dealing with technical debt, offering strategies to update aging systems without massive resource expenditure in a way that I could identify with personally. It addressed large technical problems/projects I have faced at work and confounded solutions and approaches to solving these problems. This book helped me land my next job and escape the dumpster fire. 

 

 

Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said - Phillip K Dick

 

I’ve read four other Phillip K Dick books and a handful of his short stories. I don’t know what I can say about this book without giving it away but this was likely my least favorite of his books that I have read so far. I'd suggest reading first Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Ubik.

 

 

Fighting Fantasy Books - Various Authors
 

I came across these books when looking for solo RPG books; seeing that Steve Jackson had written and co-authored some of these got my attention. I read / played City of Thieves by Ian Livingstone and Sorcery! - The Shamutani Hills by Steve Jackson. These books are Choose Your Own Adventure books with dice rolling. At first I thought that these books were a lot more forgiving than the CYOA books, but by them time I finished them I realized the game-play is exactly the same: if you don’t make the exact right decisions in the right order, you will not win. Also like the CYOA books, these are geared towards children. I would recommend Ironsworn instead of these books. 

 

Neuromancer - William Gibson

is the first book I’ve read since I can remember where I had to use Sparknotes to keep up with what was going on. The characters speak in a casual way to each other, similar to hard boiled detective novels which is tricky (for me) to follow. There’s a lot going on here; you can see where the Wachowskis got a lot of their inspiration from for The Matrix. It’s fascinating how Gibson hit the nail on the head in the 80s when it came to the evolution of AI and technology. It gets said a lot already but it really needs to be acknowledged just how prophetic Gibson was when it came to technology here. 

 

The Medium is the Massage - Marshall McLuhan

 

The central idea of this media analysis book is that technologies are the messages, rather than the content of the communication. I know that's a heady statement to make, but that's what this book is. It mainly relies on formatting and images to convey its message. Many times while reading this book, I kept thinking of the “It insists upon itself” meme; I do think that this book insists on itself. I will also say that there are a lot of cool ideas in this book that, if you were a communications major or marketing major, you could write papers on and elaborate on. You can also chase down and explore further the many ideas that come up in this book.

She Come by It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs

- Sarah Smarsh

 

My friend lent me this book after I said I wanted to read more book about and by women. She Come by It Natural is a heartfelt tribute to Parton and the women who resonate with her music, but it doesn't bring much new to the table when it comes to being a biography about Parton. Smarsh's admiration for Parton is clear and her narrative is filled with personal anecdotes and reflections and the book largely reiterates well-known aspects of Parton's life and career. 

I was under the impression that most of America knew of Parton and the charitable work she has done. On the subject of Parton’s Imagination Library project, the book quotes children’s author Robert Munsch saying “I thought of Dolly Parton as this singer with the really big boobs who was in the movies with, like, the really big boobs. I had no idea.” I was reading this book while riding the bus and after asking what I was reading a lady said “I used to LOVE watching Elvira on TV”. I guess if that's you're impression of Dolly Parton, maybe check this one out.

 

Empire of The Summer Moon - S.C. Gwynne

Gwynne's meticulous research and vivid storytelling bring to life the incredible saga of Quanah Parker, the last great Comanche chief, and his extraordinary journey from a fierce warrior to a respected leader and eventual advocate for his people. The book not only provides a comprehensive account of the Comanche's way of life but also paints a broader picture of the American West during a time of profound transformation. Gwynne's ability to blend historical facts makes this a compelling read that is both informative and captivating.

 

Growing up in New England and learning about the tribes that lived there versus the plains tribes which I really only first really learned about in this book was fascinating. Understanding how torture, murder, and rape were accepted parts of plains natives' lives really helps shatter the Noble Savage myth that a lot of us are taught. I've listed these books in the order in which I finished them. I read half of this book during lock-down, and recently finished it. I would recommend this book before all others on this list.