Book Review

The Walk That Changed Nothing

In 1982, the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries coined a term that would quietly reshape how an entire culture thinks about health: shinrin-yoku (森林浴). The literal translation is “forest bath.” Not a hike. Not exercise. Not a nature walk with a fitness tracker counting your steps. A bath — something you soak in, something that surrounds you, something you do not actively pursue but passively receive.

The practice is deceptively simple. You walk slowly through a forest. You stop frequently. You breathe. You listen. You look at the way light filters through the canopy. You notice the texture of bark, the smell of damp earth, the sound of water moving over stones. There is no destination. There is no goal. There is no metric.

I have been building sites with Hugo for years. I wrote my own theme, tuned my build pipeline, and deployed more static sites than I can count. But I rarely see a resource that captures the why behind Hugo as well as the how. Brian P. Hogan’s Build Websites With Hugo does exactly that.

Published by Pragmatic Bookshelf in 2020, this 154-page book is not a reference manual. It is a guided tour through building a real portfolio site from scratch. You install Hugo, create a theme, add projects and a blog, wire up data sources, and deploy the final result — all while learning Hugo’s mental model.

The Book That Changed How I See Websites

I have recently read Just Enough Design by Taku Satoh, a slim but powerful book published by Chronicle Books. Satoh is one of Japan’s most respected living designers — he has shaped everything from packaging for major brands to museum exhibits — and in this book he distills decades of work into a single idea: hodo-hodo (ほどほど).

The word is ancient Japanese. It means “just enough,” “moderation,” or “the right amount.” When Satoh applies it to his work, it becomes a design philosophy: deliberately holding back, leaving room for the person on the other side to engage with an object according to their own sensibility.

I’ve watched “The Queen’s Gambit” on Netflix, and I must admit — I love this chess-themed dramatic series! And I am not alone in enjoying this brilliant show about chess and genius, of course. According to this article in “Business Insider”, and I quote:

Netflix said last week that “The Queen’s Gambit” was its biggest limited series yet and was watched by 62 million households worldwide in its first 28 days, sparking a massive surge in chess popularity and chess set sales (a view is counted if an account watches two minutes or more).