A Sunny day for war

I recently read Sun Tzu's The Art of War. I read it a while back in college, but was only trying to get through the assignment as fast as possible so that I could go focus on more challenging chemistry assignments which sucked up all my time for a quarter.

The book contains pithy aphorisms, each served up in easily digestible portions to suit the busy warlord on a rampage. However, the wisdom is also useful in modern life, and strangely well suited to being read by daily subscription in an RSS reader. Dailylit.com offers the Art of War as well as many other titles. I started reading the book around Halloween, and finished by Wigilia (Christmas Eve). The RSS-able format is really easy to process, for this title at least, and convenient.

DailyLit and the Art of War

I recently subscribed to DailyLit based on a recommendation from fellow book blogger Sharon at Ex Libris. I'm starting out with a feed for Sun Tzu's the Art of War. I've never been able to connect with the text before, as I found the list approach to be stilted. But somehow it seems to fit very well as an rss feed. Just as Sun Tzu intended it, I suppose. It just goes to show that good content can work in any media.

One issue I'm having with it is that I usually post my progress status in the sidebar with a snippet of javascript such as showing how far I've read as a simple percentage of pages read. But the feed from dailylit doesn't let me do that easily; they do say how many episodes there are in a book, but I've no idea whether those are each of equal length or not. So, for example, I've read 2 of 16 episodes of The Art of War but I have no idea if that means I am 12.5% of the way through or not. My quantitatively oriented gray matter is quivering with frustration at this obvious oversight.

Photo of book by Nuno Barreto