Finished reading: Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson 📚 Definitely 5 ⭐. The best book I’ve read in a while and one that gives me some hope for the future of our planet amidst climate change. It’s speculative fiction and I’m sure there’s a bunch of unrealistic enthusiasm for things like blockchain and regenerative agriculture, but this is an educational read and a fine novel. Everyone should read this book.
Finished reading: Breaking Bread with the Dead by Alan Jacobs 📚I think my favorite thing about this book (thank you @ayjay) is the permission it gives to read old books. If the book is no longer politically correct, that’s OK, accept it and use that for insight into the time when it was written. @ayjay is much more nuanced and this book is definitely worth reading.
Currently reading: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline 📚
Finished reading: A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker 📚 I enjoyed this novel a lot, even though it’s about a post-pandemic world. It was written pre-COVID and she got an amazing number of details correct. As an occasional sound tech and concert producer myself, I loved the little snippets about live sound production.
Currently reading: White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo 📚
Finished reading: The Mermaid, the Witch and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall 📚Another one that I quit reading, it just wasn’t doing it for me.
Currently reading: The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall 📚
Finished reading: The Guest Book by Sarah Blake 📚 I loved this book. It’s a good story, with interesting and unexpected plot twists. It’s also a fine history of the changing role of (admittedly, white well-to-do) women over the past 100 years.
Currently reading: A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker 📚
Currently reading: Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind by Alan Jacobs 📚
Currently reading: Ulysses by James Joyce 📚
Finished reading: David Copperfield by Charles Dickens 📚
Finished reading: Inland by Tea Obreht 📚 I didn’t love it, mostly because I liked none of the characters, except perhaps Burke the camel.
Currently reading: The Guest Book by Sarah Blake 📚
Currently reading: David Copperfield by Charles Dickens 📚
Finished reading: Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand 📚A cracking good read. Interesting insights into the world my parents grew up in - 1930s and 1940s America (they had nothing to do with horses!).
Currently reading: Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand 📚
Currently reading: Inland by Téa Obreht 📚
Finished reading: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel 📚 Turns out this is a novel about surviving a pandemic, one which kills 99% of the world’s population. The tension is that I think the author believes the world would be a better place. It is good storytelling.
Finished reading: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño 📚 Ugh. The book is made up of five smaller books. I was quite interested by the first three books, thought-provoking tales which made me consider the nature of reality. But book 4 is horrific, to the point of being sick. Is this a novel about the awfulness of men? Perhaps.
Currently reading: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel 📚
Currently reading: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño 📚
Finished reading: Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan 📚A fascinating, thought-provoking, and beautifully written novel. Highly recommended, especially for all of us techies here. There’s an interesting alternative history subtext: “what if Turing hadn’t been essentially murdered by the uptight Brits?”
Finished reading: Balm in Gilead: Journey of a Healer by Sara Lawrence Lightfoot 📚 Definitely worth reading. The story of a black woman, the only one in her class at Cornell in the 1930s, who goes on to medical school and becomes a renowned child psychiatrist. Useful perspective both from her daughter (the author of this book) and herself about living while Black in America. We have wasted so much energy on racism and prejudice in this country. You can see it in the energy her white male bosses put into thwarting her, and of course the energy she has to waste on being allowed to do the work she is so good at.
Currently reading: Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan 📚