Finished reading: Harvest by Jim Crace 📚Dark and depressing, albeit well written. It’s a novel about the time in England when the economy switched from agrarian commons to capitalist exploitation.
Currently reading: How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi 📚
Finished reading: Ark by Veronica Roth 📚
Finished reading: Randomize by Andy Weir 📚
Finished reading: You Have Arrived At Your Destination by Amor Towles 📚
Finished reading: A Kind of Freedom by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton 📚Definitely worth reading, but such a sad tale of white oppression of black people over generations.
Currently reading: Surfaces and Essences by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander 📚
Finished reading: Ahsoka by E.K. Johnston 📚Totally fun and also a bit helpful to better understand The Mandalorian.
Currently reading: A Kind of Freedom by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton 📚
Finished reading: Binti by Nnedi Okorafor 📚Highly recommended. One of the things it shows is that our concept of diversity is so puny. Imagine a college campus with humans, humanoids, jelly fish beings, sentient trees, and more.
Finished reading: Ulysses by James Joyce 📚 Skipped 100 pages in the middle, the “play.” Yeah, imagining the internal monologue of a bunch of often drunk men has its allure but does get tiresome.
Finished reading: Foundation by Isaac Asimov 📚 So many men. One woman, I think, and all she cares about is jewelry.
Currently reading: Ahsoka by E. K. Johnston 📚
Currently reading: Foundation by Isaac Asimov 📚
Finished reading: Ready Player One 📚Read it mostly so that I could say, “yeah, I read it.” A fun read but not very deep or meaningful.
Currently reading: Binti by Nnedi Okorafor 📚
Ministry for the Future Book Club
📚 One of my favorite futurists is Bryan Alexander, thinker in the academic space. I’m reading this book because he’s sponsoring a book club for it. The comments so far from fellow readers have been fascinating and thought-provoking. The book club is back with Ministry for the Future | Bryan Alexander
The plot focuses on a new United Nations agency tasked with addressing the problem, and how they proceed. A counterpoint character is an aid workers who survives a horrible disaster and tries to figure out how to live afterwards. It’s a rich, ambitious, and frankly optimistic book, and might be just what we need now.
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.