Category: Books
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Reading #68 – 2023 in review
After an eight year hiatus and more than a few personal changes, here’s (most of) what I read in 2023. Nonfiction first. 2023 had much less nonfiction than some years as I found it harder to engage with. I did enjoy How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community by Mia Birdsong despite it…
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Reading #62: California Bones
California Bones by Greg Van Eekhout I’ve lived in California for almost 18 years now, but last year was my first visit to the La Brea Tar Pits. The pits themselves are bubbly, smelly, and a little anticlimactic. The life-sized models are 70s-esque and cartoonish. Watching paleontologists work on giant crated hunks of tar extracted…
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Reading #61: The Inquisition, Vikings, and Cossacks
I’m skipping twenty or so books I’ve failed to write about in a timely manner in favor of some more recent ones. London Under by Peter Ackroyd I love London, history, underground things, and spooky things–therefore this was a pleasure to read. It’s not a linear history or narrative, more a series of vignettes focusing…
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Reading #60 2013 Bankruptcy Edition
I’m declaring reading note bankruptcy for anything read in 2013. Or early 2014. It was a busy summer and fall and winter. I did keep a list, though. Nonfiction Of the nonfiction, I particularly recommend How Music Works by David Byrne and A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit. Both expanded my understanding of what humans can do,…
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Reading #59: Statistical Wizards, Revelations, and Vampires
Nonfiction Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation by Elaine Pagels This is a general introduction to the Book of Revalation, the historical contexts in which it was written and later understood, and what current scholarship has to say about it. I’m not particularly literate in the Bible (nevermind biblical scholarship), so…
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Reading #58: Cooperatives, Stone Axes, and Soviets
Nonfiction The Company We Keep: Reinventing Small Business for People, Community, and Place by John Abrams John Abrams is the founder of South Mountain Company, a design & build worker-owned cooperative in Martha’s Vineyard. His books describes the history of the company, their choice to move to a worker-owned cooperative model, and their overall philosophy…
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Reading #56: Elites, Apocalypses, and Tentacle Noir
There are some damn good books in this one. Nonfiction Twilight Of the Elites: America after Meritocracy – Christopher Hayes Hayes (aka “the host of that show on cable news where people don’t yell”) has one clear and central argument: the culture of meritocracy in this country is both ineffective and actively harmful. He…
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A life lesson, or, what is seen cannot be unseen.
It was a lesson I should already have learned. I had learned it. Many years ago, as a teenager growing up in Washington D.C., I worked a summer job at Reiter's Books on K Street. Reiter's was and remains one of the finest science & technology bookstores in the world. It was a great job, as long as…
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Reading #55
I've been keeping loose track of the books I read for a while now, on various platforms. I'm going to try doing it here for a while. Nonfiction Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile by Taras GrescoeTaras Grescoe really doesn't like cars: or rather, he really doesn't like what happens to cities when…
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Drones and Automated Trading Systems
This week I reread William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive for the umpteenth time. It’s the final book of the Sprawl trilogy which started with the more famous Neuromancer. This time, there were some lovely resonances between the books and the world of today, almost 25 years after it was published. One detail that jumped out at…