books

Finished reading On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder. Quick and bracing; nothing I didn’t already know, but a good refresher.

Another thing that strikes me about Moonbound is its fundamental kindness and generosity.

Finished reading Moonbound by Robin Sloan. The book started with a banger of a prologue, eased off a fair bit, and brought it back up for the finale. Even though I didn’t quite fall in love with the book, I enjoyed it thoroughly, perhaps because it consistently surprised me.

Finished reading Lake of Souls by Ann Leckie, a collection of short stories. A handful are set, at least notionally, in her Imperial Radch setting, several are in the setting of The Raven Tower, and several others are their own things. I enjoyed all of them to greater or lesser degrees; The Raven Tower in particular seems perfect for short stories.

Finished rereading The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie. I love this fantasy novel, about gods and bargains and thoughtfulness, and its casual queerness is the cherry on top.

Finished reading The Design of Books by Debbie Berne. This is a casual overview of the process of, as it says on the cover, designing books, from cover to page layout to interacting with authors and editors. Very interesting, though of course not especially relevant to my life.

Finished reading Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan, and its accompanying novella “Ajax Penumbra 1969”. This was fun; it felt like a light Neal Stephenson novel, in length and intensity and depth, and earnest where Stephenson tends ironic.

Finished reading The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. A promising setup (what if people could step through an endless series of parallel Earths?) was let down by merely adequate writing and a very abrupt out-of-nowhere ending (that wasn’t really an ending at all but a setup for the next book). Glad I read this book; not sure if I’ll read the next.

Finished reading Dinner in Rome: A History of the World in One Meal by Andreas Viestad: a light overview of food and history, through the lens of a single (large) meal at Rome’s La Carbonara. The lightness is counterbalanced by an excellent bibliography, like A History of the World in Six Glasses (discussed in the bibliography).

Finished reading The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett, another murder mystery, though not quite so noir-y as Cahokia Jazz. This one is set in an odd fantasy world, and we’re left with a clear path to more stories starring the protagonist and his brash boss.

Thinking back on it, the book feels somewhat similar to Bridge of Birds.

Finished reading Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. This was a harrowing book, written in the early ’90s, about a teenager growing up as the United States is collapsing in 2024. It ended on a slightly hopeful note, and the book’s society is more collapsed than ours, so I guess there’s that.

Content warning: nothing on-screen, but there are plenty of references to rape.

Finished reading You Deserve a Tech Union by Ethan Marcotte. I’ve needed to pace myself with this, because I keep getting mad about my job and the industry as a whole. Even though the point of the book is to inspire and mobilize unionizing, I’ve ended up disheartened. (This will pass.)

Finished reading Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford, a noir set in the city of Cahokia in an alternate 1922. The story ends up being a bit like one of Le Guin’s (explicitly so), ending up asking whether a utopia is worth the price; in the meantime, it explores cultural identity, racism, and economics, with all the elements of noir (a corrupt establishment, dirty police, a femme fatale, etc.). I loved this, another candidate for book of the year.

Finished reading The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. This was a wild ride — I couldn’t put it down — about labor and sentience and connection. Very briefly: a woman and the only possibly-sentient android explore the possibility of an octopus civilization, while a man is enslaved on a fishing trawler run by an AI and a savant tries to hack into a more sophisticated AI. This will be sticking with me for a while, a candidate for book of the year.

Rhymes with Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin and, unexpectedly, Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” which I’ve already been listening to quite a bit lately.

Finished reading Witch King by Martha Wells, whose protagonist is the demon a bunch of fools tried to bind in the first chapter. Turns out he’s mostly a nice guy, or at least trying, as he tries to (in one arc of the story) overthrow an evil empire and (in the other) prevent a new empire from taking its place. Quite good.