goal

target: 30 - read: 05 (so far)

if i were a better man, i’d do something high minded, like targeting research in a specific vein of study. i am not that man.

books

note, this is a running list.

maus i: a survivor’s tale: my father bleeds history (art spiegelment)

another graphic novel that i found lurking on one of our shelves and lo, i hadn’t read this. definitely worth all of the press that i recall from this in the 1990s. i can’t believe i waited this long to read it. i did a little digging and surveyed the 3 oracles (claude, gemini, and gpt-4) to try to better understand the controversy around this. (i think i’m poorly suited as a baseline for cultural offense.)

summary: people didn’t took issue with the use of animals as imagery and the strong language, as well as the graphic depiction of the holocaust. pretty garden variety lily-livered shit. our society has become oddly delicate.

sidebar: in tennessee (2022) they voted to ban maus from the 8th grade curriculum because of strong language and the nude depiction of a mouse. my reading of the tennessee school board meeting minutes leaves me embarrassed for tennessee.

(11-Jan-2025)

recommended: highly

murder in the solid state (will mccarthy)

i picked this up at a local used book store and it’s straight out of the 1990s “hard sci-fi”. the underlying technology of interest is nanotechnology which hasn’t had the oomph that we would have thought it would exert in the 90s. there are amusing futuristic nods in here and hilarious misses.

hits

  • a brain scanning device that is the successor to the lie detector to sensitive to be useful and at the same time too good to be admissible in court. seems about right to me.
  • cellular video phones and distracted drivers.
  • rapacious technologists and their obstruction and preservation of hegemony as it suits them.
  • a third political party that has outsized influence, but is all about, “law and order”, and giving the police everything that they want. while the republicans are as bent to the whims of the billionaires and the democrats are as ineffectual as ever.
  • chinese industrial spies
  • heads up displays a la meta ray bans
  • cities violently sweeping up the homeless and ghettoizing them into toxic waste zones.
  • home automation with keyword commands. the notion of a 12Hz burglar alarm that would mess up intruders was bowel movingly amusing/interesting.

misses

  • a round of cocktails is $10.
  • the ham fisted condescension of the scientists in conversation is even insulting to the reader.
  • doesn’t imagine the internet per se. reflects a classic telco worldview
  • whoa! the chapters where they go into “fishtown” and interact with “afriatics”. well, it was written in the 90s. this did not age well. on the flip side, there’s something pretty frank and weird about the way that race is discussed in here, cognizant of racial divergences while being tone deaf in the discussion.

weak ending, with about as cliche a courtroom exoneration as you can scrape together. there’s even an awkward shout out to usenet and first person world building games in the closing chapters. the dude was cranking out the last few chapters as the publisher was putting the screw to him. i was amused, but i was constantly flipping to the back to see how much more i had to wade through during the last 70-ish pages. (09-Jan-2025)

recommended: not really.

replay: memoir of an uprooted family (jordan mechner)

i got this on a recommendation from a friend and burned through it in a couple of sittings. it’s a graphic novel and these don’t typically trip my trigger or even come onto my radar. it’s not an anti-graphic novel bias, i just don’t gravitate seem to be plugged in there. that said, i have a tendency to read graphic novels as if they’re books, focusing solely on the text and the dialogue. i have to re-train myself to relax the eyes and take in the visual context of what’s going on in the scene. there’s a lot here that goes unsaid in the text that adds considerably to the story. the posture and tone of his teenage kids, the focus the subjects in a frame in their surroundings. along with a much better appreciation for the relaxation of holiday and life, even during wartime. it was a moving book. (08-Jan-2025)

recommended: highly.

the quickening (elizabeth rush)

this was an intersting and engaging read throughout, as a middle aged dude, the discussion around the desire to be a mother didn’t really land like i suspect it would for others. still, that was an interestign way to structure the book and to put some personal immediacy around it. the discussion about life on an antarctic research vessel studying glaciers … that shit was riveting and really well done. (02-Jan-2025)

recommended: yes.

the bogleheads guide to investing (mel lindauer, et al)

i’m an unabashed boglehead. this was a refresher and a reminder to pay attention to various bits of planning. now if you’ll excuse me, there are some spreadsheet updates i need to make. (01-Jan-2025)

recommended: highly