reading

notes bookshop link recommended: yes i fell into this from zinnser’s book on writing to learn from a month or so ago. this is a textbook. it’s not funny, but i do think some of the arguments lofted in the exercises are hilariously bad. (but disturbingly close to those i’ve heard in real life for some of the issues lofted.) the book is a pretty solid and engaging dicsussion of the various fallacies and traps we can fall into when thinking about various topics and scrutinizing arguments....

notes bookshop link recommended: yes there’s not a lot to say about this. it’s a fun, quick read and apparently the first installment on a much longer series. there’s all sorts of interesting stuff swirling around in here and stephenson is doing a great job of “world buliding”. the initial character, dawn/aurora, straddles two worlds between the wars and during the rise of soviet communism. there are historical figures (neils bohr makes a sidebar cameo), events (a world’s fair) interesting digressions (polo being played by cowboys/girls in montana, etc....

links, etc Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Temptations of Narrative a pretty solid review of the message some additional food for thought.

notes bookshop link recommended: yes there’s been no shortage of press on this book. i suspect i’ve ingested a fair amount of what’s surrounded it. given the hype around the book you’d be forgiven for glossing over the trip to dakar and to a school board meeting. i’m not sure that i parse the dakar bits, i’m not meta/cerebral enough to grok what’s going on here. but it doesn’t feel like much....

2034: a novel of the next world war – (ackerman, stavridis) the audible version of this got me across the better part of south dakota. i can only listen to fiction via audiobook and this did the trick. it’s a solid ride through the coarse concepts of potential american decline in military dominance. or put less jingoistically, an interesting conception of what the rise of china and india means in a multipolar world order....