reading

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....

writing to learn (william zinnser) this is not really what i was expecting it to be and it was surprisingly engaging. broadly, this is an argument for using writing as a mechanism for learning vs. learning to the test or via standard educational practices. he highlights institutions that have incorporated writing deeply into their programs. i have a natural bias towards organizations that have a culture of writing and this is perhaps the one thing that’s intrigued me about amazon work culture from what i’ve heard from friends....