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Sometimes I get to walk to work. This is my favorite relay to go.
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Fascinating read from Counter Craft about writers writing less led me to wonder: what are we losing when our best writers are writing things other than novels? My first reaction is something akin to despair. But is is it really all that much?
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Finished reading: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad 📚
El Akkad has found the words for what has been happening in Gaza, and describe its effect on all of us. Essential and heart-wrenching, like prime James Baldwin but right off the stove and no time to cool down.
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Finished reading: Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino 📚
This might have been my favorite book of 2024 if I had read it last year. Adina Giorno was born the moment the Voyager I spacecraft launched. Before long, this sensitive and observant child of a Philadelphia immigrant learns (or decides?) she is an alien sent to Earth to observe humanity and report back to her home planet via fax(!) about just what it is like to exist here. This charming account of her life and recollections is an absolute joy. Melancholy and funny at once, a profound and carefully observed meditation on longing and belonging.
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Finished reading: Wild Forest Home by Betsy Leialoha Howell 📚
Well-written glimpses into the work of a PNW wildlife biologist working for the National Forest Service are woven into the backdrop of Howell’s personal journey. You would be hard-pressed to find a better account of the changing landscape of forests in the last 30 years, especially in the altered landscape of the Northwest Forest Plan’s realignment of the forest service’s goals, from someone who cares about these places. There is also plenty about specific animals like Olympic marmots, martens, marbled murrelets, spotted and barred owls, salamanders, and fishers, along with accounts from decades at the front lines of forest fires.
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Finished reading: The Traveling Feast by Rick Bass 📚
A lovely idea: a writer makes the occasion of a dinner an excuse to speak with and write about his favorite living writers. Many of his favorites overlap with mine, and I really enjoyed this.
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Finished reading: The Sea Runners by Ivan Doig 📚
The Sea Runners a stupefyingly relentless account of four indentured servants escaping from a Russian trading post in what is today Sitka, Alaska. In their harrowing journey by canoe (in winter) through a brutal stretch of Pacific coastline down to Astoria, Oregon the yearning for human freedom constantly confronts an absurd and often hostile universe, with mounting dread. Like Dostoevsy trying to write a Coen Brothers movie. With prose so sharp that it can feel brittle, Doig carves narratives that feel simultaneously intimate and epic. Not for the feint of heart, but boy can Doig paint a picture.
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Finished reading: In the Pockets of Small Gods by Anis Mojgani 📚
Opened this with no knowledge of book or author. It hooked me immediately and never let go. This is a readable, genuinely moving and at times profound collection of poetry with a through line of processing grief. Wonderful.
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Snow beginning to recede on the skylight of my office.
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Finished reading: Slow Down by Kohei Saito 📚
I liked his rationale for degrowth and why it is not just another word for “austerity,” and I even followed his rehabilitation of the Marx’s ecological bona fides as far as that goes; but I wanted more detail about how it might be achieved.
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Currently reading: And the Roots of Rhythm Remain by Joe Boyd 📚
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I didn’t plan on diving into an 850 book about music, but I flipped to a the chapter called “Tezeta”, learned like seven fun things about Tony Allen in two pages, and knew I was installing myself inside these covers for a few weeks. This is so great.
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One great list I got from the always-wonderful Phinney Books Newsletter (#379, Oct. 5, 2024): Reactor Mag’s Most Iconic Speculative Fiction Books of the 21st Century.
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“How long do crows hold a grudge? Marzluff believes he has now answered the question: around 17 years.” (Seattle Times).
I’m guessing that time frame can be extended indefinitely if the crow is bound in the chest cavity of a human zombie.…
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Kim McNeil’s reading project is inspirational to the point of being intimidating. I have my eye on her #NYRBWomen25 year-long group reading project, not least because the title of the first title on the list (by Simone Weil) is particularly thrilling just to say aloud: On the Abolition of All Political Parties. Sign me up.
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Currently reading: Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari 📚
A copy of the latest big book from Harari arrived today and I got sucked right in.
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Paul Yamazaki is the GOAT
Reading the Room: An Interview with Paul Yamazaki > My faith in the reader is profound. Our role is to bring them to a new door, to a new room. We are trying to choose the best of what’s out there. How do we arrive at the best? Reading and conversations with other readers, other booksellers. If a book comes into your hands and you find yourself moved by it, ask, How did this find me? Answers to that question will always be fruitful and will always make you a better bookseller.
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This article about (and visualization of) the Starlink satellites in low-earth orbit will make you fear for the future of the night sky as seen here from Earth.
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Return to Astro
I’ve returned to some work on the astro side of things as I ran into some wheel-spinning on Sanity, almost all of which is very, very (very) likely to be the limitations of me bluffing my way through React in general and the manipulation of state in reaction in particular. So today I added shelf locations (barebones) to the web component, defined a route for individual books.
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The advent of social media, with all its apparent opportunities for self-expression, briefly suggested a debased fulfillment of Hegel’s horizon of autonomy and recognition for everyone. But now, as a constitutive component of twenty-first-century capitalism, the internet’s key functions include the disabling of memory and the absorption of lived temporalities, not ending history but rendering it unreal and incomprehensible. The paralysis of remembrance occurs individually and collectively: we see this in the transience of any “analog artifacts that are digitized: rather than preservation, their fate is oblivion and loss, noted by no one.
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Today in “Great Newsletters”: Ann Boyer’s Mirabilary compels me to find a copy of The Red Wheelbarrow:
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Currently reading: Liberation Day by George Saunders 📚
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