Category: Books
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Read Lately – January 2025
Some notes and comments on books read in January, 2025.
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Decentralizing Your Media
The more you have in universal mediums, the better off you will be in the long term. I like BlueSky, even though people behave the same as they ever did. The lede: Bookshop is now selling ebooks, and the proceeds from ebook sales goes to local, independent booksellers. Supporting indie brick-and-mortar’s has always kind of…
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Riffs On: Shadow Libraries
Last year I read Syria’s Secret Library, and then dug into the reporting behind the book (permalink), a project of love in a time when Darayya – just outside Damascus – was under siege. “In many cases we get books from bomb or shell-damaged homes. The majority of these places are near the front line,…
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This Black Box of Doom is getting Heavy
It’s billed as “satire,” but, man, I don’t know. Maybe it was the vibe of the trip, but I picked up this book when we were recovering from Helene in Charleston. At the same time, in the same shop, I also bought Loneliness & Company. Both books addressing more or less the same problem: tech…
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Failing Creativity – Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act
“Hate” is such a strong word, but I can’t get my head around Rubin’s dumb book any other way. I’ve soured on Rubin over the years as he has shifted from less business and more “creativity,” wandering the world in his unruly, unwashed opulence. Sure, he looks the part of a creative guru, but my…
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Notes on: Figuring by Maria Popova
“So much of the beauty, so much of what propels our pursuit of truth, stems from the invisible connections.” And just like that, with the thesis set, Maria Popova takes us through over five hundred pages of invisible connections between Johanns Kepler in 1617 to the launch of the Voyager space probe in 1977. Between…
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Recently Read – August 2024
Two major novels of note: Heretics – Leonardo Padura Translated by Anna Kushner The back of the book alluded to Padura being “Cuba’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez” – which is quite the statement. Heretic’s is a novel of Jewish diaspora masquerading as a crime novel set across a vast span of time and locations. 17th century…
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The Ghost of The Living
“They say when you meet someone who looks just like you, you die.” p.Wish, The Doppleganger “No one makes themselves; we all make and unmake one another.” Naomi Klein, Doppelganger Going through Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, something I snagged from the library purely because of the subtitle “A Trip into the Mirror World,” I was opened…
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The Age of Information, The Aging of Information.
Some thoughts on James Gleick’s The Information. “The alphabet is like a contagion – both the virus and the vector of transmission in and of itself.” Back in the “learn to code” days – a phrase shot off in mean spirit by anti-intellectuals to journalists and academics who were loosing their jobs by the thousands…