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gravely

gravely@bookwyrm.social

Joined 1 year, 9 months ago

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gravely's books

Currently Reading

Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House (EBook, 2009, Penguin Group UK) 4 stars

The Haunting of Hill House book follows four strangers, all of whom come to Hill …

"How weary one gets of this constant pounding," Theodora said ridiculously. "Next summer, I must really go somewhere else." "There are disadvantages everywhere," Luke told her. "In the lake regions you get mosquitoes."

The Haunting of Hill House by  (Page 147)

A fun break, finished in a day, deserving of it's reputation.

Isaac Babel, Boris Dralyuk: Odessa Stories (2016, Pushkin Press, Limited) 4 stars

Runyon's gangsters have more in common with Benya Krik than Hammett's, who gets a cover blurb, to me, but those characters are only in the first few stories—the rest are about a jewish boy's (the authors?) childhood in Odessa. I enjoyed them, but I'm going to put off starting the second Babel collection I've got for now.

Vincent Bevins: If We Burn (Hardcover, 2023, PublicAffairs) 4 stars

The story of the recent uprisings that sought to change the world — and what …

Covering 2010-2020ish, this caught me up on a lot of the struggle I had been oblivious to before 2016 and been distrusting of various sources since. Pretty remarkable work. Bevin succeeds, to me, at detailing the process and outcomes of what seem to have been predominantly anarchist movements he's sympathetic to.

Scott Malcomson: Splinternet: How Geopolitics and Commerce Are Fragmenting the World Wide Web (2016) No rating

What a strange little book. Kinda a rehash and very abridged version of Levy's Hackers that begins in WW1 and ends post-snowden. Especially strange to finish on hackers fighting back against the government and corporate attempts to run "the internet" as I was descending to land at DCA to attend the last ShmooCon in DC.

I'm still team Evgeny Morozov re: "what's the Internet?"

Adolph Reed Jr.: The South (Hardcover, 2022, Verso Trade) No rating

Starting the year with the slimmest book on the pile, and a memoir to boot, worked well the past two years. I forget why I wishlisted this one — I thought I'd read another Adolph Reed Jr. book but I see shelving this now that it was his son, Touré, whose "Toward Freedom" I'd enjoyed (and just added to Bookwyrm.)

David Wong, Jason Pargin: I'm Starting to Worry about This Black Box of Doom (2024, St. Martin's Press) 4 stars

Outside Los Angeles, a driver pulls up to find a young woman sitting on a …

Content warning pretty online

Naomi Klein: Doppelganger (2023, Farrar, Straus & Giroux) 5 stars

What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who …

Another one that I waited out thinking "eh, probably great but maybe I'll pass" and then people I follow just kept citing it months and months later, so onto the pile it went. My first and not last Klein book, about significantly more than I expected.

Alice Munro: Family Furnishings (Paperback, 2015, Penguin Canada) No rating

The later, somewhat darker, more explicitly autobiographical half of Munro’s anthologies of short stories.

Munro's characters tend to (I know this reads like a horoscope) move on from situations for the next thing without a plan, or to be a little selfish before getting back to being serious, if they ever do. She's always putting characters on trains, or in cars, or on buses.

Wes Marshall: Killed by a Traffic Engineer (2024, Island Press) No rating

In the US we are nearing four million road deaths since we began counting them …

Lots of people read this last year when Marshall published it and the title was so catchy, I thought about it after the last few accidents in SF, which made me think I should go back and actually read it.

80+ three page ideas, lots of overlap with the incident management side of my day job, casually written (if a little too pop, even, but I guess that's ok).

Every field is like this, it seems.

Robin Sloan: Sourdough : or, Lois and Her Adventures in the Underground Market (2018, Picador) 4 stars

Lois Clary is a software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company with …

Re-using my comment on Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore: “Fun, light, very quick read. Very weird to read something so connected to ~2017~ techie-San-Francisco and get 100% of the references and roll my eyes at a few of them.”

Started Sloan's newest, Moonbound, immediately afterward, and it’s very different so far.