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gravely

gravely@bookwyrm.social

Joined 1 year, 11 months ago

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gravely's books

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finished reading Out There by Kate Folk

Kate Folk: Out There (2022, Random House Publishing Group)

One of the author quotes on Folk's website (www.katefolk.com/home) blurbs these as "if Kafka and Camus and Bradbury were penning episodes of Black Mirror" and yeah, pretty much. I'm too much of a ninny to watch Black Mirror, and if someone made this book of stories into a show I would be too much of a ninny to watch it, but I enjoyed each of these little tales of mostly single women, mostly in SF, dealing with some pretty strange things. Body horror, as promised.

finished reading The Real World of Technology by Ursula M. Franklin (CBC Massey lecture series)

Ursula M. Franklin: The Real World of Technology (Paperback, 1999, Anansi)

In this expanded edition of her bestselling 1989 CBC Massey Lectures, renowned scientist and humanitarian …

Franklin's lectures are no less relevant in 2025 than they were when she added the final three chapters in 1999 to texts delivered as lectures in 1989 conceived as early as in the 1970s with respect to a a gem of fascinating sets of dialectics regarding what she calls the real world of technology. Holistic and prescriptive work, planners and planees, environment and nature, liberation and exploitation, time and space.

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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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.