Reviews and Comments

as the women arrive at the house I put on Portishead's self titled, this one needs spooky music.

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.

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.

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?"

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.)

Christmas gift

picked up after a friend who had already enjoyed it linked x.com/mickey17movie/status/1836197947668860958 in discord, very fun, read it in a few days.

p good! kinda Y.A. and a little slow to start but w/e, fun ending

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fun, light, very quick read. Very weird to read something so connected to ~2012-techie-San-Francisco (I was here by then) and get 100% of the references (and roll my eyes at a few w/ 12 years of hindsight).

There are a few authors I simply pre-order without question—Jason Pargin, Kelly Link, Emily Wilson in the past year alone, but always King. I was going to save this for vacation in a few weeks but ended up with more time on my hands so it came off the pile.

I particularly liked "The Answer Man”