This Changes Everything, by Naomi Klein. An unexpectedly pivotal book for me. I hadn’t paid much attention to climate change before this, other than noticing more frequent extreme weather events. I wish things weren’t the way they are. I wish we had a healthier relationship with the earth. I now have even less patience for unregulated capitalism. (Selfishness is supposed to save the world? Sheesh.) Anyway, the book was occasionally slow reading but overall it was good and important.
Building Ligatures, by TypeTogether. A pleasant history of TypeTogether and some basics of type design and typography. Nice overviews of some different scripts, too. The overall theme was working together to make things better, which was a nice followup to the suggestions in This Changes Everything.
The Last Nomad, by Shugri Said Salh. What a wildly different life she’s had. (She was a Somali nomad, though that’s only the first third or so of the book.) It definitely expanded my horizons and was worth reading. The FGM part was infuriating and so, so sad.
Recent fiction reads
All Our Wrong Todays, by Elan Mastai. Loved it. Some parts I think could have been glossed over or removed, but as a whole, I thought it did several interesting things with the time travel conceit. Especially near the end. Whew.
The Imaginary Corpse, by Tyler Hayes. The POV character is a stuffed yellow triceratops. At first the setting wasn’t really working for me and I almost gave up, but once it got into the mystery, I was fine. A little weird. (Which is what fantasy is good at.)
Fugitive Telemetry, by Martha Wells. Novella. Sad to come to the current end of the Murderbot series, but she’s under contract for a couple more novellas and another novel, I believe (according to a recent AMA on Reddit), so that’s nice.
Books acquired since last post
Cloud Atlas — David Mitchell
Dispatches — Michael Herr
Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind — Alan Jacobs
Verdigris Deep — Frances Hardinge
The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House — John F. Harris
The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together — Heather McGhee
Spirits of Vengeance — Rob J. Hayes
Smoke and Stone — Michael R. Fletcher
Queenslayer — Sebastien de Castell
Crownbreaker — Sebastien de Castell
Subway: The Curiosities, Secrets, and Unofficial History of the New York City Transit System — John E. Morris
More Songwriters on Songwriting — Paul Zollo
Dark Sea’s End — Richard Nell
James Baldwin: A Biography — David Adams Leeming
The Perfect Predator: A Scientist’s Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug: A Memoir — Steffanie Strathdee, Thomas Patterson
The Florentines: From Dante to Galileo: The Transformation of Western Civilization — Paul Strathern
Bone Swans: Stories — C. S. E. Cooney
The God Is Not Willing — Steven Erikson
Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest — Stephen E. Ambrose
A History of Food in 100 Recipes — William Sitwell
The Restaurant: A 2,000-Year History of Dining Out — William Sitwell
The Infiltrator: The True Story of One Man Against the Biggest Drug Cartel in History — Robert Mazur
The Presidents Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity — Nancy Gibbs, Michael Duffy
How I Learned to Understand the World: A Memoir — Hans Rosling
The Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro
Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong — Eric Barker
Hild — Nicola Griffith
Bookends: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Literature — Zibby Owens
The Cartiers: The Untold Story of the Family Behind the Jewelry Empire — Francesca Cartier Brickell
Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England — Amanda Vickery
The Field of Cloth of Gold — Glenn Richardson
The Elements We Live By: How Iron Helps Us Breathe, Potassium Lets Us See, and Other Surprising Superpowers of the Periodic Table — Anja Røyne