What I'm Reading: November 2024

Not sure how much life-update I wanna put in these? Let’s see… I got over my COVID infection, the election happened, I began a gradual-but-long-anticipated life change, my partner and I went on a little vacation, I dyed my hair blue, and I started a new job.

Last time I did all sorts of sections including what I’m watching, but honestly it’s all about the reading for me.

Links

• Luna shares a great way to write macros in Rust. Surely you will not regret writing your Rust this way.
• I’d recommend watching basically every talk on the XOXO YouTube channel but especially I want to recommend Ed Yong’s talk about his pandemic reporting and the effect on his life. I know this isn’t reading, but it’s very good I promise.
• Alyaza Birze’s critique of solarpunk is a pretty in-depth explanation as to the problems with the genre? aesthetic? Tumblr tag? dressed up as a political movement.
• Who Gets Shipped and Why has some great data visualizations of fanfic ships.
• Dante’s web-culture focused link roundup is great, especially the RSS propaganda.
• How do platforms make decisions about gender-specific topless nudity bans? In Transitu is a trans woman exploring that question as well as “gender detection” machine learning models. The images in the link don’t load automatically, but do depict torso-up nudity.
• I was taught Plath as the prototypical “mad literary genius”. I guess I’m not at all surprised to find out from The Silencing of Sylvia Plath that she was instead an abused woman in an impossible situation.
• I don’t watch much online video anymore but I was taken a bit aback to find out the “creator-owned” streaming service Nebula isn’t organized as a co-op. As the post says, it’s not worth cancelling my subscription over, but it is good to know.
• Check out How to Monetize a Blog if you haven’t (don’t judge a page by its title) and then check out How to Write a Blog Post About How to Monetize a Blog.

Books

• Magic’s Price by Mercedes Lackey. This is the third entry in a trilogy (previously I read the first two) that I had liked. Honestly I thought this final book was mostly dull and unsatisfying. It disposes of most of the cast we’ve built in favor of a handful of mysteries that I didn’t care much about, and its central driving antagonist sort of comes out of nowhere. I think the villain’s shadow should have loomed large over the whole trilogy, instead of a gesture in the first book and essentially a whisper in the second.
• An Indigenous People’s History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. I didn’t realize how tight the focus of this book would be; it reasonably focuses quite tightly on the Indigenous People in its title rather than History of the United States. Frankly it’s a haunting work that lays out a well-documented program of genocide waged over hundreds of years across an entire continent. I’m not sure how someone could read this book and not come away with the conviction that settler colonialism must be opposed in all forms and that repatriation of lands to indigenous nations is both necessary and insufficient.
• Dragon Ball Z by Akira Toriyama. I think I get Dragon Ball as a cultural force now. It’s funny that the anime has a reputation for slow pacing, because the manga rushes along at breakneck speed. The misogyny eases up a lot as we move to Z, from “disastrous” to “normal teenage boy material.” Now I know what a Goku is and how he’s different from a Gohan. Was that essential? Not at all, no. Was it fun? Hell yeah.
• Too Like the Lightning, Seven Surrenders, The Will to Battle, and Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer. Most of my November reading was a slow descent into madness by way of Palmer’s Terra Ignota series. As I read the first book it dawned on me that this wasn’t the utopian science-fiction quartet that I had expected. Without spoiling too much you’re in for an unreliable (and maybe monstrous)^[1] protagonist-narrator; global intrigue; a world totally reorganized away from nation-states and borders; and philosophical questions of miracles, death, and faith. That’s really only the first book or two; after that things escalate.
  • This series also smacks of Gender and Race and Eurocentrism, in ways that work and don’t. Certainly we can attribute some of this to our protagonist, but there are a couple passages I wish the author wrote differently. It’s not the worst “cis person writing Gender” I’ve read, far from it, but go in prepared for some bumps in the road.
• Noor, by Nnedi Okorafor. A cyborg woman blows up her life and goes on the run in a medium-future Nigeria threatened by desertification. I think I might not finish it, which comes as a surprise. I remember thinking very highly of Okorafor’s Who Fears Death, but Noor thus far hasn’t gone down smoothly. I think it’s something about the prose? The dialogue doesn’t feel quite right? I can’t tell if the problem is me or the book.