I’ve decided to experiment with two new tools for a little while: Aboard for bookmarking and filing interesting things (and I’m always interested in things that Paul Ford gets excited about); and Omnivore as a new read-later platform. Something about a new clean slate in each of those categories is really appealing, so I’ll see how it goes.
I finished reading How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu. What a fascinating novel: Told in interconnected short stories and read compellingly by more than a dozen performers, it’s the story of a global plague discovered in melting permafrost that ultimately spans beyond the entirety of human history. Despite that scope it’s intimate; each story is a vignette of loss, grief, love, loneliness and carrying on. Amid it all, Nagamatsu imagines what capitalism would be like in a world devastated by a new plague and climate change at the same time: an economy of death-related services, weird cryptocurrencies, and skyscrapers converted to cemeteries that tower over flooded cities and failed crops. It’s vividly realized in the details of everyday life in this hypermodern and changed world while tracking across centuries, and so compelling.
I’m happy to find that calibre worked overnight as I hoped: after a few days of tinkering with setting it up on my little Ubuntu NUC, it’s pulling a couple of news and reading sources into daily digests and sending them to my kindle via email. I wish that kindle were more flexible with ad hoc reading (and it’s one reason I’m thinking about a kobo), but this is a nice, effective step toward how I would like it to work.