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Pretty Good Hat

Tag: Reading

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Media diet this week. I’ve been reading:

  • I finished The Tainted Cup, and thought it was fun and interesting. I’ll definitely read more in the series.
  • Listening to Circe. It’s excellent and the audiobook reading is perfect.
  • Started reading Metal from Heaven

And some TV:

  • Season 2 of Severance is here. I re-watched Season 1 a couple of weeks ago and was struck by how tight it was, how specific and articulated its vision and its characters are. The first episode of Season 2 hit all the notes I would have wanted: It surprised me and promises so much.
  • We finished the final season of Loudermilk. It walks a fine line between jokey and sincere, and I think ends as a really moving story about found family and addiction, while managing to frequently be really, really funny.
  • American Primeval is very violent depiction of a violent era in the American West, and centers on the Mountain Meadows Massacre. It’s well done; I don’t know if I’d recommend it.

And some music I’ve liked:

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.