book
Rated Heads of the Colored People 8/10
A brief and clever collection of stories, loosely connected by characters, geography and theme - many of them about Black protagonists navigating relationships with other Black people in both Black and white social milieus. Engaging and well-executed.
Rated How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World 10/10
love this. very thoughtfully done and lays out a theory of infrastructure as both care and freedom. Practical and informative, but with ideas, too.
Rated No One Is Talking About This 8/10
mixed feelings about this one, but hard to argue with how funny and weird the funny-weird parts are and how heartbreaking the sad parts are.
Rated I Have Some Questions for You 8/10
very compelling, pretty bleak. didn’t grab my entire heart like GREAT BELIEVERS but very well done.
Rated Beautiful Ruins 8/10
this is so lovely. cleverly done, emotionally affecting.
Rated The Cartographers 8/10
enjoyable, but takes a long time to get where it’s going.
Finished reading O Poder da Espada
Rated Several People Are Typing 8/10
fun! i knew it *involved* workplace Slack chats but didn't realize it was *entirely* workplace Slack chats
Rated Doomsday Book 8/10
Long but solidly readable; somehow I didn’t know until a little ways into the book that it was written in 1992 and takes place in a 2055 that’s heavily affected by a pandemic that takes place sometime in the intervening years. Also kind of fun to see what “the future” looked like 30-some years ago; the book posits a world with time travel and land-line phones. <br/><br/>It’s a little…distant, maybe—The character relationships aren’t well-developed—but as it builds it gets compelling.
Wants to read Os Demônios
Rated A Gentleman in Moscow 10/10
I love my friend the Count and his found family
Rated Player's Handbook 8/10
I think they did a really good job with this edition - putting the detailed instructions on how the game is actually played up front, for instance. The art is nice and I mostly like the minor changes they’ve made to the game mechanics and how those mechanics are explained.
Rated Jade Legacy 10/10
very long and rich and sweeping but also very exciting moment-by-moment. the first two books are so tight in scope by comparison that it's impressive that this one *moves* as much as they do.
Rated The Elements of Style 10/10
Not my first read, and my copy is so old that the bookmark in it is a Blockbuster Video rent-6-get-one-free card. Some of the advice here is dated and all of it is opinionated in a charming-but-cranky way but it’s a delight to read and a good reminder that writing is communication. In an age when so much of the the “written” “content” you come across was not written but “generated,” a stern but encouraging voice telling you to structure, write, to rewrite, and to think about the reader’s experience is refreshing.
Wants to read The War of the End of the World
Rated Crying in H Mart 8/10
A really lovely memoir of the author’s fraught relationship with her Korean-immigrant mother and the Korean food that bonded them. I went in expecting this to be very sad and it is - the subject is very much loss and grief, and the ravages of both cancer and cancer treatment come up in detail. But it’s also very warm and thoughtful, with much of the book focused on how Zauner uses cooking, music, writing, and travel to keep her mother with her. Brief and really well written.