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I’d wanted to write a Q3 update, but put it off long enough that it made more sense to write one for the end of the year, instead. I’ve still mostly been reading fantasy these past few months, starting with the first Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson (plus the accompanying novella, Mistborn: A Secret History.) Each book is a compelling page-turner — I devoured the trilogy much too quickly, but thankfully Sanderson is an insanely productive writer, haha.
Shifted away from sci-fi these few months…to an adjacent genre, in fantasy! In reading order: Vita Nostra. Originally written in Russian by Ukrainian author-couple Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, the title comes from the phrase Vita nostra brevis est brevi finietur – “Our life is brief, soon it will end.” We follow Sasha Samokhina as she is tested, accepted to and progresses through the Institute of Special Technologies, which, in the words of the text, “turns people into Words.
Updating a little earlier than usual, mostly to share an old paper that I found recently but is probably one of my favourite academic papers to date. It’s How to Draw Three People in a Botanical Garden, written in 1988 by Harold Cohen – a painter by training who later taught himself to program. He eventually created AARON, an “expert’s system” that Cohen used to investigate the nature of visual representation: “those internal cognitive processes that underpin and inform the making of representational objects.
Reading was very light these past few months. The words of long books swam on the page, and I couldn’t get past more than a page or two. I let myself go back to old comforting books and blogs, mostly comics. I particularly enjoyed Ben Orlin’s Math with Bad Drawings for interesting math stuff weaved into whimsical nerdy jokes. A familiar scene. I did manage to read one of Ben’s recommended novels, This Is How You Lose the Time War – it was interesting and written in a very visually descriptive manner, but it feels like recently everyone is using the format of writing multiple separate storylines that eventually converge.
Somewhat wanting for quantity and variety, but regardless, here’s what I read over the first half of 2021. Sci-fi Read more than one book from most authors on this list, and so the following list is organized by author. Dune, Children of Dune. Frank Herbert’s excellent Dune has been making the rounds online for a while now. I read up to the fourth book (God Emperor of Dune) last year and remember not really enjoying the second (Dune Messiah), so on this round of re-reads I went back to the first and third books of the series.
I set a Screen Time limit on Instagram this year, frustrated by the amount of advertising my mindless scrolling was causing me to consume. (The irony of using one behemoth’s product to limit my use of another behemoth’s product isn’t lost on me…) But this week or thereabouts it seems like the powers that be have decided to make some changes – packing more advertising into your feed, slicker Discover recommendations.
The second half of 2020 was fairly busy – I began life as a graduate student (!), and the academic reading put me off more casual reading for a while but December provided an opportunity to slip back into books. I only managed to pick up a few, but I’ve enjoyed most of them: First, Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. A bestseller in its day, I’d never heard of it before and don’t remember having seen it on book recommendation lists either.