Started reading Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media by Jacob Mchangama 📚

Reading this along with a few of my co-workers this summer. The author will be speaking at our org’s annual meeting later this year. LA Review of Books has a good review.

Want to read After Black Lives Matter by Cedric Johnson 📚

Johnson was on a recent New Books Network podcast to talk about his new book on policing and anti-capitalist struggle.🎙️ At the end of the podcast, he has a chance to discuss some of the interesting work he’s doing as an urbanist studying the Olympic Games in Los Angeles ahead of the 2028 Games.

Want to read The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet (author of The Family, co-author of Killing the Buddha) 📚

Started reading Not Alms but Opportunity by Touré F. Reed 📚

Finished reading Virtue Hoarders by Catherine Liu 📚

Started reading Virtue Hoarders by Catherine Liu 📚

Started reading The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov 📚

Only really know this book from the Rolling Stones song. Trying to read more classics from the 20th century this year.

Baby bookworm 📚

Finished reading The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel 📚

Finished reading I Must Resist, Bayard Rustin’s Life in Letters 📚

I got a notification this morning that my application to join the Literal Librarian program was approved.

Literal is one of numerous Goodreads alternatives that have launched in the past several years. I’ve been using it since May 2021 (in beta). I also use the Bookshelves feature in Micro.blog with the Epilogue app for iOS to track my reading. Micro.blog automatically posts to my Mastodon account, so I guess I use that too.

The CMS powering Literal’s book data is quite snappy, and I’ve managed to upload a couple covers and add page count to a few editions already. The message that greets you in the CMS dashboard is “Use your powers wisely, and enjoy!”

Started reading The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel 📚

Finished reading: The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald 📚

Started reading: Thelonious Monk by Robin D. G. Kelley 📚

Started reading: I Must Resist by Bayard Rustin 📚

Finished reading: Tenth of December by George Saunders 📚

Started reading: Tenth of December by George Saunders 📚

Finished reading: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel 📚

This the second novel about a fictional pandemic (and the immediate collapse of society) I managed to finish recently. The other one was Severance (2018) by Ling Ma. Both books were written and published in the years before the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

No more dystopian pandemic fiction for me for a little while.

Started reading: The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald 📚

Finished reading: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow 📚

This book is worth reading, as are the critiques of it, especially the responses by Chris Knight, Nancy Lindisfarne, and Jonathan Neale. I would not waste your time with any reviews penned by employees of the American Enterprise Institute.

I’m glad I finished this book and found it worth engaging with. Graeber and Wengrow present a much more hopeful view of humanity than the other popular titles in the Big Histories genre they are in argument with, including “Sapiens” and “Guns, Germs and Steel”.

Started reading: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel 📚

Finished reading: Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino 📚

Finished reading: They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent by Sarah Kendzior 📚

Started reading: They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent by Sarah Kendzior 📚

Finished reading: Detail In Typography by Jost Hochuli 📚