What are you reading these days? #23

I've just finished The Secret Barrister, which is an overview and teardown of the current British judicial system. It's incredibly well written - witty, poignant, and humourous despite the biting content.

Probably not one for anyone outside the UK, but crucial reading for anyone in the UK with even a passing interest in the concepts of law, justice, and right/wrong.

I'm currently reading The Music of What Happens by Bill Konigsberg. I picked up an uncorrected library proof from a conference on a whim and ... it's okay. Not life-changing, but fine.

Poetry-wise, I'm reading When I grow up I want to be a list of further possibilities by Chen Chen. I'm really liking the humor and pathos of the poems so far, and his long lines allow an expansive sensibility.

I just finished The Outside by Ada Hoffman and that was life-changing. Space opera, Eldritch horror, weird reality, it's great.

Getting in some non-fiction this week, I just finished The High Frontier, by Gerard O'Neill. A bit weird that I hadn't read it already, being a huge advocate of the sort of free space colonization it describes, but I guess I got around to it. For those who aren't familiar, the book lays out an alternate way forward to the traditional science fiction notion of colonizing planetary surfaces. Turns out, you get a lot more bang for your buck with rotating space habitats, on the order of millions of times the living area per unit of mass. Beyond that, the lack of significant gravity wells makes shipping and transit an absolute breeze, and offers easy access to 0g environments for manufacturing and recreation. And the habitats aren't cramped: even with 1970's material technology, i.e. steel or aluminum, habitats miles across with hundreds of square miles of surface area could be built. Today with carbon fiber, you can build one thousands of miles in diameter, with the surface area of a large country or a small planet.

Besides the central ideas, the book is also interesting for being a vision of the future written for a past with a different outlook. Like many science and science fiction writers in the mid-20^th century, O'Neill was convinced that overpopulation was a much more pressing concern than it ended up being, and writing in the 1970's, was likewise of the mindset that the energy crisis was the new normal, and not just a temporary oil shortage caused by geopolitical factors. Would that we actually were running out of fossil fuels, might've saved us some trouble.

Considering he had power satellite construction as the economic engine of space colonization, it's not surprising that none of it's happened yet, with fossil fuels still being dirt cheap. Hopefully the need for low carbon energy and the recent fall in launch costs will have us take another look at power satellites soon, but as of yet it doesn't really seem to be on anyone's radar for whatever reason. It's honestly kind of baffling to me how much both space based solar power and free space colonization have faded from public consciousness. Maybe they never had much of a hold on it in the first place, but the latter seems to have fallen by the wayside even for science fiction authors, in favor of outmoded ideas like terraforming.

It did make me wonder though, how many of the cool space projects thought up in the 70's and 80's would we have gotten if shuttle flights weren't wildly more expensive than predicted, or if NASA had actually built a shuttle derived heavy cargo lifter, like the shuttle C? Seems like even more so than budget cuts, space development in that era was handicapped by the exorbitant launch costs of the regular shuttle.

As an aside though, man, O'Neill hated nuclear power. I can understand, though strongly disagree with, the idea of not wanting to use it on Earth, but he wanted to avoid using it for interstellar flights too!

I have been "reading" Crown of Midnight in the #2 in the Throne of Glass series, I was very into it but I've not been reading much at all as I tend to commute by Bike more now and have not had the impulse whilst at home or when relaxing outdoors. Fire and Blood has been resting heavily on my bookshelf for a few months now without even being cracked open, I've also left the third book of IQ84, The Book Thief and Speaker for the Dead half read, bookmarked and abandoned.

I read through Malcolm Harris's Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millenials.

The book is an attempt to distill down the larger forces, particularly economic ones, that have shaped the experience of millenials. One of his arguments is that employers have externalized the risks of investing in employees because those employees now have much greater freedom to leave and seek other jobs. One effect of this is that training got pushed onto the educational system, making education no longer about learning as an ideal but instead about us becoming the capital that employers will later rely on. This happens because we have been habituated to the idea that we need to overwork ourselves in order to get ahead, that our work should be done "for its own sake" and not for any actual return or tangible benefit to us, and that we prioritize work over our own needs.

His argument is significantly more fleshed out and nuanced than I'm portraying here. I'm also only highlighting one particular part of it, and I'm doing it from memory, so I'm probably not doing it as accurately as I could. Nevertheless, it was certainly an interesting perspective, and one that I'm glad I was exposed to.

The book at large touches on and contextualizes millenial disillusionment and why, exactly, we would feel that way. It wasn't until the end of the book that I realized how much I live in perpetual disillusionment. I've gotten so used to it that it is invisible to me, but occasionally I get made aware of it in the same way that occasionally you become aware of your own breathing. The end of the book was that moment for me. Usually, in books of this type, they spend 95% of the book highlighting issues, often seemingly insurmountable ones. Authors then give over the last 5% to solutions. I often roll my eyes through these sections, as they feel naively hopeful to me. I often question whether the author actually believes their solutions, or whether their editors/publishers forced them to put them in to "end on a high note" or because it's an expectation of the genre. I am seemingly unable to meaningfully engage with large-scale optimism, to the point that I assume it's a falsehood when others present it. This is not a healthy outlook.

This book follows suit, spending nearly all of its text on issues and saving a small smidgen at the end for solutions. Harris then systematically runs through the potential actions that we, as millenials, can take, and then explains why each of them will fail. It was a bleak ending, but I can't deny that it felt right to me. The perspective he took is exactly the one I have when I read about the myriad ways we can improve society. My kneejerk reaction to a solution is "that'll never work." I hate that I live with that cynicism, but I also can't help but feel anything else, particularly related to economic issues.

i've finally parsed out (most of) my booklist which is 113 books/articles long, so technically a lot. actively, though, i'm a little past a third of the way with the first LBJ book by caro after not bothering with that for literally two years. it's enjoyable and, like literally all caro books for those of you who have tried/succeeded in reading them, incredibly longwinded--which is the charm.

Currently rereading Joe Abercrombies First Law trilogy because i want to read his other books but thought it would be best to reread the trilogy first because i read them years ago and only had a vague memory of the people, places, plot. Very enjoyable even on a reread.

The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa (english trans.). I'm trying to read more Literature and i think i jumped in the deep end here. One of those books i have to read a paragraph or two and put down for a few hours.

History wise i've just started India's Struggle for Independence by Bipan Chandra but i'm only a few pages in.

I'm still finishing up Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior by Leonard Mlodinow—about 60% through. It's good, but I should be taking better notes. It's definitely reading like a not-very-boring textbook.

Next up on the fiction front is The Rule of One by Ashley and Leslie Saunders. It's a young adult sci-fi dystopia book. I need to add a few more of those to my rotation, I can churn through those quickly (despite their looming danger to my sleep schedule).

I'm still undecided on what's next for me in non-fiction. Probably going to pick a memoir, either Mama's Boy by Dustin Lance Black, or Serious Eater by Ed Levine. I already have both purchased and sitting in my library, so it honestly might come down to a coin-toss.

Paris au 20e siècle (technically it’s XXe but fuck Roman numerals) by Jules Vernes. While the grammar is still similar to today’s french (compare to Sherlock Holmes’s), the vocabulary is just archaic enough to make it frustrating to read which is why I’ve been going rather slowly about it.

It describes Paris in the 20th century, and how through the focus on capital and industrialisation, while the city has become incredibly high-tech, people have lost their culture. The main character, Michel wins the Latin Prize on technicality — he is the sole applicant, and yet gets scolded for even applying.

The Widow. I just picked it 'cause it was available from my library's eBook selection. Surprisingly decent, but hits a bit of a cheesy-CBS/CSI-esque hurdle whenever the author starts up the tech jargon into the story. I don't care, really. I was looking for an easy read because I'm behind on my Goodreads Reading Challenge.