What are you reading these days?

I'm reading Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. It's told from the perspective of those living through evictions, but the author weaves in how policies and incentives drive the system that we see in America now. A few things I've learned:

• Police departments, when called by those renting, will often demand that landlords resolve nuisances with tenants (even if the tenants were victims). They will fine landlords or require a landlord to file an eviction if a tenant has called the police one too many times.

• Blacklists and tenant screening tools drive homelessness. One eviction can dog a renter for decades and those most in need may have to apply to hundreds of apartments to get an opportunity to rent a unit. The units that they find will be more expensive, less transit/job accessible, and less well maintained, creating a cycle where too much is paid on housing and further evictions.

The book is from 2009, so a lot has changed since then (much for the worst). We're likely to see a dramatic surge in homelessness and foreclosures within the next year or so.

I'm mostly reading about stuff like geometry and algebra for my mathematics module. Apparently it's fairly basic, high school-level stuff, but it's difficult enough to re-learn after not having touched it since the 90s. I like algebra, but I also hate it. Weird.

Well, as promised, Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks. It was very good (and very long!), and is, broadly speaking, about dead people. There's multiple deeply intertwined subplots: Hell is real, at least for a rather large number of societies. It's a VR environment where the mind-states of the dead are tortured to threaten the living into good behavior. We get to extensively see into one of them. Lededje Y'breq is also dead, but got better (courtesy of a Culture ship) after being murdered by her slavemaster, an amalgamation of Musk and Bezos with significantly more resources and rather fewer moral qualms about his activities (both of which are rather impressive). She wants revenge, the Culture doesn't want her killing people (as we've gotten used to, for reasons beyond the immediately obvious), so the ship dispatches a drone to keep watch on her as she returns to her home world.
In the bigger picture, the virtual hells are fairly unpopular with a great deal of people. For decades, an entirely virtual war has been raging back and forth between pro-hell and anti-hell forces, after an agreement to make the decision to switch off or keep the hells on based on the war's result. We follow Vatueil (an interesting name, wouldn't you agree), a soldier in the anti-hell forces, through a large variety of simulated combat environments from medieval siege warfare over automated space marine battles to completely incomprehensible hyper-jellyfish combat. The situation for the anti-hell forces looks increasingly dire though. They discuss cheating and escalating the virtual war into the real world.
There are many factions within and beyond the Culture involved, and multiple twists at the end do actually keep these two paragraphs fairly spoiler-free, haha. I recommend it!

After this, i'm taking a break from Culture books for now and starting the next week with Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand Of Darkness, which i don't know much of anything about other that it's a classic of feminist sci-fi, so i'm excited!