• they/them

this is my profile, get outta here!!


laminatedmoth
@laminatedmoth

This will be a post of books I've read this year.
I'm on The StoryGraph.
Currently reading Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.


laminatedmoth
@laminatedmoth

Started the year with some collections of Magic: The Gathering's short stories.


laminatedmoth
@laminatedmoth

Revisited some of K.A. Applegate's Animorphs books in February.

  • 2023-Feb-06 The Hork-Bajir Chronicles is still my favorite Animorphs book on my current, very slow, re-read through the series. Although its explicitly a hetero romance, I find the whole story incredibly queer.
  • 2023-Feb-07 The Pretender #23 in the series. Another Tobias story focusing on depression, but looking more towards the incredibly relatable lack of familial love & nurturing.
  • 2023-Feb-08 The Suspicion #24 in the series. The Helmacrons have a Romulan ship, which implies that Paul Schneider has had encounters with them long before the yeerks.
  • 2023-Feb-09 The Extreme #25 in the series. Oof, not the greatest portrayal of indigenous folks in the arctic circle & their hunting practices.

laminatedmoth
@laminatedmoth

Just read about Star Wars and cosmology in March.

  • 2023-Mar-01 Cecil Castellucci's Moving Target: A Princess Leia Adventure. A non-consequential Leia story between Empire and Return. Nothing interesting, but Nien Nunb is there.
  • 2023-Mar-02 Kieron Gillen's Shadows and Secrets. Issues #7-12 of the 2015 Star Wars: Darth Vader series. Develops Dr. Aphra as an original character for the comics. It's pretty fun to see the Empire spend so many resources just to fuck with Vader.
  • 2023-Mar-06 The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow. I'm not a physicist, and this is a pop-sci book. I don't think you can prove that God does or does not exist, but rather, that a (Western) understanding of God is an entirely optional axiom, where all other fundamental laws of reality complement both the existence and lack of God, and does not contradict either notion, either. But I also don't think M-theory justifies spontaneous creation in the way Hawking suggests. Without some recursive or self-inventing mechanism, I'm not sure how you can claim an end to reducibility as some 11-dimensional spacetime.
  • 2023-Mar-07 Timothy Zahn's Alliances, the 2nd entry of the first post-Disney Thrawn trilogy. Two plot lines; one with Vader ABY and one with Anakin BBY. Establishes more of the Disneyland theme park Black Spire Outpost. I think Zahn writes Anakin pretty well, and understands the significance (and insignificance) of his transformation into Vader. Thrawn is much less of a Mary-Sue compared to the original Thrawn trilogy, but there's a lot of attempts at praising his character as an agent of fascism, for the sake of making a sensationalizing story instead of any critical introspection.

laminatedmoth
@laminatedmoth

More March reading.

  • 2023-Mar-15 Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred. This was good read! There's some good critique of both the scientific establishment and pop-science, specifically around physics and cosmology, but also ties into their personal experience while explaining dark matter through a lens informed by Black & queer identity. Highly recommend.
  • 2023-Mar-27 David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Fascinating anthropology text. I'm a fan of Graeber's writing style, which I find a lot more engaging than other, generally dry, anthropology texts. It's good to zoom out and consider what fundamental assumptions we're making when analyzing the sociology of the distant past, which also provides the skills & understanding for imagining a distant, and hopeful, future.
  • 2023-Mar-28 Hakeem Oluseyi's A Quantum Life: My Unlikely Journey from the Street to the Stars. This autobiography is largely concerned with academic pursuit while also struggling with the African-American identity, specifically with the presence of drugs. He calls himself a "gangsta nerd" and recounts stories of failing classes while also dealing; the negative feedback loop of failure and drug-use seemingly impossible to escape.

laminatedmoth
@laminatedmoth

Continuing my backlog of Black astrophysicists

  • 2023-Apr-01 Fear of a Black Universe: An Outsider's Guide to the Future of Physics, Stephon Alexander. I wasn't expecting the final chapters covering support for pan-psychism. I plan on re-reading those sections later this year. I'm not convinced by the philosophy but clearly there's some precedent for so many physicists to take it up.
  • 2023-Apr-01 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson. Frustrating close to 1312. I've been trying to read more sci-fi, since I never read any as a kid. There's a lot I really liked in this, although this probably spent more time talking about genitals than I'd care for. Maybe its just the general transhumanist theme of "do body modifications make you more/less a person" that I dislike. I really enjoyed The Long Walk and how he captured the feeling of exhaustion as it ties the body and mind together in a gross and messy way. And I also like detective stories. But those two storylines felt stylistically disjoint, even if they carried similar thematic elements.
  • 2023-Apr-01 A Dead Djinn in Cairo, P. Djèlí Clark. Wow! I loved the pacing and voice. Turns out, there is such a thing as a "good" steampunk narrative. If you read the synopsis mentioning the presence of Angels and society attempting to live alongside it, please toss out your preconceived, Dan Brown-ian notions. Dead Djinn is much more interesting.
  • 2023-Apr-06 Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows. My mental voice isn't imagery or language, but rather, some sort of system of links, which is difficult to describe. I picked up the book hoping to better explain how my usual thoughts are structured, and although that's absolutely not what the book is about, I think it does a pretty good job describing how I think about this. The book is somewhat of an instruction manual on how to approach problems, but I largely found it to be more of a self-confirmation. Maybe I need to formally study systems analysis. One key takeaway that a lot of compsci & engineering nerds miss is the fallibility of the Model. Meadows emphasizes repeatedly that there is no perfect model, but maybe what needs to be said is that all models are fundamentally flawed due to their ideological position, instead of some subjective metric of accuracy.

laminatedmoth
@laminatedmoth

More April readings.

  • 2023-Apr-07 Isaac Asimov's Guide to Earth and Space. Why did I bother reading this.
  • 2023-Apr-10 The Haunting of Tram Car 015, P. Djèlí Clark. Another story in the detective agency from Dead Djinn. Really fun. At this point, I'm committed to reading the rest of his work.
  • 2023-Apr-13 A Master of Djinn, P. Djèlí Clark. Not as strong as the two short stories, but still great. Much more gay and critical of colonization.
  • 2023-Apr-21 All Systems Red, Martha Wells. I put this off for a while because Murderbot Diaries sounds pretty cringe-y. Turns out, that's kind of the point. I really like what this story is doing with who owns the means of violence. I'm very tired of ace & agender characters only getting to exist as robots and aliens, but I think Wells makes this much more interesting when the line between robot & human is defined by corporate hegemony, a social construct, and becomes blurred when she starts to describe the productive relationships & ownership of labor. I'll definitely be reading more of the series.

laminatedmoth
@laminatedmoth

even more April reading.

  • 2023-Apr-21 The Black God's Drums, P. Djèlí Clark. Really refreshing and playful scamp-&-pirate story.
  • 2023-Apr-28 The Last Command, Timothy Zahn. The 3rd entry of the original pre-Disney Thrawn trilogy. Really wish Mara Jade would make a post-Disney appearance. Couldn't care much for anything else in the series, but lmao at the implications of Luuke getting killed.
  • 2023-Apr-29 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Murray Bookchin. I think the most important takeaways are how he considers technology, particularly what we see in later cyberpunk, as both a trapping in and a release from scarcity. With the current trends towards a misinformation-by-self-referential-propagation death of the internet, and the closure of any bourgeoisie journalism that's the least bit sympathetic to labor & liberation, I'm more skeptical of our path forward, though.
  • 2023-Apr-30 Babel-17, Samuel R. Delaney. The romantic elements have a hetero framing, but like The Hork-Bajir Chronicles, the alien aspects make it difficult to fit in those norms, giving rise to a queer reading. I also really enjoyed everything about language in this book, looking at the functions of poetry, but also, giving space for a poetry that exists outside of the vague, cultural elements and towards the abstract, programmatic elements. In doing so, he also indicates that both of these approaches are emergent from societal forces, and include all their base ideological flaws, while also revealing the beauty of that which exists and the possibilities of reality itself.

laminatedmoth
@laminatedmoth
  • 2023-May-04 Ring Shout, P. Djèlí Clark. I've cleared up most of my P. Djèlí Clark backlog with this. I've seen this cover around town at cafes and on the bus, always held by folks that look like they campaigned hard for Hillary Clinton. Between the optics of the readers and the cover's artwork, I really assumed the worst and dismissed the book when it was stronger in the zeitgeist. Now that I've read through Clark's other works, and realize Ring Shout is written by the same person, I happily picked up a copy to read. I think, however, the book didn't land much for me, which is fine, I still thought it was a good read. The conversations voicing each character's political concerns contrasted against the overt, tangible, racist struggle, informed me that I should be reading with an eye towards author intent and what the text is trying to speak to, and I don't think this was actually the best framing on how to read it. I need to re-engage and re-read it in the future, focusing more on the characters and less on my political analysis.
  • 2023-May-07 Edison's Conquest of Mars, Garrett P. Serviss. Alright, I didn't really read through this, but the 372 Pages podcast coverage was so long and so thorough, that it sure feels like I read it. This was a laughably bad book.
  • 2023-May-11 The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu. Oh my god, this book has an awful start. In the American release, I can see why the editor pulled the section from later in the book to the front, knowing how much the NYT Bestseller crowd loves a good Red Scare. The first chapter has Cixin Liu writing Chinese communists calling any and all established science as "reactionary" without giving a single, solid argument as to why something like Einstein's Theory of Relativity could be thought that way, and definitely never gave the possibility that relativity is entirely compatible with these character's politics. The severity ends with this professor being beaten to death by communists berating him as "reactionary" because he's just too much of an Honest Scientist. I think the editing & translation definitely work to this, but it seems Cixin Liu's science-fiction is coming from some notion of the purity of science & rationality. Aside from being filled with plenty of ideological assumptions around technology and mathematics, I think there's enough in this book to hold my interest to read the next in the series. It's clear the author doesn't understand calculus and the actual three-body problem, and I doubt he'll offer more in the way of sociology during The Dark Forest, but I love how the characters and situations are written. The sombre, depressing horror around existentialism being brought into the character's expressions & pursuits, along with the absurd counter-measures in an intergalactic fight between both an alien invasion and very misaligned global political forces, are great. I think the 2019 Chernobyl mini-series is playing in that same space.
  • 2023-May-15 Last Shot, Daniel José Older. Tie-in novel to Solo: A Star Wars Story, and not the novel adaptation of the film. This ended up being a one-last-hurrah adventure for Han Solo & Lando, with some flashbacks to give L3-37 some back story. Boy, L3 is handled infinitely better than in the movie, and I wish Phoebe Waller-Bridge got to portray this character instead of... Horny Millennium Falcon. Solo and Lando are so out of practice, and it's revealed that maybe they never were in-practice, that the ability of rest of their adhoc crew and sheer luck gets them through the story's challenges. There's a likeable, well-written Ewok and a hot-shot Rodian (also nonbinary, written in a way that shows nonbinary characters exist regardless of societal pressures). I would much prefer an adaptation of this over plenty of the other Solo-centered Star Wars stories out there.

laminatedmoth
@laminatedmoth
  • 2023-May-21 Star Wars Jedi: Battle Scars, Sam Maggs. Tie-in novel to Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, not an adaptation. Actually read in May & not June but I forgot to append it to the previous post, woops. I like romance stories, but usually in Star Wars fiction, they don't land for me. This one worked, though. As far as I know, this is the first properly LGBTQ-centered in the Star Wars universe, with a lesbian falling-in-love story at the center. This makes it hard to evaluate, since I usually grade Star Wars against Star Wars. Compared to the handful of lesbian romance novels I've read, I think this was well-executed. It also managed to give more personality to Cal Kestis, the least developed main-character in all of Star Wars. I liked the interiority of Merrin and the development of Fret, but I'll be surprised if Fret ever makes another appearance in Star Wars canon.
  • 2023-Jun-08 Foundation, Isaac Asimov. I really don't get this book. Asimov wants to play around with this idea of psycho-history, but it doesn't seem to have any reflection and only offers very thin opportunity for speculation. I get that some people like it for being setup to a larger story of empire, but between the writing style, the weak social commentary, and the author's problematic history, there's really no reason anyone should read this, and no reason for me to read the future entries in the series.
  • 2023-Jun-16 The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. I'm a sucker for anything taking a close look at things in the Pacific Northwest cascades, but I loved the thoughtful analysis of how the economics of matsutaki mushrooms proves outliers of the capitalist framework. Although I've often been stiff on my materialist stance, after reading her method of using intentionally anti- (de-?) materialist arguments, I'm convinced that materialism isn't the only effective analytical tool. I'm coming away after reading this book with a new outlook on what can change myself & society, how we can operate within and against capitalism, and of course, a deeper respect for the mushrooms in my local ecology.

laminatedmoth
@laminatedmoth
  • 2023-Jun-16 Artificial Condition, Martha Wells. The 2nd entry in the Murderbot Diaries series. The same compliments I had for the first book apply here. I liked the bend towards detective fiction. I felt the ending was cut short, though, but maybe it was written with plans for the 3rd book well under-way. Maybe this is a series that needs evaluated as a whole instead of as just the parts, and maybe that's itself is also one of the themes of the series.
  • 2023-Jun-27 The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler. Initially I was pretty hesitant with how the novel was going to handle machine learning and LLM, especially with how "AI" has been in the zeitgeist. That, coupled with the long history of animal studies constantly pushing back on the socially constructed division of rights/capabilities between human and animals, kept me in a critical stance while reading the first half of the novel. However, I think Nayler understands the trappings of those subjects, and carefully navigated the space while also managing to do the cool sci-fi thing I love of exploring interesting philosophical questions. I particularly liked the characterization of the oceans as both sentient and a vector for capital, the Baudrillard-ian look at cross-species semiotics, and the exploitation of the space between labor and meditation.
  • 2023-Jun-28 Spear, Nicola Griffith. Not gonna lie, although its not even two weeks since I read this, I don't remember a thing. There's some stuff around gender that doesn't feel like its exploring anything more than some classic Joan of Arc stories. Maybe I need to revisit it, but it felt more European than I like for this kind of fantasy.

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @laminatedmoth's post: