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A mega-thread of all the books I read in 2023. The setup: one cast per book (oldest > recent), inc. an impression and a link. Comments, questions and extra recommendations welcome. This may take a while...
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#1: Alan Moore's Watchmen series (a 12 issue collection). The phrase that comes to mind for this series? "Frighteningly relevant". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen
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#2: Underland by Robert Macfarlane. Ride- along as Macfarlane goes to some primal locations and provides a vicarious experience of the power of place. https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/56082/
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#3: the third volume (issues 12-18) of Skottie Young's and Jorge Corona's Middlewest. Beautiful art and a poignant tale of coming to terms with one's traumas. https://imagecomics.com/comics/series/middlewest
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#4: The Complete Persepolis (Vol. 1 and 2) by Marjane Satrapi. An experience that helped me understand what it meant to be inside Iran during the Islamic Revolution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persepolis_(comics)
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#5: Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life. A text that took me deeper into the diversity of non-human agencies and understandings. https://www.merlinsheldrake.com/entangled-life
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#6: The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman. A particularly wrenching rendition of an already unfathomable time in human history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maus
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#7: There Are No Electrons by Kenn Amdahl. An odd and entertaining introduction to electronics that I actually recall with some fondness. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/304551
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#8: Keller Easterling's Extrastatecraft. Scary and exciting in a gloomy way. Lends supports to the idea that the singularity has already occurred (corp. personhood). https://www.kellereasterling.com/books/extrastatecraft-the-power-of-infrastructure-space
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#9: the 2nd volume of McGilchrist's The Matter with Things. Really helped me to see the malleability of our experience. Could've been longer tbh. https://channelmcgilchrist.com/buy-now-the-matter-with-things/
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#10: Saga: Compendium One by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples. A real experience; I was excited when I got to sit down and read this of an evening. https://imagecomics.com/comics/releases/saga-compendium-one-tp
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#11: Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast. Felt a little twee to begin with but I actually found myself quite affected by the end. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can%27t_We_Talk_About_Something_More_Pleasant%3F
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#12: Daniel Hillis' The Pattern on the Stone. An orientation in computing akin to Petzold's Code (though perhaps a little softer). https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/277658
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#13: Bastani's Fully Automated Luxury Communism. A decent manifesto that set me to thinking about a lot of things—especially the interplay of tech, labour and capital. https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/476-fully-automated-luxury-communism
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#14: Robin Hobb's Liveship Traders Trilogy. Classic fantasy, really. Dramatic and poignant and insert more literary adjectives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liveship_Traders
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#16: Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Like the preceding entries, this was evocative and managed to get me to buy in to and comprehend the non-human perspectives. https://adriantchaikovsky.com/children-of-time-children-of-ruin-children-of-memory.html#anchor3
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#17: Oral Histories of the Internet and the Web by Niels Brugger, Gerard Goggin. A history of a most foundational thing. Illuminating, esp. how it refactors conventional, anglo-centric narratives about the net. https://www.routledge.com/Oral-Histories-of-the-Internet-and-the-Web/Brugger-Goggin/p/book/9781032333380
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#18: Mystics, Masters, Saints and Sages by Robert Ullman and Judyth Reichenberg-Ullman. A collection of enlightenment anecdotes. Intriguing and a little underwhelming. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/922048
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#19: Everything Flows by Daniel J. Nicholson and John Dupre. I'm a sucker for attempted paradigm-cides, and this is one undertaken with class and humility. https://academic.oup.com/book/27525
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#20: Chris Miller's Chip War. I'm a dummy when it comes to semiconductors—both technically, and as an industry—so this served as a nice, light introduction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_War:_The_Fight_for_the_World%27s_Most_Critical_Technology
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#21: Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant. I'm pretty blind to the discourse around contemporary healthcare (and how capitalism has entangled with it), and this helped me see a little more. https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2801-health-communism
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#22: Operating Systems: Three Easy Steps by Remzi H. and Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau. Part of my continued attempt to get a Fingerspitzengefühl for computing. Serendipitous outcome of this? A continued sense of awe. https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/
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#23: Jessica Bruder's Nomadland. A despairing look into how a society's underclass manage to subsist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomadland:_Surviving_America_in_the_Twenty-First_Century
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#24: Pessoa's The Entangled Brain. Bangs the drum of embodied cognition in a convincing fashion. Say it with me: "Embodiment matters. Embodiment matters. Embodiment..." https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262544603/the-entangled-brain/
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#25: Mike Prada's Spaced Out. Following my re-engagement with the NBA I wanted to better understand the modern "pace and space" paradigm. This really helped. https://www.triumphbooks.com/spaced-out-products-9781629378862.php?page_id=21
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#26 and #27: Complexity, Entropy and The Physics of Information Vol. 1 and 2. Probably "above my level" in technical terms, but a good interdisciplinary grounding in some foundational papers and proceedings. https://www.sfipress.org/books/complexity-entropy-and-the-physics-of-information
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#28: 2nd ed. of Rob Philip's Physical Biology of the Cell. A great map for cellular and molecular biology that makes the domain feel accessible more than intimidating. https://www.routledge.com/Physical-Biology-of-the-Cell/Garcia-Phillips-Kondev-Theriot-Phillips-Kondev-Garcia/p/book/9780815344506
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#29: Mahajan's The Art of Insight in Science and Engineering is, to me, actually better than the prettied up Street Fighting Mathematics. It provides sharp tools for reality comprehension. https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/26055
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#30: Jackson's The Essence of Software asks the provocative question of what software is and proposes a novel approach for conceptualising it. https://essenceofsoftware.com
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#30: Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli. Absolutely gorgeous, and with the narrative oomph that such impactful visuals deserve. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterios_Polyp
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