What The F are you reading these days?

saymyname

saymyname

Safe Space Counsellor
i actually finished colonialism not too long ago...and am nearing the finish line on disrobing the aboriginal industry by st. frances...its been a pretty good read and i think it enlightened me in other ways i did not previously consider a lil on how the abo mind works. i appreciate that she just wants to have an honest conversation about how to help the natives without the bullshit that is being pushed. quite prescient as i think it was first published in 2009 or some shit. def recommend.

i'm probably going to finish bitter harvest next, but maybe i want something a little lighter first..havent quite decided...but...what are you fuckers reading?
 
Upvote 8
Back issues of Time magazine from the early 1960s (available for free online), far more interesting than it sounds because reading it you can see the rot gradually seeping into Western society: although Time was staunchly anti-Communist back then, it was sympathetic to the beginnings of coloured immigration to western European countries (because what difference could a few Negroes possibly make?) and to the hideous brutalist architecture that we're still stuck with today, which seemed stunning and brave at the time because it replaced the glass boxes of Mies van der Rohe.

What's also fascinating is the way in which now-iconic figures of that time were criticized harshly but honestly for their pretensions, such as Jack Kerouac, Marilyn Monroe, JFK etc. At the time of Monroe's death, for example, the article about her death (buried in the back of the magazine in the "Show Business" section) basically said "this is no surprise, she was always a complete trainwreck of a human being" -- very different from the way in which she is regarded now, i.e. as a feminist martyr. And they were intelligent enough back then to realize that most popular culture was essentially crap, even the stuff that is regarded as "classic" today. I'm still only halfway through 1962, so I'm looking forward to hearing about what they have to say about the Beatles, LSD, hippies, student riots, Black Panthers etc. later on.
 
I’m just about finished Homer’s Odyssey (W.C. Bryant translation, not the feminist revision that the new movie is based upon). It was composed between 700-4000 years ago and is an absolute page turner. It is fascinating to get a sense of the Grecian understanding of human agency and fate (often by the hands of the Gods), reverence for tradition and home, the things for which men fought for, or were worthy of manly tears (being estranged from one’s home, the loss of a good man and friend, or the inability to die of a noble death). Highly recommended.

I am also muscling my way through ‘How Linux Works’ by Brian Ward. With all these new surveillance and censorship laws, I am trying to reclaim as much of my privacy and independence as possible. I made the jump to Linux a while back, which was mostly fine, but when they stopped providing security updates for my router, I was forced to either ditch it, or install open-source firmware on it and have greater control. I chose the latter, but it’s been a tough journey. I thought I ‘bricked’ my router twice. I’m trying to get my network up and running again with my VPN going through the router with some split-tunneling. I absolutely suck at both Linux and networking, but this book is helping. Still, I do find I learn a lot more by changing settings that ‘break’ the network, then spending hours figuring out why. How do other people get good at this stuff? Lol.

Note: to those wondering why I’m showing as a ‘new user,’ it’s because I purged my account about a week ago. I’ll probably do that once in awhile. No point in making things easy for our overlords.
 
Nothing at the moment. Or the many moments prior.
I have Kim Stanley Robinson's Science in the Capital series (Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below and Sixty Days and Counting) and three of John Scalzi's Old Man's War series (Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigades and The Last Colony) sitting within reach. They've been sitting there judging me for years, waiting to be read.

Someone mentioned A Canticle for Leibowitz in the last thread. I thought "Why is that title so familiar?" so I rummaged about my tomes and found it. It appears I stopped reading at page 270 of 313. It's finished now.
 
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