My life is now pretty much deal with email, work on the house until 3, pick up my kid, deal with email, take my kid to swimming, collapse in a puddle and "work on the house until 3" and "take my kid to swimming" involves a good 7 hours a day for audiobooks.

We last did this 327 days ago?

Library

- You have to be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin To Live, Paul Kix. The mechanics of MLK's march on Birmingham. Progress is a bitch, and it isn't guaranteed. Recommended.

- Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, Robert Heinlein. I decided to do some of the junior Heinleins because my life is a bummer. This one is cute. Very Golden Age. Recommended.

- The Door Into Summer, Robert Heinlein. I don't even remember this one. I think it was an archetypal "I'm Heinlein, you're stupid" Heinlein.

- Tunnel in the Sky, Robert Heinlein. Eh. Hunger Games before Hunger Games. Definite indications of Heinlein's protofascism on display.

- The Communist Manifesto, Marx & Engels. This takes 45 minutes and is still a waste of time.

- A Desolation Called Peace, Arkady Martine. This is the sequel to A Memory Called Empire which I torrented because I'm impatient. It's f'n GREAT but more on that below.

- The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt. Arendt makes much of the fact that historically, antisemitism is fairly recent. She's big on the ordinariness of it all, which tracks.

- The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt. Haidt has become insufferable. His principle schtick at this point is "if your research disproves my research it's because you're doing it wrong." His recommendations aren't all that tough, though - monitor your kid's internet and keep them off social media until they're sixteen at least. Having seen the drama erupt on chats with my f'n 11-year-old I totally get it. Parenting is a full time job and I guess some people forget that?

- The Trading Game, Gary Stevenson. This book is mostly a lie, at least according to everyone supposedly in it. It's still pretty awesome and i recommend the shit out of it. It's about a punk-ass kid who hustles hard enough to trade Swiss Francs for Citibank and then decides he's a socialist, basically. He spends half the book pickaxeing his bonus out of Citi in a glum and punk-ass way. What fucked me up pretty hard is I've made more money by buying and holding crypto than this poor asshole did hustling 90 hours a week trading gilts or whatever over the same amount of time. I probably shouldn't admit that.

- Battle Cry Freedom, James Mcpherson. I was looking for a decent reference on the Civil War that isn't Shelby Foote's paean to racism. This isn't it. Much like Mary Beard's SPQR, it's a full-throated textbook that feels no compunction whatsoever to make you want to read it.

- Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hanna Arendt. Did you know that Hanna Arendt really really regretted using the phrase "the banality of evil?" Eichmann in Jerusalem isn't about "banality" so much as it's about normalcy; her whole point was that the Holocaust didn't start with a bunch of people going "let's be evil" it was a steady slide of "I guess we're doing this" where each step further was justified by the step directly behind. She basically paints Eichmann up as the Walter Mitty of the Nazi Party, an unremarkable, boring bureaucrat whose focus was on successfully executing bureaucracy, not Jews. She points out more than a few times that Eichmann expressed stress, guilt and severe misgivings about what he was doing but he kept doing it anyway because ultimately, it was his job.

- SPQR, Mary Beard. Much like I wanted a Civil War book, this is the book on the Romans and it's boring AF. There's a breed of historian who assumes that if you're reading their shit it's because you already find it unrelentingly fascinating and I don't. I think the Romans are overblown compared to pretty much every other contemporary culture which means Team Beard has abso-fucking-lutely nothing to say to me. I think I made it 4 hours in?

- Red Plenty, Francis Spufford. This is a weird one because it's kind of a dramatization of soviet economics as told through the eyes of access characters. So it's not really true but it's based on true events? And it's worth it for the insight into another culture and another set of values, I guess?

- The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackon Bennett. This book is dope. Imagine Middle Earth except the ocean is full of monsters, magic has been replaced by genetic engineering and everyone is gay and neurodivergent. Now go follow Holmes and Watson as they solve a Whodunit. Watson is an autistic savant and Holmes is agoraphobic. And.... GO

- Secondhand Time, Svetlana Alexievich. I couldn't finish this. Not because it wasn't good but because it's terrifying. It's an oral history of the Soviet Union, in which a bunch of Muscovites celebrate totalitarianism, deprivation, mass murder and oppression because at least the rest of the world feared them. There's no introspection in it anywhere. Several anecdotes about the wall coming down and White Russians discovering holy shit we better get outta Dagestan because they'll murder us otherwise I never realized these people we oppressed and treated as third class citizens might actually resent us. "Weren't things great under Stalin?" Weren't things great under Trump? Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in Literature for this book and others. She's Belarusian, currently living in exile in Germany.

- The Olympian Affair, Jim Butcher. So Butcher wrote a book about a steampunk magical universe where everyone flies around on airships powered by magic and wind and nobody lives on the ground and also cats can talk for some reason. This book is its sequel. I won't say it makes sense but I will say it's a fun little swashbuckler, just like the last one, and that Jim Butcher can write himself a pithy cat.

- The Mercy of Gods, James S. A. Corey. Our Dynamic Duo has decided to write an apocalyptic alien invasion saga to follow up The Expanse and it's fair-to-middlin' good. It's promising.

- The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler. I think this was a NikolaiFyodorov recommendation? It's funny I've read the influences that made this book and yeah, I guess that's one way to go with it. It's kinda fun. It pretty clearly owes its existence to My Octopus Teacher, The Outlaw Ocean and Wind Up Girl.

- Masters of the Air, Donald L. Miller. This is not the snappy Apple series, which is great. This is an intensive study of the logistics and history of the European air war and I am glad to not be fighting it.

Torrents

- Sundown Towns - a Hidden Dimension of American Racism. Grim AF. A great book. Written by the same guy who wrote "what your teacher didn't tell you about American history" or whatever that book is called. I didn't finish it. My diet of grimness is grim.

- Technofeudalism - What Killed Capitalism. This is the second book by Yanis Varoufakis I've tried to read and they both suck. Economists have this nasty tendency to go "I understand economics, therefore I understand everything" when even the first half of that statement is pretty questionable. Varoufakis ended up being in charge of the Greek economy during the crisis so I guess he's got some credibility? But also he's an idiot.

- The first three Clavell books. Holy shit these are long. I made it halfway through Whirlwind a few years back and quite honestly the best part about Clavell is you can not understand a word he's saying for half an hour at a time because you're hammer-drilling into concrete and you'll change a battery and won't have missed anything. I'm cool with long books but Clavell needed an editor. These things are easily 250% too long.

- The INfinite Game, Simon Sinek. This could be a pamphlet. "If you focus on long-term goals rather than short-term goals your business will last longer." kthxbye

- The Key to Rebecca, Ken Follett. Ken Follett is a much better writer than James Clavell. But like Clavell, he's orientalist AF. These audiobooks are old enough that the narrator does that bullshit Charlie Chan accent and it's really cringe.

- Joe Haldeman, The Forever War. I read this because I needed to get the taste of Starship Troopers out of my mouth and it doesn't really hold up. I've read this book maybe four times, in four different versions, and I should have stopped at three twenty years ago.

- Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein. This is a shit book, on every level, in every dimension, and people who like it should feel bad.

- Ma'am Darling, Craig Brown. For some reason I felt like reading 75 facts about Princess Margaret. I think I'm really into the idea of the British Monarchy as the canary in the coal mine of the British Empire and Princess Margaret is definitely that.

- Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto. This is the City of Quartz analogue for the Bay Area. It's worth a read. Republicans suck, and always have.

- Raven, Tim Reiterman. Yeah I read a 500 page book on Jim Jones. I am none the wiser.

- SM Stirling, the first book of the Emberverse, at least 4 hours of it. Total shit.

- The Age of Grievance, Frank Bruni. Frank Bruni is an asshole.

- What we Owe the Future, whatever jackass wrote it. This is the Communist Manifesto of the TESCREAL posse and it's just as bad. Longer, though.

- Your Face Belongs to Us, yadda yadda - could also have been a pamphlet. "there is a company. It is bad."

Not gonna lie. Day after the election I poured some scotch and watched a couple episodes of Land of the Lost.