Link tags: books

The case for rereading | A Working Library

Reading, especially fiction, is often referred to as an escape, but I’ve never believed that. It’s true that a great story transports you somewhere else, that returning to your life afterwards can feel like an abrupt reentry. But I think that’s less because you escaped the real world, however briefly, and more that you got a clearer look at it. A great book rearranges time: it brings both history and speculative futures into the present, into a now you can occupy and taste and feel.

Kissa. Book. Launch. — Roden Explorers Archive

Own. Your. Nook. There’s power in owning your nook of the ‘net — your domain name, your design, your archives — and it’s easier than ever to do so, and run a crowdfunding campaign at the same time.

Top 10 books about remaking the future | Peter F Hamilton | Books | The Guardian

Here then are 10 stories of remaking the future that contain hope — or at least stability.

1. The City and the Stars by Arthur C Clarke
2. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
3. Revenger by Alastair Reynolds
4. Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
5. Do You Dream of Terra-Two? by Temi Oh
6. Consider Phlebas by Iain M Banks
7. Natural History by Justina Robson
8. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
9. Way Station by Clifford D Simak
10. News from Gardenia by Robert Llewellyn

There Has Never Been a Better Time to Read Ursula Le Guin’s “Earthsea” Books - Electric Literature

Well, this is timely! Cassie mentioned recently that she was reading—and enjoying—the Earthsea books, which I had never got around to reading. So I’m reading them now. Then Craig mentioned in one of his newsletters that he’s also reading them. Now there’s this article…

To white protestors and accomplices, who say that they want to listen but are fearful of giving up some power so that we can all heal, I suggest you read the Earthsea cycle. You will need to learn to step away from the center to build a new world, and the Black majority in this fantasy series offers a better model than any white history.

What’s Happening? Or: How to name a disaster - Elvia Wilk - Bookforum Magazine

It went unnamed by Doris Lessing and Cormac McCarthy. William Gibson called it The Jackpot:

On the one hand, naming the crisis allows one to apprehend it, grasp it, fight back against it. On the other hand, no word can fully encompass it, and any term is necessarily a reduction—the essence of “it” or “change” is not any singular instance but rather their constancy.

Memoirs Of A Survivor, The Peripheral, Parable Of The Sower, New York 2140, The Road, Children Of Men, Station Eleven, Severance, The Rapture, Ridley Walker:

Fiction can portray ecologies, timescales, catastrophes, and forms of violence that may be otherwise invisible, or more to the point, unnameable. We will never grasp the pandemic in its entirety, just like we will never see the microbe responsible for it with the naked eye. But we can try to articulate how it has changed us—is changing us.

The Fonts in Popular Things Identified Vol. 1 · Typewolf

I’d watch this game show:

Welcome to the first installment of a new series on Typewolf, where I’ll be identifying the fonts used in popular things. The focus here is on anything you might encounter in contemporary visual culture—movie posters, TV shows, book covers, etc.

So no one told us the internet was gonna be this way | The Outline

An interview with Joanne McNeil about her new book, Lurking:

Someone who was creating, say, a small decentralized community for a specific group of people would not have luck finding investors, as opposed to Facebook, which sought to build a platform for all.

‘Sfunny, when I was on Quarantine Book Club the other day, this is exactly what I talked about one point—how Facebook (and venture capital) moved the goalposts on what constitutes success and failure on the web.

Quarantine Book Club

Join your favorite authors on Zoom where you can have spirited discussions from the privacy of our own quarantined space!

A great initiative from the folks at Mule Design. As well as chatting to talented authors, you can also chat to me: this Thursday at 4pm UTC I’ll be discussing Resilient Web Design.

Extinguished Countries

Guidebooks to countries that no longer exist.

The first book will be on the Republic of Venice. There’ll be maps, infographics, and I suspect there’ll be an appearance by Aldus Manutius.

Our first guidebook tells the story of the Republic of Venice, la Serenissima, a 1000-year old state that disappeared in 1797.

Infovore » Not Like A Road To Follow

Books are machines for generating empathy.

Read fiction. I don’t mean “read sf to have ideas about the future.” I mean “read any form of fiction, genre or no”. Fiction allows us to have other ideas, live other lives, see other perspectives. It allows us to escape and re-consider the world from outside ourselves. It allows us to think at lengths and timescales that we may not from day-to-day. It is a shortcut to containing multitudes; to other minds.

Stab a Book, the Book Won’t Die — by Craig Mod

Craig compares and contrasts books to “attention monsters”:

That is, any app / service / publication whose business is predicated on keeping a consumer engaged and re-engaged for the benefit of the organization (often to the detriment of the mental and physical health of the user), dozens if not hundreds or thousands of times a day.

The Octopus: An Alien Among Us | Literary Hub

An excerpt from the book Rethinking Consciousness by Michael S. A. Graziano, which looks like an interesting companion piece to Peter Godfrey-Smith’s excellent Other Minds.

Also, can I just say how nice this reading experience is—the typography, the arresting image …I like it.

Standard Ebooks: Free and liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover.

Books in the public domain, lovingly designed and typeset, available in multiple formats for free. Great works of fiction from Austen, Conrad, Stevenson, Wells, Hardy, Doyle, and Dickens, along with classics of non-fiction like Darwin’s The Origin of Species and Shackleton’s South!

An Interview with Nick Harkaway: Algorithmic Futures, Literary Fractals, and Mimetic Immortality - Los Angeles Review of Books

Nick Harkaway on technology in fiction:

Humans without tools are not magically pure; they’re just unvaccinated, cold, and wet.

SF is how we get to know ourselves, either who we are or who we might be. In terms of what is authentically human, SF has a claim to be vastly more honest and important than a literary fiction that refuses to admit the existence of the modern and goes in search of a kind of essential humanness which exists by itself, rather than in the intersection of people, economics, culture, and science which is where we all inevitably live. It’s like saying you can only really understand a flame if you get rid of the candle. Good luck with that.

And on Borges:

He was a genius, and he left this cryptic, brilliant body of work that’s poetic, incomplete, astonishing. It’s like a tasting menu in a restaurant where they let you smell things that go to other tables and never arrive at yours.

The ‘Future Book’ Is Here, but It’s Not What We Expected | WIRED

Craig writes about reading and publishing, from the memex and the dynabook to the Kindle, the iPhone, and the iPad, all the way back around to plain ol’ email and good old-fashioned physical books.

We were looking for the Future Book in the wrong place. It’s not the form, necessarily, that needed to evolve—I think we can agree that, in an age of infinite distraction, one of the strongest assets of a “book” as a book is its singular, sustained, distraction-free, blissfully immutable voice. Instead, technology changed everything that enables a book, fomenting a quiet revolution. Funding, printing, fulfillment, community-building—everything leading up to and supporting a book has shifted meaningfully, even if the containers haven’t. Perhaps the form and interactivity of what we consider a “standard book” will change in the future, as screens become as cheap and durable as paper. But the books made today, held in our hands, digital or print, are Future Books, unfuturistic and inert may they seem.

The 15 Web Design Books of 2018 You Can’t Afford to Miss

How lovely! Going Offline is in very good company in this list, and Oliver has some nice words to say about it:

Starting with no assumption of JavaScript knowledge, Jeremy explains the latest strategies, the ins and outs of fetching and caching, how to enhance your website’s performance, and more.

Extremely beginner-friendly and approachable, it can be read in half a day and will help you get Service Workers up and running in no time.

But all I want for Christmas is for Shopify to stop enabling Breitbart.

A Book Apart, Front-End Next Steps

If you buy this bundle of books, you get Going Offline in some very, very good company.

Astronomical Typography

Typography meets astronomy in 16th century books like the Astronomicum Caesareum.

It is arguably the most typographically impressive scientific manual of the sixteenth century. Owen Gingerich claimed it, “the most spectacular contribution of the book-maker’s art to sixteenth-century science.”

Three Missions | Field Notes

Okay, I think I’m going to have to get this pack of three notebooks: Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.

Manual Aspire

If only all documentation was as great as this old manual for the ZX Spectrum that Remy uncovered:

The manual is an instruction book on how to program the Spectrum. It’s a full book, with detailed directions and information on how the machine works, how the programming language works, includes human readable sentences explaining logic and even goes so far as touching on what hex values perform which assembly functions.

When we talk about things being “inspiring”, it’s rarely in regards to computer manuals. But, damn, if this isn’t inspiring!

This book stirs a passion inside of me that tells me that I can make something new from an existing thing. It reminds me of the 80s Lego boxes: unlike today’s Lego, the back of a Lego box would include pictures of creations that you could make with your Lego set. It didn’t include any instructions to do so, but it always made me think to myself: “I can make something more with these bricks”.