What I'm reading

Lots of people on Gemini have been talking about their plans to read more books, instead of short-form web stuff. I've been doing this for a while (my Kobo reader is invaluable for this), and it's time for an update.

Finished

The Dawn of Everything, by Graeber and Wengrow. I discussed this on my last reading update, at the Winter Solstice. It probably deserves a proper review, but I'm not up to writing one right now. I think it makes its main points (human social organization is tremendously variable, and a lot of things we think are strongly linked, like cities and political hierarchy, are a lot more variably distributed than previous generations of anthropologists thought), but the question remains: What now? What do we do with this knowledge? Another world is possible, but how do we get there from here?

A Lush and Seething Hell, by John Hornor Jacobs. A novella about the cosmic horror bound up with the 1973 fascist coup in Chile (displaced to a fictional neighboring country), and a short novel about cursed secret verses to the traditional song "Stagger Lee", and the older abhuman song that underlies them. Highly recommended.

Attack Surface, by Cory Doctorow. Third in the "Little Brother" series. Goes into the advantage attackers have over defenders in cybersecurity and surveillance, and why we need political solutions to go with our technical strategies. The protagonist is a little more interesting than most Doctorow protags, but still sounds just like Cory Doctorow.

Quantum of Nightmares. The latest in the "New Management" spin-off series from the "Laundry Files" series. Mix of Lovecraftian horror, a supervillain caper, Mary Poppins, and very dark humour.

Unmentionable: the Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners, by Therese O'Neill. Basically what it says on the tin; a wickedly funny book about how much the 19th century sucked, especially for women.

On the list

I haven't actually decided what I'm reading next, but here are some possibilities:

Starry Speculative Corpse, the second installment in Eugene Thacker's "Horror of Philosophy" series.

Blackshirts and Reds, by Michael Parenti. A discussion of how "rational fascism" renders service to capitalism, and the internal and external forces that destroyed communism.

The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle, by Kelly Hurley

Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett. The next-to-last Discworld novel, which somehow I managed to miss when it came out. I may need to re-read the previous two Moist von Lipwig novels first, which makes me slightly less enthusiastic about reading this one.