reading

Currently reading I’m binge-reading Charlie Stross’s Laundry Files series – for my reference, here’s his chronology (or the Wikipedia version with ISBNs). Fiction Charles Stross, Season of Skulls (2023) Ovid, Metamorphoses (translated by David Raeburn, 2004) Non-fiction Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century (2012) Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (2023) Stalled Non-fiction Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) Jackie Bettington et. al., Keeping Archives (2008) Claire Bishop, Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today (2024) Read in 2025 Fiction Charles Stross, Quantum of Nightmares (2022) Read in 2024 Fiction Charles Stross, The Atrocity Archives (2003) Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue (2007) Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum (2010) Charles Stross, The Apocalypse Codex (2012) Charles Stross, The Rhesus Chart (2014) Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score (2015) Charles Stross, The Nightmare Stacks (2016) R. F. Kuang, Babel (2022) Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief (2017) Charles Stross, The Labyrinth Index (2018) Charles Stross, Dead Lies Dreaming (2020) Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843) (re-read) Non-fiction Naomi Klein, Doppelganger (2023) Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing (2019) Jenny Odell, Saving Time (2023) Cal Newport, Slow Productivity (2024)

V.H. Belvadi’s theme for the January 2025 IndieWeb Carnival, On the importance of friction, is an invitation for me to gather various threads that I have found in my reading in the last few weeks, and indeed to practise that friction in writing this post.1 As I slowed down over the New Year and spent more time on slow and deep reading, I saw that other bloggers were also developing more intentional reading practices. Jeremy Friesen customised his Mastodon and Emacs setup, ...

I have updated the book shortcode1 used on my Reading page to link to the Internet Archive’s Open Library, which provides crowd-sourced book metadata – you can also look for these books in your local library! I’ve used the Open Library identifier for a Work rather than a specific edition. I used the Open Library API to take the ISBN of a specific (physical or digital) book and return the Work ID; publishing and documenting that code might have to wait for another day. ...

I’ve broken out of my lockdown-era reading slump (a topic for another blog post) and wanted to return to tracking and sharing my reading online (tracking and sharing my reading is one of the reasons I went back to library school in the first place). I have accounts on both LibraryThing and Goodreads and used to find good recommendations on both sites, but Amazon bought Goodreads and LibraryThing, while still independent and nerd-friendly, is after all another silo where I am not in full control of the data I submit. ...