Tootfinder

It might be cool to see this reading list as a @… -ish fedifeed
A Man Read 3,599 Books Over 60 Years, and Now His Family Has Shared the Entire List Online | Open Culture

A Man Read 3,599 Books Over 60 Years, and Now His Family Has Shared the Entire List Online
Dan Pelzer died earlier this year at the age of 92, leaving behind a handwritten list of all the books he'd read since 1962. His family had it digitized, put it online, and now it's gone viral, somewhat to the surprise of those of us who'd never heard of him before.

Day 23: Thi Bui
Indirect CW: parental neglect, war, intergenerational trauma
Bui is the author of "The Best We Could Do", a graphic memoir which explores her relationship with her parents and unpacks some of the intergenerational trauma coming out of the Vietnam War. It has a lot of wisdom to offer about both dealing with troubled parents as a 1.5th-generation immigrant, and it delves deeply into her parents' histories in Vietnam and the complexities of the situation there both in the north and in the south. It's beautifully illustrated and very nicely plotted together given all the disparate threads it is working with.
I haven't read any of Bui's other work, but it looks like she's published a picture book for kids as well as a series of short comics during the pandemic. Besides Oseman who also writes non-illustrated fiction and the two manga artists Ice mentioned, Bui is the first graphic novel author I've included here, but I've actually got quite a few of them in my longer list, one of whom may make it into the 30 I'll include in this thread. These days I'm reading a bunch of graphic novels since they're easy to get through, and the variety of stories and perspectives in that space is wonderful these days, with a huge array of indie stuff that probably never would have gotten off the ground in traditional publishing/comics spaces.
#30AuthorsNoMen

On MAGA factions and the meme wars of 2025 and beyond :
This is a PHD/level breakdown of the two alt-right movements set out to destroy each other and the rest of the USA in the process. The creator is Cy Canterel.
On my reading list : Lost in the Kingdom of Kitsch https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGdaytfdH/…

Algorithmic Delegated Choice: An Annotated Reading List
Mohammad T. Hajiaghayi, Suho Shin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06562 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06562…

Algorithmic Delegated Choice: An Annotated Reading List
The problem of delegated choice has been of long interest in economics and recently on computer science. We overview a list of papers on delegated choice problem, from classic works to recent papers with algorithmic perspectives.

Day 22: Yuki Urushibara
I've got a few more mangaka left on my short list, and might very well get to at least one more, but Urushibara is the author of Mushishi and anyone who knows either the manga or anime understands immediately why she appears here.
Mushishi is a "seinen" anime, which means it's written for adults, not children or teenagers (although it's very accessible for all ages). It deals with a vast array of life's circumstances through the lens of a traveling mushi expert and the various whimsical supernatural creatures he is called on to deal with. He's not an exorcist though, instead understanding that humans must live in harmony with the mushi, and working like an ecologist to sort things out. As is probably obvious, Urushibara is an incredible world-builder; she's also a top-notch artist and above all, her stories are overflowing with kindness, humanity, and respect for the natural world.
Besides Mushishi, I've read "Suiiki", and it's one of the few manga I stumbled through in the original Japanese, which says a lot given my limited reading vocabulary (and the fact that it doesn't include rubi). It weaves the supernatural into a story of childhood innocence and curiosity in a lovely way.
Much like Shirahama who I mentioned earlier, Urushibara's stories are full of gentle wisdom for all ages, but Urushibara's work is quieter and less dramatic, with an adult main character confident in his expertise instead of a young-and-learning protagonist.
#30AuthorsNoMen

Replaced article(s) found for q-bio.NC. https://arxiv.org/list/q-bio.NC/new
[1/1]:
- Integrating large language models and active inference to understand eye movements in reading and...
Francesco Donnarumma, Mirco Frosolone, Giovanni Pezzulo

Replaced article(s) found for cs.HC. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.HC/new
[1/1]:
- Reading.help: Supporting EFL Readers with Proactive and On-Demand Explanation of English Grammar ...
Sunghyo Chung, Hyeon Jeon, Sungbok Shin, Md Naimul Hoque

A potential reading list...
https://www.ctvnews.ca/edmonton/article/potential-list-of-books-slated-for-removal-from-edmonton-school-libraries-contains-significant-works-…

Replaced article(s) found for astro-ph.HE. https://arxiv.org/list/astro-ph.HE/new
[1/1]:
- Reading signatures of supermassive binary black holes in pulsar timing array observations
Boris Goncharov, et al.

Solid list:
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2025/10/06/102-lessons-from-102-books/?ck_subscriber_id=389259318
Don't run through LLM, it's already a very concise list. Take time and look through it.

Replaced article(s) found for math.CO. https://arxiv.org/list/math.CO/new
[1/1]:
- Cluster scattering diagrams of acyclic affine type
Nathan Reading, Salvatore Stella

When you are visiting a personal #website or #blog: do you enjoy reading all the latest blog posts / journal entries / notes *in full* on the home page or do you prefer a list of headings for the latest entries?

Day 18: Mark Oshiro
Having just learned that Oshiro is nonbinary, they're an instant include on this list. In veering extremely heavily towards YA, and losing a spot that would have gone to an absolutely legendary mangaka, anime writer, or feminist philosopher, but "Anger is A Gift" and "Each of us a Desert" are just that good, and I'm trying to steer a bit towards towards lesser-known authors I respect.
I already mentioned "Anger is a Gift" above, but to recap, it's a painful, vivid, and beautifully honest story of queer love, loss, and protest against an oppressive system. CW for racist police murder, intergenerational trauma, and police brutality against highschool students. It's a book a lot of Americans could benefit from reading right now, and while it's fiction, it's not fantasy or sci-fi. Besides the themes and politics, the writing is just really solid, with delicate characterization and tight-plotted developments that are beautifully paced.
To me "Each of us a Desert" is maybe even more beautiful, and Oshiro leaps into a magnificent fantasy world that's richly original in its desolation, dark history, lonely characters, and mythical magic. Particularly the clearly-not-just-superscription but ambiguously-important/powerful magical elements of Oshiro's worldbuilding are a rare contrast to the usual magic-is-real-here's-how-it-works fare, and pulling that off a all as they do is a testament to their craft. The prose is wonderful, probably especially so if you speak Spanish, but I enjoyed it immensely despite only knowing a few words here and there. The rich interiority of the characters, their conflicts both with each other and within themselves, and the juxtaposition of all that against origins in cult-like ignorance allows for the delivery of a lot of wisdom and complex truths.
Between these two books, so different and yet each so powerful, Oshiro has demonstrated incredible craft and also a wide range of styles, so I'm definitely excited to read more of their work and to recommend them to others.
I'm also glad to have finally put a nonbinary author on this list; the others I had in mind won't make it at this point because there's too much genre overlap, although I'll include them in my didn't-make-it list at the end. I've now got just 2 slots left and have counted up 14 more authors that absolutely need to be mentioned, so we'll see what happens.
#20AuthorsNoMen

🚨 Listeriosis outbreak update - Ireland
Salad leaves and spinach added to list.
Nothing like cooking and enjoying a lovely HelloFresh meal and then reading the latest listeria notice that it now includes the McCormack Family Farms Irish Spinach Leaves you just used in the sauce.
I did cook it well and it was steaming hot so 🤞

Replaced article(s) found for cs.AI. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.AI/new
[4/6]:
- Large Language Models Implicitly Learn to See and Hear Just By Reading
Prateek Verma, Mert Pilanci

Regarding my reading list, I should spend more time reading than scrolling through social media
🤔

Replaced article(s) found for cs.CL. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.CL/new
[1/3]:
- ViMMRC 2.0 -- Enhancing Machine Reading Comprehension on Vietnamese Literature Text
Son T. Luu, Khoi Trong Hoang, Tuong Quang Pham, Kiet Van Nguyen, Ngan Luu-Thuy Nguyen

"What do you lose by using Facebook", asked a friend who is keen to keep his account there for some reason.
What made me leave was the manipulation. I mean: they started hiding your friends posts in order to show you adverts instead! Feeding you slop from their promoted posts and "viral" messages (that aren't actually boosted by anyone, just picked out by their megaphone to show to everyone).
If you let the algorithm determine what you see than you let it determine what you are, who you become.
Even if you think it's better at finding shiny things than you, even if you think it builds the parasocial relationships that you want, even if you think it's saving you time to let the robot manage your reading-list: if you are letting Facebook, or any algorithm written by advertisers, do your reading selection then you are letting Facebook decide who you are.
On behalf of the advertisers who bribe them the most.
This is why you gotta use RSS. You gotta use the chronological timelines not the "for you" feeds. You gotta build follow relationships that you choose and understand because otherwise, you are letting the corporation and it's systems determine these things. You are abdicating some control of your very self to the machine.
Not to mention that we have to stop feeding money to the evil multi-trillion dollar companies built to control and manipulate us through our relationships with our friends. They have enough money, they need less participation not more.
#fediverse #algorithm

Weekend list of critical reading links about the state[1] of Tech, AI[2] hype/finance/politics, mostly long form:
Ed Zitron's The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/
How to use computing power faster: on the weird ec…

The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble
Hey! Before we go any further — if you want to support my work, please sign up for the premium version of Where’s Your Ed At, it’s a $7-a-month (or $70-a-year) paid product where every week you get a premium newsletter, all while supporting my free work too.  Also,

Simple task: Which days of class should go on my syllabus?
❌ 4o-mini: shortened Nov break
❌ 4o: omitted days in Aug, Dec
✅ o3
❌ Claude 3-haiku: extended Oct break
❌ Claude 3.5 Sonnet V2: ext Oct br
✅ Claude 3.7 Sonnet
❌ Claude 4 Sonnet: extended Oct break
This is really unreliable AI performance.
#generativeAI

Accelerating Scientific Discovery with Multi-Document Summarization of Impact-Ranked Papers
Paris Koloveas, Serafeim Chatzopoulos, Dionysis Diamantis, Christos Tryfonopoulos, Thanasis Vergoulis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03962

Accelerating Scientific Discovery with Multi-Document Summarization of Impact-Ranked Papers
The growing volume of scientific literature makes it challenging for scientists to move from a list of papers to a synthesized understanding of a topic. Because of the constant influx of new papers on a daily basis, even if a scientist identifies a promising set of papers, they still face the tedious task of individually reading through dozens of titles and abstracts to make sense of occasionally conflicting findings. To address this critical bottleneck in the research workflow, we introduce a …

Well, this is just lovely /s
... HUGE icons that can't be removed from the top of the Safari Bookmarks Sidebar.
Bonus almost unreadable "Reading List" text overlaying each enormous icon.
#OS26 #Apple #Ugh

Crosslisted article(s) found for q-bio.NC. https://arxiv.org/list/q-bio.NC/new
[1/1]:
- Estimating the strength and timing of syntactic structure building in naturalistic reading
Nan Wang, Jiaxuan Li

Day 17 (oops; a bit early): Angie Thomas
Can hardly believe it's taken me this long to get to Thomas, and I haven't even read "The Hate You Give" which is probably her most popular book. I did read "Concrete Rose" and was duly blown away by her craft: the use of vernacular, the love she has for the community she writes about, the honesty with which she grapples with the bleak details of the setting, and her stubborn and inescapable portrayal of a human being where our society has taught us to see only perpetrators and victims. CW for family member death and gun violence that I can think of; it's not light reading.
As the parent of two children, Thomas' descriptions of baby care ring true, and drew me into the book more than any other factor, and her vision of a positive masculinity among so much pain is breathtaking. "Concrete Rose" is a brilliant novel, and Thomas richly deserves a spot on this list.
#20AuthorsNoMen

Day 5: Robin Wall Kimmerer
I'm taking these liberty of changing my hashtag and expanding the intent of this list to include all non-men, although Kimerer is a woman so I'll get to more gender diversity later... I've also started planning this out more and realized that I may continue a bit beyond 20...
In any case, Robin Wall Kimmerer is an Indigenous academic biologist and excellent non-fiction author whose work touches on Potawotomi philosophy, colonialism (including in academic spaces), and ideas for a better future. Anyone interested in ecology, conservation, or decolonization in North America will probably be impressed by her work and the rich connections she weaves between academic ecology and Indigenous knowledge offer a critical opportunity to expand your understanding of the world if like me you were raised deeply enmeshed in "Western" scientific tradition. I suppose a little background in skepticism helped prepare me to respect her writing, but I don't think that's essential.
I've only read "Braiding Sweetgrass," but "Gathering Moss" and her more recent "The Serviceberry" are high on my to-read list, despite my predilection for fiction. Kimmerer incorporates a backbone of fascinating anecdotes into "Braiding Sweetgrass" that makes it surprisingly easy reading for a work that's philosophical at its core. She also pulls off an impressive braided organization to the whole thing, weaving together disparate knowledges in a way that lets you see both their contradictions and their connections.
The one criticism I've seen of her work is that it's not sufficiently connected to other Indigenous philosophers & writers, and that it's perhaps too comfortable of a read for colonizers, and that seems valid to me, even though (perhaps because I am a colonizer) I still find her book important.
An excellent author in any case, and one doing concrete ideological work towards a better world.
#20AuthorsNoMen

How to tell a vibe coder of lying when they say they check their code.
People who will admit to using LLMs to write code will usually claim that they "carefully check" the output since we all know that LLM code has a lot of errors in it. This is insufficient to address several problems that LLMs cause, including labor issues, digital commons stress/pollution, license violation, and environmental issues, but at least it's they are checking their code carefully we shouldn't assume that it's any worse quality-wise than human-authored code, right?
Well, from principles alone we can expect it to be worse, since checking code the AI wrote is a much more boring task than writing code yourself, so anyone who has ever studied human-computer interaction even a little bit can predict people will quickly slack off, stating to trust the AI way too much, because it's less work. I'm a different domain, the journalist who published an entire "summer reading list" full of nonexistent titles is a great example of this. I'm sure he also intended to carefully check the AI output, but then got lazy. Clearly he did not have a good grasp of the likely failure modes of the tool he was using.
But for vibe coders, there's one easy tell we can look for, at least in some cases: coding in Python without type hints. To be clear, this doesn't apply to novice coders, who might not be aware that type hints are an option. But any serious Python software engineer, whether they used type hints before or not, would know that they're an option. And if you know they're an option, you also know they're an excellent tool for catching code defects, with a very low effort:reward ratio, especially if we assume an LLM generates them. Of the cases where adding types requires any thought at all, 95% of them offer chances to improve your code design and make it more robust. Knowing about but not using type hints in Python is a great sign that you don't care very much about code quality. That's totally fine in many cases: I've got a few demos or jam games in Python with no type hints, and it's okay that they're buggy. I was never going to debug them to a polished level anyways. But if we're talking about a vibe coder who claims that they're taking extra care to check for the (frequent) LLM-induced errors, that's not the situation.
Note that this shouldn't be read as an endorsement of vibe coding for demos or other rough-is-acceptable code: the other ethical issues I skipped past at the start still make it unethical to use in all but a few cases (for example, I have my students use it for a single assignment so they can see for themselves how it's not all it's cracked up to be, and even then they have an option to observe a pre-recorded prompt session instead).

Just finished "Concrete Rose" by Angie Thomas (I haven't yet read "The Hate U Give" but that's now high on my list of things to find). It's excellent, and in particular, an excellent treatise on positive masculinity in fiction form. It's not a super easy book to read emotionally, but is excellently written and deeply immersive. I don't have the perspective to know how it might land among teens like those it portrays, but I have a feeling it's true enough to life, and it held a lot of great wisdom for me.
CW for the book include murder, hard drugs, and parental abandonment.
I caught myself in a racist/classist habit of thought while reading that others night appreciate hearing about: early on I was mentally comparing it to "All my Rage" by Sabaa Tahir and wondering if/when we'd see the human cost of the drug dealing to the junkies, thinking that it would weaken the book not to include that angle. Why is that racist/classist? Because I'm always expecting books with hard drug dealers in them to show the ugly side of their business since it's been drilled into me that they're evil for the harm they cause, yet I never expect the same of characters who are bankers, financial analysts, health insurance claims adjudicators, police officers, etc. (Okay, maybe I do now look for that in police narratives). The point is, our society includes many people who as part of their jobs directly immiserate others, so why and I only concerned about that misery being brought up when it's drug dealers?
#AmReading