Tootfinder

Worth #reading this piece - a level-headed take on #China and how its changed.
https://www.chinafile.com/reporting-op…

App Life in China
“It’s really tough doing anything in China right now,” my friend told me. He’s a serial entrepreneur in Shanghai with a locked-in grin. We were waiting for our food in a Taiwanese restaurant in a lovingly-renovated toy factory in Shanghai. China was my home for 20 years, before moving to the U.S. in 2015. This was my first visit since the pandemic. Almost a decade away from the place where I got married, had kids, started a few companies, and sold one. It may be hard to make money in Ch…

"Gandalf!" rief Frodo und richtete sich auf. Da saß der alte Zauberer auf einem Stuhl am offenen Fenster.
#herrderringe #reading

Think I found my summer #reading

Finally re-started reading House Of Leaves.
Still wondering why it's not getting more attention, with all the liminal space trend in recent years
Probably because it's virtually impossible to create an audio book and movie from it?
#books #reading

Just finished reading "Embrace Your Size" by hara. It's a lovely nonfiction manga about body positivity, part autobiography and part advocacy/education. It talks about the author's experiences with bullying and eating disorders, and her journey to feeling comfortable with and positive about her size.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

Seen in town yesterday: new drum planters and a desk I deeply desire but that's nearly £800 😲 There's a viking exhibition on in the priory. Some detectorists were there and we had a good old chat and I'm hoping we can go along to their next meeting. Also had fun with fibre arts and learnt a bit about spinning.
Edited to add: the library is doing a #reading bingo card! I'm jus…

Finished: CL Polk - Even though I knew the end. Lovely bit of not knowing how to trust.
#book #reading

What are four books you’ve read multiple times?
Mine are:
1️⃣ "Ready Player One" - Ernie Cline
2️⃣ "Liar's Poker" - Michael Lewis
3️⃣ "Fire and Fury" - Michael Wolff
4️⃣ "Unreasonable Hospitality" - Will Guidara
#books #reading…

steve mookie kong (@mookie@weredreaming.com)
134 following, 1062 followers · What are four books you’ve read multiple times? Mine are: * Beowulf by Unknown Author * Dune by Frank Herbert * Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk * The Martian by Andy Weir #books #reading #beowulf #dune #fightclub #themartian

Just fished "Coldwire" by Chloe Gong. An interesting and well-written cyberpunk thriller, even though it didn't have the social-imaginative elements I was looking for. I liked the reveal, and the overall construction, even if I felt that a lot of things were a bit off, and I'm not sure how I feel about an ultimately-optimistic-about-technical-possibilities view of the future right now, especially after reading Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" just recently which offers an idea of a future that's less optimistic (even if it dilutes that a bit towards the end).
Even if Gong's imagined future doesn't feel like it has anything interesting to say about either how to get to or sustain a more libratory society, it's a fun book and I'm definitely somewhat interested in the potential for a sequel.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

Finished C Wilson - When women were warriors - book 1 (the warrior's path). Coming of age! And the many shapes relationships between mothers and daughters and warriors and apprentices and lovers and wives can take.
#book #reading

I read Naomi Klein's "Doppelganger", mostly by the pool or the beach while on holiday last week.
It isn't really about her being confused with Naomi Wolf, except on a surface level. Or even really about Wolf moving from left feminism towards right wing conspiracy theory.
Really it's about how political culture has changed as the world has moved more online and suffered the consequences of a pandemic and the often wrongheaded political responses to that.
Conspiracy thinking and a whole culture concentrating on reticence and reactionary thinking instead of evidence and logic.
While reading it I was hanging out with some folks who are much more right wing than I generally do. Here's some things they said:
I don't believe in Sunscreen. Isn't it funny how skin cancer rates have gone up as sunscreen becomes more popular.
I don't believe in COVID.
Carbon Warming models don't even take into account the sun.
I thought Chemtrails were a conspiracy theory, but came to believe it.
Claiming to believe in freedom while also wanting a crack-down on asylum-seekers, thinking they are destroying society.
So it's easy to believe Klein's basic thesis here, the worry that reactionary conspiracy thinking is breaking the entire body politic.
I don't think it's that people have lost all rationality. It's that people are wearing their conspiracy theories as badges, identifying them as a member of a group. Like religious beliefs that bind a group, the more stupid and outrageous they are the more those badges work to identify the ingroup from the outgroup.
The worry is always when they decide the outgroup need punishing for not taking on those conspiracy beliefs and turn to suppression and violence.
#reading #books #worldPol

I feel a bit guilty that I actually really benefit from reading self-help books.
People hate on them so much, but as someone who was not taught proper coping or social skills growing up (complex trauma is a nasty thing), I find the basic things getting explained very useful.
Idk.
#reading #books

I'm going on a reading adventure. I just finished up with Shadows of the Apt series by Adrian Tchaikovsky. As I started thinking about what to read next, I thought I might go back and finish series that I never completed. I try to only read book series whose story is concluded. But occasionally I can't resist like Dungeon Crawler Carl. But I'm so bad at waiting.
So thought this might be a good use case for my local AI. I downloaded by reading history from #BookWyrm and asked it to find all the series that had concluded, but I never finished. And it worked great.
So now I get to go back and jump into old worlds that I used to explore. Its going to be so much to visit old friends, old stories. Squee! First up, #Mistborn!
#bookstodon #books #reading @…

There's a bit in QualityLand [ #books #reading #socialMediaBan

Just finished re-reading volume 1 of Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou by Hitoshi Ashinano in English official translation, checked out from one of my local libraries. It's really cool to see lots of the excellent Japanese stuff that I read through fan translations mostly online in the 2000s and 2010s not only come out as an official translation, but make their way onto library shelves for random people to discover without having to be deep into Japanese culture fandom.
YKK is of course a pretty legendary manga, and even though I'd read it before, it had been a while and the manga is so much more feelings-based than plot-based that it was at least as enjoyable the second time through. Ashinano's sweeping curves that capture the wide open landscapes of Minato are beautiful, and her characters also capture a particular feeling of freedom and kindness that's lovely to immerse oneself in. It's the kind of world where you understand immediately that the gun is just a memento and doesn't represent any kind of violence, foreshadowed or otherwise. Calm down, Chekhov, have a coffee, and get with the extremely relaxing times.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

So yesterday the Bayeux tapestry was transported, and because of the chatter about it I learned a couple of things. The best being that there exists a replica in Reading. #bayeux #tapestry #penises #replica #reading #bayeuxtapestry

Just finished reading "The Beast Player" by Nahoko Uehashi. I had already watched the anime, but it had been so king I didn't remember all the details. While the anime was great, the book is even better, and it's going to be high on my list of things to recommend to my children when they're old enough to read for fun.
The neurodivergent representation is cool, as is the deep central question of interspecies bonds and the political possibilities and dangers they entail. Uehashi handles the exploration of that question well in my judgment, including appropriate ambiguity without muddying moral clarity. Elin is a truly fantastic protagonist, not without flaws but nevertheless a excellent role model and a very sympathetic figure without being pitiful.
One thing I really love about Uehashi's writing is that she's not shy about using interior narration to tell the reader directly what a variety of characters are feeling, but when she does this she focuses on human contradictions, quirks, and weaknesses that make those characters feel much richer, and that remind the reader of all the ways our weird and sometimes contradictory or inexplicable quirks guide our actions just as much as both logical thought and predictable/expected feelings. None of the characters is an unerring source of wisdom, with every grand principle presented shown to have its weaknesses and biases, and even the wisest characters making mistakes and learning from them.
Overall, a wonderful book, and having also seen the "Seirei no Moribito" anime but not read the books, I'm excited to dig into more of Uehashi's extensive catalog.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

So... I've started reading Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey, and 110 pages in I'm finding a lot to dislike, even though I've mostly heard nothing but good stuff about the series (and also the TV show). The fact that it became a popular TV show should probably have been a warning, but so far it's got standard-issue patriarchal & misogynist background radiation plus copaganda, with no real signs that there's going to be any reversal or repudiation of that stuff. There's also no indication I'll get any interesting thoughts about society or humanity out of this beyond bog standard space opera fare, in stark contrast to, say, A Deepness in the Sky which I also read recently and which has a similar heft. Does anyone who has read deeper into the series have opinions on whether it's worth my time?
#Bookstodon #AmReading #ReadingNow
It's got some good stuff in there; keep going!
Your instincts aren't wrong; read something else.
Other

Just finished reading "There is no Antimemetics Division" by qntm. Not nearly the kind of aid-to-the-societal-imagination stuff I'm craving these days, but it does pleasantly stretch one's conceptual boundaries (assuming the horror aspects don't bother you). The core idea is truly clever and well-explored, even if I think it could have been even stronger by discarding classic horror tropes entirely (then again, I'm very much not the target audience in this regard).
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

Just finished "Healer of the Water Monster" by Brian Young. I'm reading a bunch of juvenile fiction right now in a quest to have some good recommendations for my kids to read in a few years when they're old enough, and this one definitely makes the cut, with deeply-integrated #OwnVoices Diné cultural elements, good (to my reading) handling of complex topics like divorce and depression, and cool magical elements. This is exactly the kind of new generation of kids' fiction I'm looking for that drops the regressive themes present in so much of what I read at that age. For example, I just before this I read Howl's Moving Castle and then The House of Many Ways by Dianna Wynne Jones, and while the first was pretty much great, the sequel has a whole benevolent monarchy thing that's central to the book in a way that weighs down the politics of the book a lot. Unsurprisingly, the indigenous perspective is a refreshing one.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon