Experimenting with moving my "want to read" list here.
With luck, this might also encourage me to read more regularly, to balance the ambitious addition of books to said reading list against my recent reading habits...
I guess we'll see about that.
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Award-winning translator and author Ken Liu presents a collection of short speculative fiction from China. …
Like any anthology it's unlikely every story will speak to you. However, the overall standard is very high and there's an abundance of interesting ideas and perspectives.
Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. …
“Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.” (Fredric Jameson)
I read this book in 2021, which no doubt coloured my intrepretation of it, but it's left a lasting impression. A really biting portrayal of modern "knowledge work", and the increasing absurdity of Candace's life as the wheels gradually fall off her world...
After touring the rural areas of Panga, Sibling Dex (a Tea Monk of some renown) …
Continues where the first one left off
It’s been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; …
I read the Monk and Robot series over a couple of days last year when I was feeling stressed and a little burned out, and they were exactly what I needed.
Revised and updated edition.
This book incorporates some chapters that were originally published elsewhere, and it is really a collection of essays around the common theme of music. There's a mix of personal theories of music and composition, discussions of the primacy of context in music, advice on more practical topics such as the music business or "How to create a Scene", and some biographical accounts of creative process. I enjoyed the biographical elements the most, although I felt some had probably been simplified and sanitised a little for the book - I know enough history of Talking Heads to guess that some of these sessions probably came together a bit less smoothly when everyone was "in the room"!
Some chapters have aged noticeably, but this provides something of a historical snapshot. For example, the chapter on the music business mentions multiple "new" distribution companies. A decade later only iTunes, Amazon, and Bandcamp are …
This book incorporates some chapters that were originally published elsewhere, and it is really a collection of essays around the common theme of music. There's a mix of personal theories of music and composition, discussions of the primacy of context in music, advice on more practical topics such as the music business or "How to create a Scene", and some biographical accounts of creative process. I enjoyed the biographical elements the most, although I felt some had probably been simplified and sanitised a little for the book - I know enough history of Talking Heads to guess that some of these sessions probably came together a bit less smoothly when everyone was "in the room"!
Some chapters have aged noticeably, but this provides something of a historical snapshot. For example, the chapter on the music business mentions multiple "new" distribution companies. A decade later only iTunes, Amazon, and Bandcamp are still distributing music. The other names such as ithinkmusic, Topspin, CDBaby, and eMusic either no longer exist, or exist in a different form.
This is a revised edition, and from what I can tell most of the major revisions were done by adding some paragraphs to the end of chapters. Updating a book in this way seems perfectly fine, but I probably would have preferred explicit labelling for the new content rather than the somewhat clunky transition at the end of some chapters. For example, the chapter on music distribution ends with a section on streaming that contradicts much of what came before it. At least that update seems prescient: if I understand the time line correctly then the original content is from 2009 and the updates were written 2012 or 2013, which pretty much covers the rise of streaming services.
Interesting references are sprinkled throughout the book. For example, I made a note to follow up about the Brazillian composer Tom Zé and his concept of music and dancing as "fabrication defects" in otherwise perfectly manufactured corporate workers.
If you're a David Byrne fan like myself, or you're interested in popular music, then I think you'll find something of interest here. Don't be afraid to skim through if a particular chapter doesn't grab you!