2018-01-01: 2017 Book Reading in Review
So much of my reading energy this year went into endlessly reloading
political web sites and reading essays and poll analysis. This was not a
very good use of that energy, but I did it anyway, and I'm not sure I
could have stopped. It was a very 2017 problem, and I know I'm not alone
— it was an anxious, anger-inducing year for a lot of us. I think that's
also why I read shorter books (although more of them) than in 2016. Most
of the year's reading happened in a couple of bursts during vacations.
My reading goal for last year was to get back to reading award nominees
and previous award winners. The overall quality of my reading rose towards
the end of the year, and I think several books I read in 2017 are likely
to be award nominees or winners in 2018, but I still fell short of that
goal. I'm carrying it over to 2018, coupling it with a goal to read more
non-fiction, and calling that a goal to make time and energy for deeper,
more demanding, and more rewarding reading. I want to sustain that over
the year, rather than concentrating all my reading energy in vacations.
There were no 10 out of 10 books this year, but there were 6 books with a
9 rating. On the fiction side, two of them were the second and third
books of Julie E. Czerneda's Species Imperative series:
Migration and
Regeneration. I
recommend the entire series, starting with
Survival, as
excellent SF focusing on practicing scientists and on biology and ecology
rather than physics. Czerneda has a slightly cartoony style that can take
a bit to get used to, and I found the romance subplot unfortunate, but the
protagonist was a delight and the last two books of the series were
excellent.
The other fiction books with 9 out of 10 ratings were Becky Chambers's
A Closed and Common
Orbit, a sequel to
The Long Way to a
Small, Angry Planet that I thought was even better than the original,
and Melina Marchetta's
The Piper's Son.
Many thanks to Light for the
recommendation of the latter; it's the sort of mainstream literary fiction
that I wouldn't have found without recommendations. It's a satisfying
story about untangling past emotional mistakes and finding ways to move
forward, but all the subtle work done by friendship networks was what made
it special to me.
The two non-fiction books I gave 9 out of 10 ratings this year were
Algorithms to Live
By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths, and
Why We Sleep by
Matthew Walker. The first was a well-structured look at how we apply
computer science algorithms to everyday life: short on actionable insight,
but long on thoughtful analogies (email and social media as buffer bloat!)
and new ways to view everyday decisions. The second is a passionate
attempt to convince everyone to get more sleep. Like many projects dear
to the author's heart, it should be taken with a grain of salt, but I
found the summary of current sleep research fascinating.
The last book that I think deserves special mention is
The Tiger's Daughter
by K Arsenault Rivera. It lacks the polish of some of the other books I
read, and at times could be a sprawling mess, but of all the books I read
this year, it's the one that most reliably puts a smile on my face when I
remember it. It is completely unabashed about its emotions and completely
in love with its characters and dares the world to do something about it,
and I needed a book like that in 2017.
The full analysis includes some
additional personal reading statistics, probably only of interest to me.
2018-01-07: Free software log (December 2017)
I finally have enough activity to report that I need to think about how to
format these updates. It's a good problem to have.
In upstream work, I updated rra-c-util
with an evaluation of the new warning flags for GCC 7, enabling as many
warnings as possible. I also finished the work to build with Clang with
warnings enabled, which required investigating a lot of conversions
between variables of different sizes. Part of that investigation surfaced
that the SA_LEN macro was no longer useful, so I removed that from
INN and rra-c-util.
I'm still of two minds about whether adding the casts and code to
correctly build with -Wsign-conversion is worth it. I started a
patch to rra-c-util (currently sitting in a branch), but wasn't very happy
about the resulting code quality. I think doing this properly requires
some thoughtfulness about macros and a systematic approach.
Releases:
In Debian Policy, I wrote and merged a patch for one bug, merged patches
for two other bugs, and merged a bunch of wording improvements to the
copyright-format document. I also updated the license-count script to
work with current Debian infrastructure and ran it again for various
ongoing discussions of what licenses to include in common-licenses.
Debian package uploads:
- lbcd (now orphaned)
- libafs-pag-perl (refreshed and donated to pkg-perl)
- libheimdal-kadm5-perl (refreshed and donated to pkg-perl)
- libnet-ldapapi-perl
- puppet-modules-puppetlabs-apt
- puppet-modules-puppetlabs-firewall (team upload)
- puppet-modules-puppetlabs-ntp (team upload)
- puppet-modules-puppetlabs-stdlib (two uploads)
- rssh (packaging refresh, now using dgit)
- webauth (now orphaned)
- xfonts-jmk
There are a few more orphaning uploads and uploads giving Perl packages to
the Perl packaging team coming, and then I should be down to the set of
packages I'm in a position to actively maintain and I can figure out where
I want to focus going forward.
2018-01-20: New year haul
Some new acquired books. This is a pretty wide variety of impulse
purchases, filled with the optimism of a new year with more reading time.
Libba Bray — Beauty Queens (sff)
Sarah Gailey — River of Teeth (sff)
Seanan McGuire — Down Among the Sticks and Bones (sff)
Alexandra Pierce & Mimi Mondal (ed.) — Luminescent Threads
(nonfiction anthology)
Karen Marie Moning — Darkfever (sff)
Nnedi Okorafor — Binti (sff)
Malka Older — Infomocracy (sff)
Brett Slatkin — Effective Python (nonfiction)
Zeynep Tufekci — Twitter and Tear Gas (nonfiction)
Martha Wells — All Systems Red (sff)
Helen S. Wright — A Matter of Oaths (sff)
J.Y. Yang — Waiting on a Bright Moon (sff)
Several of these are novellas that were on sale over the holidays; the
rest came from a combination of reviews and random on-line book
discussions.
The year hasn't been great for reading time so far, but I do have a couple
of things ready to review and a third that I'm nearly done with, which is
not a horrible start.
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