2021-01-01: 2020 Book Reading in Review
In 2020, I finished and reviewed 42 books, two more than 2019 (although I
had finished but not reviewed two books at the end of 2019, so the total
is even more similar than that). This is the best year for reading in
terms of book count since 2012, despite being seriously distracted by a
new job, a pandemic, and US political meltdowns. Those distractions do
show up in the drop in page count.
If it weren't for the pandemic, the count would have been higher. Just as
I got into a rhythm of reading while I exercised, gyms became a bad idea
for the rest of the year. Treadmills are good for reading; long walks
around the neighborhood not so much. That time went to podcasts instead,
which I'm not too sad about but which don't prompt reviews.
Finding the mental space and energy to write reviews proved as much of a
challenge as finding time to read this year, and I once again had to do
some catch-up at the end of the year. To the extent that I have goals for
2021, it's to tighten up the elapsed time between finishing a book and
writing a review so that the reviews don't pile up.
I read one book this year that I rated 10 out of 10: Michael Lewis's
The Fifth Risk,
which is partly about the US presidential transition and is really about
what the US government does and what sort of people make careers in civil
service. This book is brilliant, fascinating, and surprisingly touching,
and I wish it were four times as long. If anything, it's even more
relevant today as we enter another transition than it was when Lewis wrote
it or when I read it.
There were so many 9 out of 10 ratings this year that it's hard to know
where to start. I read the last Murderbot novella by Martha Wells
(Exit Strategy) and
then the first Murderbot novel
(Network Effect),
both of which were everything I was hoping for. Murderbot's sarcastic
first-person voice continues to be a delight, and I expect Network
Effect to take home several 2021 awards. I'm eagerly awaiting the next
novel, Fugitive Telemetry, currently scheduled for the end of
April, 2021.
Also on the fiction side were Alix E. Harrow's wonderful debut novel
The Ten Thousand Doors
of January, a fierce novel about family and claiming power that will
hopefully win the 2020 Mythopoeic
Award (which was delayed by the pandemic), and TJ Klune's heart-warming
The House in the
Cerulean Sea, my feel-good novel of the year. Finally, Tamsyn Muir's
Gideon the Ninth and
Harrow the Ninth
were a glorious mess in places, but I had more fun reading and discussing
those books than I've had with any novel in a very long time.
On the non-fiction side, Tressie McMillan Cottom's
Thick is the best
collection of sociology that I've read. It's not easy reading, but that
book gave me a new-found appreciation and understanding of sociology and
what it's trying to accomplish. Gretchen McCulloch's
Because Internet is
much easier reading but similarly perspective-enhancing, helping me
understand (among other things) how choice of punctuation and
capitalization expands the dynamic range of meaning in informal text
conversation. Finally, Nick Pettigrew's
Anti-Social is a
funny, enlightening, and sobering look at the process of addressing
low-level unwanted behavior that's directly relevant to the current
conflicts over the role of policing in society.
The full analysis includes some
additional personal reading statistics, probably only of interest to me.
2021-01-04: New year haul
For once, I've already read and reviewed quite a few of these books.
Elizabeth Bear — Machine (sff)
Timothy Caulfield — Your Day, Your Way (non-fiction)
S.A. Chakraborty — The City of Brass (sff)
John Dickerson — The Hardest Job in the World (non-fiction)
Tracy Deonn — Legendborn (sff)
Lindsay Ellis — Axiom's End (sff)
Alix E. Harrow — The Once and Future Witches (sff)
TJ Klune — The House in the Cerulean Sea (sff)
Maria Konnikova — The Biggest Bluff (non-fiction)
Talia Levin — Culture Warlords (non-fiction)
Yoon Ha Lee — Phoenix Extravagent (sff)
Yoon Ha Lee, et al. — The Vela (sff)
Michael Lewis — Flash Boys (non-fiction)
Michael Lewis — Losers (non-fiction)
Michael Lewis — The Undoing Project (non-fiction)
Megan Lindholm — Wizard of the Pigeons (sff)
Nathan Lowell — Quarter Share (sff)
Adrienne Martini — Somebody's Gotta Do It (non-fiction)
Tamsyn Muir — Princess Florinda and the Forty-Flight Tower (sff)
Naomi Novik — A Deadly Education (sff)
Margaret Owen — The Merciful Crow (sff)
Anne Helen Peterson — Can't Even (non-fiction)
Devon Price — Laziness Does Not Exist (non-fiction)
The Secret Barrister — The Secret Barrister (non-fiction)
Studs Terkel — Working (non-fiction)
Kathi Weeks — The Problem with Work (non-fiction)
Reeves Wiedeman — Billion Dollar Loser (non-fiction)
Rather a lot of non-fiction in this batch, much more than usual. I've
been in a non-fiction mood lately.
So many good things to read!
2021-01-28: INN 2.6.4
INN 2.6.4 has been released. This is a bug fix and minor feature release
over INN 2.6.3, and the upgrade should be painless. You can download the
new release from ftp.isc.org or
my personal INN pages. The latter also has
links to the full changelog and the other INN documentation.
As always, thanks to Julien ÉLIE for preparing this release and doing most
of the maintenance work on INN!
Changes in this release:
Added support for systemd notifications and socket activation. Use of
more features provided by systemd, including more notifications, will
come in future releases. Thanks to Marco d'Itri for this first
systemd integration into INN.
nnrpd now adapts the length of the DH parameter used during a DHE
key exchange so as to comply with the security level OpenSSL 1.1.0
or later expects. Thanks to Michael Baeuerle for the bug report.
cnfsstat now also returns information about retired CNFS buffers:
buffers mentioned in cycbuff.conf as a cycbuff but not declared in a
metacycbuff.
Switch default innreport behaviour to the common practice of
externalizing CSS into a separate file. Its name can be configured
with the html_css_url parameter in innreport.conf. If this
parameter is unset, the default innreport.css file name will be used
and innreport will generate this CSS file for you. Previously
generated reports are kept untouched, though, and will still contain
inline CSS if you had not already set the html_css_url
parameter in previous INN versions. Thanks to Richard Kettlewell for
the patch.
sm can now read and store any number of articles given in wire format
on its standard input when both -s and -R are used. Only native
format was previously possible. Thanks to Bo Lindbergh for the patch.
Added new -a flag to B<rnews> to disallow, if needed, the use of
additional unpackers from the rnews.libexec sub-directory of
pathbin (as set in inn.conf); only rnews and cunbatch will
then be recognized as valid batch commands.
Added new -b flag to rnews to save rejected articles in the bad
subdirectory of pathincoming (as set in inn.conf).
Otherwise, rnews just logs and discards any articles that are rejected
or cannot be parsed for some reason.
Added new -d flag to rnews to log via syslog the message-ID and the
Path header value of each article rejected as a duplicate.
Added new --enable-hardening-flags configure-time option, enabled by
default, to use hardening build flags like -fPIE and
-fstack-protector-strong. This option can easily be disabled if the
compiler or the platform does not support them well. More hardening
build flags will eventually be added in future releases.
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