Books

This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Media Diet

Inspired by Kottke’s media diet posts, I’m going to try and collect my own thoughts here. Also, the holidays is always a good time to catch up on watching/reading so there’s quite a bit to cover here!

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers – A light second book in the series, I didn’t enjoy it as much as the first, which wasn’t amazing, but left the reader with some nice thoughts to dwell on. This book hinted that it was trying to do that again, but didn’t manage to pull it off.

So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport – I’ve resolved to read more non-fiction this year, and enjoyed this one. It’s very typical in the thesis/data/example mixture but is short and well-paced and makes a good case, especially to someone early in their career.

Kindred by Octavia Butler – My second reading of Butler after being disappointed in Xenogenesis, and I enjoyed this much more. Excellent prose and pacing, a single-threaded story that doesn’t lose track of itself, time-travel book that doesn’t get lost in the details, just a solid book all around. It certainly could have dug a little deeper on the hypothetical social issues or the other characters, but then it would have been a different book and been far less likely to pull it all off.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Silver Chair by C. S. Lewis. – A decent fantasy adventure. Not quite as charming as other entries in the series, but also somewhat (though not entirely) less allegorical.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis. – Underwhelming though satisfactorily final conclusion to the series. It started with a lot of promise but quickly stumbled into a predictable and rushed dash to wrap things up.

Artemis City Shuffle by Jessie Kwak – A fun, short and sweet intro to the series. Seems optional but if the rest of the series is similar it should be a fun ride.

Movies

Black Adam – Meh.

Pale Blue Eye – Decent.

Glass Onion – OK.

Games

Marvel Snap (mobile/Steam) – I started playing this a few months ago and it’s a solid addition to the digital card game genre. Fast-paced, highly variable but deep enough to stay interesting even after hundreds of games. The progression mechanism still feels a little rough but the game itself is fantastic. The meta is pretty good for a card game, I regularly see an assortment of decks, but it is has converged on a few mechanics, so hopefully they’ll stay ahead of that. They recently tuned (nerfed) a card that risked tanking the game (Leader) which was nice to see, so hopefully they’ll also tune a few of the dumber locations (District X) and keep the game fresh.

Dwarf Fortress (Steam) – I’ve only logged a few hours on the new version, but I played it years ago in the text-based interface. It’s a great game if you’re looking to be rewarding for committing to a long learning curve (which I’m not, at the moment), and the new graphical UI makes it much more appealing by shorting that curve.

Outpath: First Journey (Steam) – A demo for a future game, it feels promising as a blend of casual/survival/crafting genres. The low-res graphics are tiresome, the novelty of retro “8 bit” graphics has long passed, and requires a level of expertise to pull off these days, and this game lacks that.

Television

Yellowstone (Season 5, Part 1) – This show has always been kind of dumb but also kind of fun, albeit in a lazily violent way. Lately it’s been trying to be less dumb and as a side effect is becoming less fun. It’s safe to say that politics and intrigue are not Sheridan’s strong suit. The barometer of the show has always been Rip, and he’s transitioned very rapidly from a skilled gangster enforcer to … a dad.

Andor (Season 1) – An exceedingly well-constructed show, with several story arcs in series as well as an overarching one. The heist was cliché but sets everything else up and we get a whole bunch of new and detailed perspectives on the Empire and Rebellion that add more details to Star Wars canon than anything else since the movies.

Jack Ryan (Season 3) – Despite a credible star and decent marketing, I feel like this show always flies under the radar. It’s a good spy/action thriller that doesn’t necessarily stay true to Tom Clancy canon, but certainly does to the spirit of his books. I lump this in with the Mission Impossible movies as engaging, well-crafted , brain-not-quite-off action thrillers.

Podcasts

The Rest is History is a recent discovery and highly recommended. Their recent episodes on the origins of Nazism show how so many factors, some outside Germany and others even before it existed, played into such a terrible event.

Hardcore History is also always highly recommended. Similar to the The Rest is History’s series but in far more detail, “Supernova in the East” covers what led Japan into World War II. It filled in a lot of gaps in my knowledge and presented a far more complete picture than most Americans (and possibly Japanese) students would get at school.

Upcoming

Some things I’m hoping to read/watch/play soon:

Bullet Train
Winter’s Heart
Ghost Pirate Gambit

Like the culture at large, I’m moving from physical media to digital. I’m slowly getting rid of almost all paper documents via my scanner. I haven’t bought a CD in years. I’ve never been a collector of movies. I haven’t had a roll of film developed since the early 90s. Our printer isn’t even usually hooked up, and when it is it’s usually to sign-and-scan a contract or something, as I haven’t found a great replacement for that yet.

Even more than the digital conversion, I don’t even bother with much physical media. Files are backed up to online services like S3 or Rackspace via Jungledisk. I have some 1TB external drives for peace of mind and Verizon’s inevitable billing errors, but never burn anything to DVD or CD.

I kept all of my old CDs, because I wasn’t comfortable with throwing out full-quality versions of something. There is FLAC, but at the time I switched a few years ago I wasn’t happy with the FLAC-encoding tools so I went with 256k VBR MP3 files, and figured I’d re-encode them again someday and then be able to toss the discs. This argument does’t make a ton of sense given that I now pay for degraded copies of new music, but that’s a little psychology I’ll put off analyzing.

Books, however, are tough for me. I’ve been using a Kindle for a while, and love it, as do most who have one. I look at my bookshelf and think “this doesn’t really need to be here”. I’ve tossed a number of books, but I pick up an old Choose Your Own Adventure book and the innumerable hours I spent reading and re-reading them comes back to me. The thought of throwing it away is unsettling.

I will probably never even read these books again. I’m not sure if my potential future kids would bother with them, but the sentimentality runs too deep. So I keep them, and even my minimalist girlfriend probably understands. It’s not like I have thousands of them, there’s probably 100 books I can’t toss.

Some books I keep because technology just hasn’t caught up to them yet. Cookbooks, picture books, and so on. These will probably go eventually, I end up tossing a few each time I look through the shelves. The sentimental books that are signed by the author or were gifts I keep too, I don’t see a real clutter issue there either, and again, I don’t have too many of these.

The quandry comes with new books. These books have no sentimental value yet, nor will they ever, and I think that’s part of the trouble. The part of me that wants to move into the future, to be more mobile, more organized, more free of physical possessions has not yet found a decisive victory over the nerd who did a book drive for his Eagle project and spent those precious half-days of school lost in the annex at the Ames Free Library.

I’ve always looked at books as some strange kind of investment. I spend $10 on a book, and read it. I can read it again years later, or give it to someone else, there’s some residual value, (not monetary, selling books is hardly worth the trouble IMO). But now I click “buy it now” and I still realize what is arguably the real value of the book, yet I have nothing to put on my shelf and page through from time to time. Nothing to jog my memory when I see it, or spark a conversation when someone else sees it. Nothing I can hand to a friend and say “you really need to read this”.

I’m not even that concerned with Amazon going away or revoking my access to these books, while that would be unfortunate, I can always buy them again somewhere else. Physical books can be destroyed or stolen too, probably even more easily than e-books. Nor am I too concerned with the privacy issues, although I do recognize that lack of concern is a privilege not everyone has. The idea of an oppressive government “burning” or suppressing a book is real as well, but I think computers are so numerous now that this knowledge will find a way to survive. One small hard drive can hold literally millions of books, I’m sure at least one copy will survive.

Unfortunately this isn’t a very constructive post, as I don’t think there is an actual solution to this. I guess this is more of a eulogy. It’s a problem faced by most generations that see the things they grew up valuing being devalued, and it stings for someone who, if you asked him anywhere from age 5 to 15, probably would have said the most valuable/important thing he owned was his book collection.

Category: Books

Media Diet: January 2023