February reading. I think The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet topped the list, but as should be evident I’m really enjoying the Dungeon Crawler Carl series too. And Cory Doctorow’s second Martin Hench novel was another one-night pageturner (one that, this time, I was smart enough not to begin reading when it was already past my bedtime).

The DOE “book banning hoax” press release claimed that challenged books are “age-inappropriate, sexually explicit, or obscene”. Only 13% of banned books in 2023–24 included “on the page” sexual scenes—but 36% featured PoC characters and 25% featured LGBTQ characters.

give the brain a lil break today by hacking on the microblog. my books now show up in the activity feed and the reading list RSS feed.

now i'm going to go read my goofy dungeon crawler book

few emails i am so excited to receive

Update on the arm I bought to hold my e-reader for me: have just discovered this enables me to knit (simple patterns) while I read

Last night I finished The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and half a sock

was pretty jazzed to hear bookshop.org started selling e-books, but that DRM is a bummer 😞

kind of sucks that the best way to "buy" digital books at the moment is typically to pirate the book, then buy some shitty DRM-locked e-book you never open

even doing that i feel gross, like i'm encouraging these publishers to keep selling e-books this way

update: the library director was in today and showed me his secret space opera hoard. new additions to the list:

• August Kitko and the Mechas from Space, Alex White
• You Sexy Thing, Cat Rambo

(haven’t read either yet, but he highly recommends)

he also had two of the books i’d been wanting to include in the display!

• The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Becky Chambers
• Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee

(original post)

call me when you figure out how to make working out more like reading (in bed with a cup of tea)

Slate

in case you needed a reason to volunteer at your local public library: today the librarians let me pick a theme for and then curate one of the featured displays.

time to get this town reading more space operas!

my picks, if you want to read along:

• All Systems Red, Martha Wells
• Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie
• Collapsing Empire, John Scalzi
• Empire of Silence, Christopher Ruocchio
  
• Foundation, Isaac Asimov
  
• Leviathan Wakes, James A. Corey
• Olympos, Dan Simmons
• Saga (graphic novel), Brian K. Vaughan
• Shards of Earth, Adrian Tchaikovsky
• The Stars are Legion, Kameron Hurley
• The Three Body Problem, Liu Cixin

was working with a somewhat limited selection, or else I’d have tucked in some others:

• The Algebraist, Iain M. Banks (this is my current read!)
• Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks
• The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Becky Chambers
• Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee
• Nova, Samuel R. Delany
• Pandora’s Star, Peter F. Hamilton
• Revelation Space, Alistair Reynolds
• Shards of Honor, Lois McMaster Bujold
• Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
• We Are Legion (We Are Bob), Dennis E. Taylor

(I haven’t read all these, but the ones I haven’t are all on my to-read!)