Reading Update

Sunday, June 9, 2019 at 3:46pm

Now that my Scribus exploration for the weekend is done, I'm devoting the rest of my time to reading, primarily making progress on Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturer. I'm still not regretting the fact that I splurged on the Folio Society edition of "The Book of the New Sun" series. The typesetting and overall production quality are astounding. It's also a fantastic read. I'm now a little over halfway through Shadow and enjoying it immensely.

The arrival of that set interrupted progress on my ecological SF bucket list. I paused my progress on Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars a few weeks ago. I posted my ecological SF reading list on my old blog. I'll make a point of bringing that back to this blog in the near future.

One of my favorite academic journals, The Hedgehog Review, kicked off an email newsletter this week. They published an article on their website reviewing a book that had crossed my radar before—The Lost History of Liberalism. I decided to go ahead and pick up a copy, since our dominant political ideology is a topic that interests me immensely. I find my views on this occupying a space that isn't easily definable in common vernacular. Academic texts seem more often capable of capturing nuance and exploring contradictory perspectives. I worry that the ability to do so is on the wane in our culture.

And finally, I was browsing the stacks at my favorite Seattle independent bookstore, The Queen Anne Book Company, and I spotted a copy of The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books. When I read the blurb, I had to pick up a copy. I feel there's the seed of a really good speculative fiction story in the meta-narrative it describes.

My current plan is to finish "Book of the New Sun," proceed on to The Lost History of Liberalism, then The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books, then hopefully I'll still remember enough about Red Mars to pick that up again.