By Any Other Nerd

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think is at its strongest when Byron Reese is showing that the ways we think about the world came from somewhere. Storytelling, mathematics, probability, and (less so) artificial intelligence can feel so normal to us that it is difficult to imagine a world without them. Reese’s book helped make those habits of thought feel strange again. The book traces a progression from humans using language and telling stories, to using abstract concepts like mathematics, to developing ways of predicting the future, and eventually to creating “rocks that think” (computers). I found that movement through the history of thought a useful means of sensemaking, albeit one that still feels a bit arrived at in hindsight. Regardless, it's still compelling. It offers an accessible way to consider thinking devices (conceptual or physical) as most distinctly human: our ability to communicate, externalize ideas, imagine what has not happened, ...

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes What stayed with me most about The Last Picture Show was how much was going on beneath the usual image of small-town life in the early 1950s. For a novel published in 1966, it is remarkably open about sexual tension, infidelity, prostitution, loneliness, cruelty, and even bestiality. So much of it is presented matter-of-factly, as simply part of life in this rural Texas town. There was more meat there than the sanitized version of the period or of rural America that people often imagine. The novel is a coming-of-age story, and in that way it reminded me of books like The Outsiders and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn . The contexts are different, but they all involve young people grappling with the dirty realities of the world and trying to make sense of lives in which there is not always much to grab onto. That is especially true in Thalia. High school sports become a form of meaning-making, even though they are often bad at it. People gather at the pool ha...

Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes I didn't expect BattleAxe to hit this hard again. This was my third or fourth time through Sara Douglass's BattleAxe . I first read it in the summer of 1995, when it came out in Australia, and while it wasn't the book that turned me on to reading, it was absolutely the book that turned me on to fantasy. I'd always been into fantasy on film, but fantasy fiction had didn't really grabbed me as much. I remember slogging through The Lord of the Rings and finding it kind of dull or at least not something that pulled me in. And then here was this 600-plus-page book that I flew through in two weeks. I'd never read a book that big before, never mind a book that big in two weeks. I got pulled along in this really lovely way. I became deeply interested in this new world of characters, and just plain fascinated by what Sara Douglass was doing. This is not the first time that I've mentioned Sara Douglass and her work here.  Years ...

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes I went into Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought thinking it was The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis. That is, I thought it was a biography about Barbara Tversky’s husband and his work. And then, I realized it was her work--her phenomenal breadth of work-- and that made the book more exciting to me. It also did make me aware of the ignorance of my own ignorance. I knew there was a world of cognition research around Tversky, but I had not really understood this Tversky, this body of work, this way of thinking about how action shapes thought. The book is just incredibly rich.  What I’m still sitting with most is this idea of how much our spatial reasoning shapes our mental reasoning, which then shapes the way we build the world around us. Tversky makes it feel obvious in the best way: of course our sense of physical awareness, our sense of spatial awareness, plays into our minds. Of course the physical w...

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes The Solace of Open Spaces is a reflective, contemplative book, one that tries to be earnest about hard but beautiful and deeply felt lives in the Wyoming in the 1970s,  particularly what we tend to think of as cowboy or ranch life. Ehrlich paints vivid pictures of that world, and most of the time I think she succeeds in giving the readers true glimpses into those worlds. But there are also moments where that vividness tips into something a little romantic or nostalgic. There are hints of mourning in the book, as if she is not only describing this world but grieving the possibility that it is slipping away. That tension made the book interesting for me. Ehrlich is at her best when she is sitting deeply with the place she has entered (moving from urban surroundings to the big wide open environments of Wyoming) and, in many ways, become part of. She notices the everyday challenges and rituals: the rituals of people, the rituals of animals, the ritua...

Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes I supported Doctorow’s Kickstarter for the audiobook,  The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI , because I believe deeply in Doctorow’s work and ethic around publishing but also I regularly his work because feels like an inoculation against the tech bro BS that surrounds so many conversations about technology. The book continues his work and connects directly to Enshittification , Chokepoint Capitalism , The Internet Con , and How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism . In many ways, it feels like the AI-specific version of the same larger project: look past the gadget, look past the hype, and look at the larger techno-social capitalist system that decides who benefits and who gets used up. That is Doctorow at his best. He does not treat AI as magic, or as an inevitable apocalypse, or as a neutral tool that just happens to exist outside power. He keeps asking the better question: who does this technology do things for, and who does it do things...

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes From the New York Times, 1877 Sharing a recent piece that my colleague, JT Torres , and I wrote about multimodal reading with a particular focus on audiobooks (you're all shocked, I know!).  The piece, Does Listening Count as Reading?: Multimodal Reading Matters , was a fun piece to author because I get to nerd out about audiobooks and got to co-write with my friend, JT, whom I first collaborated on this article last year for Inside Higher Ed . Here's an excerpt; read the rest here : " Imagine if you were told that a technology could order up a sermon for a congregation or immediately summon a long-dead historical figure to charm your dinner guests. Maybe you want a mechanical voice to dispense medical advice?  Such a technology might even render libraries irrelevant !" Certainly, the above references AI. After all, many headlines warn that AI threatens to make books obsolete. Other articles lament students' shortened attention s...

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes What I like about The Great Gatsby at 100 is what I often like about The Great Courses in general: it gives you a deep dive into a particular topic in a way that feels accessible, but not shallow. Sheila Liming takes The Great Gatsby and looks at it through economic, class, gender, race, and cultural lenses, and the result is the exact thing I want from a book—or course—about a book: it made me want to go back and read The Great Gatsby again. Does this give me new insights into the thing? In this case, it certainly did. I have read The Great Gatsby a few times, and I have taught it at different points in the past, so this was not a first encounter with the novel. But Liming’s course felt like a refresher and a set of newer insights into the text. I especially appreciated the way she moves between specific details in the novel, details from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life, and the larger cultural world around the book. There are moments where she draws...

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes Mundanity is what makes The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break work. Steven Sherrill drops the Minotaur, or "M" in the novel into the present, living in a trailer park in the South and working at a restaurant. We expect the Minotaur to come with violence, aggression, mythic grandeur, maybe even some kind of cult-leader or roadside-attraction weirdness.  The novel does play with these expectations but often inverts them. Violence often happens to him, both accidentally and self-inflicted, as well as intentionally by others, but we don't see any real violence from him. He does become an attraction (cutting meat at customer tables), but only for that to not really be successful. We expect his body to somehow be the thing of legends, but descriptions give us anything but a very real body that has been worn for millennia.  He has very physical needs and very physical experiences. He eats, works, smokes, desires, aches, remembers, forgets. He i...

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes What I loved most about A Short Stay in Hell is the way Steven L. Peck builds on Jorge Luis  Borges’ “ The Library of Babel ” without simply repeating it. I have always enjoyed Borges’ infinite library, and I love a story that builds off other fiction. Peck’s novella draws from that story, but also from afterlife literature like Dante’s Inferno , and even made me think of The Twilight Zone episode “ Time Enough at Last. ” I can deeply related to the nightmare of being surrounded by books and still being trapped because they are entirely inaccessible. Given my propensity for literature and comics, intertextuality is part of the meaning-making. This short novella works because it lets us draw on a whole wealth of other stories about libraries, hells, quests, punishments, and revelation. The central idea is that somewhere in this infinity of books is the book of your life, perfectly displayed, you only have to find it to escape.  It feels lik...