By Any Other Nerd

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...