Posts for January 2018

2018-01-01: 2017 Book Reading in Review

So much of my reading energy this year went into endlessly reloading political web sites and reading essays and poll analysis. This was not a very good use of that energy, but I did it anyway, and I'm not sure I could have stopped. It was a very 2017 problem, and I know I'm not alone — it was an anxious, anger-inducing year for a lot of us. I think that's also why I read shorter books (although more of them) than in 2016. Most of the year's reading happened in a couple of bursts during vacations.

My reading goal for last year was to get back to reading award nominees and previous award winners. The overall quality of my reading rose towards the end of the year, and I think several books I read in 2017 are likely to be award nominees or winners in 2018, but I still fell short of that goal. I'm carrying it over to 2018, coupling it with a goal to read more non-fiction, and calling that a goal to make time and energy for deeper, more demanding, and more rewarding reading. I want to sustain that over the year, rather than concentrating all my reading energy in vacations.

There were no 10 out of 10 books this year, but there were 6 books with a 9 rating. On the fiction side, two of them were the second and third books of Julie E. Czerneda's Species Imperative series: Migration and Regeneration. I recommend the entire series, starting with Survival, as excellent SF focusing on practicing scientists and on biology and ecology rather than physics. Czerneda has a slightly cartoony style that can take a bit to get used to, and I found the romance subplot unfortunate, but the protagonist was a delight and the last two books of the series were excellent.

The other fiction books with 9 out of 10 ratings were Becky Chambers's A Closed and Common Orbit, a sequel to The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet that I thought was even better than the original, and Melina Marchetta's The Piper's Son. Many thanks to Light for the recommendation of the latter; it's the sort of mainstream literary fiction that I wouldn't have found without recommendations. It's a satisfying story about untangling past emotional mistakes and finding ways to move forward, but all the subtle work done by friendship networks was what made it special to me.

The two non-fiction books I gave 9 out of 10 ratings this year were Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths, and Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. The first was a well-structured look at how we apply computer science algorithms to everyday life: short on actionable insight, but long on thoughtful analogies (email and social media as buffer bloat!) and new ways to view everyday decisions. The second is a passionate attempt to convince everyone to get more sleep. Like many projects dear to the author's heart, it should be taken with a grain of salt, but I found the summary of current sleep research fascinating.

The last book that I think deserves special mention is The Tiger's Daughter by K Arsenault Rivera. It lacks the polish of some of the other books I read, and at times could be a sprawling mess, but of all the books I read this year, it's the one that most reliably puts a smile on my face when I remember it. It is completely unabashed about its emotions and completely in love with its characters and dares the world to do something about it, and I needed a book like that in 2017.

The full analysis includes some additional personal reading statistics, probably only of interest to me.

2018-01-07: Free software log (December 2017)

I finally have enough activity to report that I need to think about how to format these updates. It's a good problem to have.

In upstream work, I updated rra-c-util with an evaluation of the new warning flags for GCC 7, enabling as many warnings as possible. I also finished the work to build with Clang with warnings enabled, which required investigating a lot of conversions between variables of different sizes. Part of that investigation surfaced that the SA_LEN macro was no longer useful, so I removed that from INN and rra-c-util.

I'm still of two minds about whether adding the casts and code to correctly build with -Wsign-conversion is worth it. I started a patch to rra-c-util (currently sitting in a branch), but wasn't very happy about the resulting code quality. I think doing this properly requires some thoughtfulness about macros and a systematic approach.

Releases:

In Debian Policy, I wrote and merged a patch for one bug, merged patches for two other bugs, and merged a bunch of wording improvements to the copyright-format document. I also updated the license-count script to work with current Debian infrastructure and ran it again for various ongoing discussions of what licenses to include in common-licenses.

Debian package uploads:

There are a few more orphaning uploads and uploads giving Perl packages to the Perl packaging team coming, and then I should be down to the set of packages I'm in a position to actively maintain and I can figure out where I want to focus going forward.

2018-01-20: New year haul

Some new acquired books. This is a pretty wide variety of impulse purchases, filled with the optimism of a new year with more reading time.

Libba Bray — Beauty Queens (sff)
Sarah Gailey — River of Teeth (sff)
Seanan McGuire — Down Among the Sticks and Bones (sff)
Alexandra Pierce & Mimi Mondal (ed.) — Luminescent Threads (nonfiction anthology)
Karen Marie Moning — Darkfever (sff)
Nnedi Okorafor — Binti (sff)
Malka Older — Infomocracy (sff)
Brett Slatkin — Effective Python (nonfiction)
Zeynep Tufekci — Twitter and Tear Gas (nonfiction)
Martha Wells — All Systems Red (sff)
Helen S. Wright — A Matter of Oaths (sff)
J.Y. Yang — Waiting on a Bright Moon (sff)

Several of these are novellas that were on sale over the holidays; the rest came from a combination of reviews and random on-line book discussions.

The year hasn't been great for reading time so far, but I do have a couple of things ready to review and a third that I'm nearly done with, which is not a horrible start.

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