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Thumb Drives and Oven Clocks

Thumb Drives and Oven Clocks

a litblog, of sorts

Latest Post -

Brokering Power

I've been reading The Power Broker by Robert Caro this year, more or less along with the 99 Percent Invisible Breakdown series, and it's honestly going pretty well. I've been playing a bit of fall-behind-and-catch-up with the episode releases over the summer; I just caught up with the August episode and it's looking like I'm about to fall behind on the September episode (I just started reading Megan E. O'Keefe's Devoured Worlds trilogy, which I've been saving up for the right moment when it made perfect sense to do the whole thing in one frantic gulp).

The August section was surprisingly rough, so it was pleasant to have the podcast episode to turn to afterward, where they straight-up admitted, "Hey, this section is surprisingly rough." That made me feel better about suddenly feeling like a complete gibbering idiot trying to keep up with whatever was going on in that block; it was the part for me where, were this a novel, I think you'd definitely be the most, like, yeah, I get it, this dude sucks. But the good word is the September chunk should be much smoother, so I am looking forward to that, and then we start moving into the loss of power, and that's going to be good, I suspect.

I think the highest praise I can give this book is that is confirms I am in fact actually interested in reading the LBJ books, too.

Anyways. I don't think I even realized this was the 50th anniversary year of the book. So that's cool.

Also, no, I haven't started Miss MacIntosh yet. I'll get there. Right now I'm listening to the Blank Check episode about Dune (1984), which has me thinking maybe now's the time to finally start my planned reread of Dune. I first read it a couple years ago and it left me feeling oddly cold. Even now having seen all the movies I'm like, am I still trying to crack Dune? I think so. My goal this time out will be to read it and not feel completely exhausted by it the whole time. Which makes me think I should probably wait until after I run that marathon I'm planning on running in a month. Oh boy am I tired!

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Adventures in pre-ordering

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What I'm Reading: Lies and Sorcery, by Elsa Morante

Finding Shirley Jackson everywhere these days

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On Finishing Septology

I'm sad now, it's fine, it's fine

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More on Septology

Somewhere around the midway point.

15 more posts can be found in the archive.