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What I read: September 2020

 "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism" by Cory Doctorow. This is very relevant to a lot of the jobs I apply for these days. Basically, interoperability! Anti-trust! 

"Rogue Protocol" by Martha Wells. I wasn't done with book 2 (last month) when I requested this one on Overdrive. The wait purported to be 16 weeks. So I requested the hard copy too, and made it a race. The hard copy won. 

LHC #95: "Things we lost in the fire: Stories" by Mariana Enriquez. Probably another in the "girls behaving badly" genre I seem to have been mad about in Jan of 2019. Except it's from Argentina and translated into English, so not the same at all. Really good. I need to read more lit in translation, and also maybe I would love to know a language well enough to translate out of it. 

LHC #96: "An Ocean of Minutes" by Thea Lim. It's a pandemic story that I requested back in Jan of 2019, when I didn't know how much fun pandemics were. I found this triggery and depressing. Someone else I know said she got it out of the library and then sent it back without reading. Who does that? Weird. 

"Akira: Book 5" by Katsuhiro Otomo. I'd read 1-4 two or three years ago, and there's no good reason I didn't finish the series. So I'm going to do that. I read the first few pages then went online and read synopses of the first four volumes because I'd forgotten a lot. 

"Kitaro" by Shigero Mizuki. Ada Palmer had an old Tor.com post about the author. This was quite delightful. 

LHC #97: "Prisoner: My 544 days in an Iranian prison solitary confinement, a sham trial, high stakes diplomacy, and the extraordinary efforts it took to get me out" by Jason Rezaian. That is some long title. One of the main characters in Persephone spent a year in prison in Iran so this was research. 

I've been reading Charlie Jane Anders' essays about writing, and I'd just read one that gave me an epiphany about asking what is the most important character relationship in the novel when I read this book. So I asked myself, what is the most important relationship here? I think it was the one between JR and his interrogator. But he repeatedly called his interrogator stupid and made fun of his mediocre English, whereas I kept thinking, his interrogator must have had a hell of a time coming up with things to question him about, day after day. That's how he got paid. What a tough job that must have been, having to pick through JR's boring emails looking for something to ask about, day after day, then go home and play with his kids and talk to his wife. 

I wanted more nuance. Jason and I wouldn't be friends if we were in the same circle, I don't think. He would think I was stupid. Or maybe it just needed a stronger editor. But I was happy when he got out. 
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