Nick Doty > Recent Status Updates

(but paused this book when it got deeper into the theatre, which I didn't enjoy as much, and I picked up Overstory)

it's getting kind of brutal and scary towards the end, but faster paced as the stories more tightly and quickly interleave

From the beginning, a useful categorization of governments and of different types of civic technology projects, and with valuable caveats about identifying existing projects and ways to partner. I'm so pleased that recognizing privilege is such an early and important topic, though I didn't appreciate all the conclusions here (it seems too easy to assume that team diversity is an automatic cure to oversights).

In the trunk of the book now, and enjoying the interlocking stories, as well as the rightful importance of Sequoia sempervirens.

I love recognizing the trees (banyan, coast live oak), but I also love recognizing the people and places (Bangkok, Stanford and early computer people). Beautiful intertwining.

Lovely opening story about the chestnut, which makes me wonder if there's now a fungus-adapted version and whether chestnut wood could be grown again locally.

Loving: the California ecosystem descriptions, future thinking about environmental disaster and its effects on California, the culture and myths around soil, plants, animals and birds. And now especially enticed by the separate computer network culture.

So far it is all that I had hoped: nature writing, futurism, world building and science fiction.

Nice to see the introductory comments about different translations of the Tao Te Ching, as I'm also reading her famous translation of the Tao Te Ching. Translating from a future language is an excellent conceit for speculative fiction / science fiction. Her argument is that the 'original' is never accessible anyway, and, very taoist, all that's available is the present.

(as recommended by Jamie, because otherwise I was just sitting looking at Twitter.) I like the allusions to Mayor LaGuardia and the different levels of corruption that are possible.

"I thought about the garden tended by a monk living in mindfulness. His flowers are always fresh and green, nourished by the peace and joy which flow from his mindfulness.

We ought to listen to music or sit and practice breathing at the beginning of every meeting or discussion."

I really like the example of washing the dishes before sitting down to tea.

And in some ways this is a little more direct than I expected about how your life is going to be so much better once you just start meditating mindfully.

Is this just a how-to book on settling in the wilderness? And a morality tale about a strong father figure? It feels like Little House on the Prairie sometimes.

enjoying the start of this, largely because I always love that initial feeling of pioneering, planning, imagining a way to create a new life and bend resources to use. (an interesting if also offputting sense of romance and lust as well.)

Interesting, but slow. The sudden change in narrator renewed my attention.

I loved that quick drop in about how she's remarried. Still haven't heard her name yet. And the conversation with the maths boy tour guide was lovely, and got us the title of the book, still without any clear connection to the narrator's life or a larger plot.

Changing narrators is unusual, but I enjoy it.

It's foolish for me to start so many books at once, but I love how geographically localized this is for me. The cover is this detailed description of a park in San Francisco where I just was. Today, I was on the train through Klamath Falls and Klamath is a key setting for his fishing adventures. Oh, and a small misadventure in Portland, where I'm currently stopped on the train. I like when books do that.

So much has happened in the first quarter of the book, I don't understand where it can still go. Like, I feel I've already received a pretty substantial thesis on human happiness and human nature, but this is only the beginning of the plot?

lovely, readable prose, although I worry that I'm losing a lot in translation given how much of the author's childhood consists of poems they make up for each other or phrases that family members use.

what a sad and critical ending for our boy, I feel the sting a little personally even. and while it does feel a little like a trope (maybe it precedes the modern trope and so should be excused), it still feels like a valuable take. the trope is: white man lives a safe life until he meets this completely exceptional and entirely enthusiastic pixie girl who inspires him.

I'm so charmed. By Selina, certainly, but also by the writing itself, I think. I get drawn in. it seems like it's teaching me how to live, without being obviously preachy or fabalistic.

Wonderful. now re-reading pieces to put all the details and all the imagery together.

started reading as a gift from Jenny. impressed with the prose so far.

I'd been getting skeptical about Victor and his narration, but now I'm just enthralled by the creature's story and how it's destroying everything in Victor's life

He created the monster hella fast; I thought there was going to be a lot more about the scientific/engineering process. And then, he just ignores it? It actually felt totally realistic even at the same time as being so surprising, that he's so guilty and so upset about what's happened and doesn't know how to handle it and just slowly rebuilds his life by pretending it never happened.