Let's wrap up Friday with a bookpost

[roadrunnertwice]

William Gibson — Agency

Jan 23

Late-career William Gibson books (say, starting halfway through Pattern Recognition) are some of the most soothing comfort reading I've ever found. Some of that's the pacing, some of it's the tone and the slightly off-shear way his POV characters experience the world, some of it's the intellectual stimulation, but the effect is way more than the sum of the parts (or at least of the parts I've managed to identify thus far). If I'm re-reading some Bill Gibson, that probably means I'm dealing with some major shit and the book is helping me keep an even keel.

Anyway, I loved this but I have absolutely no capacity for or interest in "reviewing" it as a normal aesthetic object. It's simply not possible.

By the way, if you're not sure how to Gibson: go ahead and start with The Peripheral. His books come in clusters, but they all stand by themselves and can be read in any order... with the exception of this newest one. So, start with the newest one that can stand alone.

Martha Wells: The Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect

May 12

Hell yes. The Murderbot series is fantastic and you should definitely read it.

This one is just as good as the others, if not better. It's also longer.

Comfort Food Re-Reads

• William Gibson — Agency (Feb 12)
• Martha Wells — The Serpent Sea (April 20)
• Martha Wells — The Siren Depths (April 23-ish)
• Martha Wells — The Murderbot Diaries: Rogue Protocol (May 31)
• Martha Wells — The Murderbot Diaries: Exit Strategy (June 1)
• William Gibson — Spook Country (July 24-ish)
• William Gibson — Zero History (July 24-ish)
• Andrea K. Host — Touchstone series (Sep 1-ish)
• William Gibson — Agency (Nov 6)

This is a season of survival, not a season of growth. I endorse doing some re-reading of your own in these continuing plague times.

W. E. B. DuBois — The Souls of Black Folk

Sept. 30, partial

Some remedial essay reading. These were really excellent, and both the content and the voice were surprisingly current. Even the ones where he goes deep into the details of the material conditions of Black people in the rural American South circa 1890-something feel current, somehow.

Le Chad Tartine — Tartine Bread

April ??

This book was incredibly helpful in nailing down some fundamentals of natural leaven usage and dough handling technique and really just raising my entire god damn game, bread-wise. I used to make pretty ok bread, but now I make bread that can actually meet my own high standards.

This book is also full of blind spots and unstated regional/environmental/monetary assumptions, and might not even be legible without some serious prior baking experience. (I had go deep into the bread forum zone to fill in some major gaps around water handling and starter lifecycle.) So don’t start here, ok? Cool.

I think the original Ken Forkish book is a pretty decent intro to baking good rustic bread, and the skills in it are all directly transferable to the Tartine formulae. KF’s “overnight white” recipe is relatively forgiving while still yielding very nice flavor, and it gives you a chance to get comfortable with handling extremely wet dough, playing chicken with long fermentation times, and baking freestanding loaves with a steam jail before requiring trial-by-combat against unpredictable wild microflora that sometimes get unhappy and destroy dough with corrosive mystery compounds. Also, I think he gives some of the more lucid explanations I’ve seen about treating time and temperature as ingredients, about fine-tuning the four-way balance between room°/water°/leaven%/time, about flour protein content, and about the importance of good note-taking practices (btw, get a moleskein to keep in the kitchen, you want something that will stay closed and durable in the junk drawer).

Anyway if we’re buds or acquaintances and you wanna pick my brain about anything bread-related, I’m down to video chat or whatever.

Comments

[sporky_rat]

Murderbot is a lovely comfort read.

[roadrunnertwice]

Addendum about the Ken Forkish book though is that you should definitely skip the entire tedious autobiography and go straight to the technical content.