What Are You Reading? / Book Lounge

Screenshot 2025-05-21 at 11-50-58 Endurance Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

Because I need more reminders about how soft and irritable humans have become.

Need to finish off, Liberator, by Patrick Geoghegan
… Starting to get hands, on the Metro series

Been reading through the locked tomb series by Tamsyn Miur.
Finished the first book Gideon the Ninth onto the second now.

I am doing quite a lot of reading at the moment for the purposes of literature review (in preparation of writing a paper and a Thesis). During this process, I came across the following article: Computer Scientist as Toolsmith II (Brooks, 1996) and was quite moved by (and felt compelled to share) the following extract:

The Gift of Subcreation

Making things has its glories and joys, and they are different from those of the mathematician and those of the scientist. Let us reflect together on these in a fundamental way.

[…]

Here, I want to focus on the last, the gift of work, of the capability and the call to make things. J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the epic Lord of the Rings trilogy, spent his life building a rich fantasy world with its own laws, species, languages, and geography. He calls this creativity the gift of subcreation, and he illuminates it in a poem peculiarly relevant to the graphicists’ craft [5]:

Although now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed,
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned:
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons—’twas our right
(used or misused). That right has not decayed;
we make still by the law in which we’re made.

[…] the ability and the call to create are given to us to enrich our lives and to enable us to enrich each other.

Source: https://www.cs.unc.edu/~brooks/Toolsmith-CACM.pdf

It’s a good read on many levels, really! :slight_smile:

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I just met up with my book club where we discussed The Night Gardner by George Pelecanos (He was a writer for HBO’s The Wire). It’s a pretty good book, but a very dark and gritty police/crime story.

Currently I’m reading The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming by Walker Percy for the same book club. The club book is just The Second Coming but I got them in a combined book so I decided to read both. Big mistake. The first book was terrible. I think I’m just going to finish the second one to bitch about it at book club.

In my second book club, I’m reading Hour of the Witch by Chris Bohjalian. So far it’s pretty good.

Speeed book club voted to read Project Hail Mary. Foundaryside was my vote last time. I guess I’ll add it and confederacy of duances to my to read list because the descriptions sounded interesting

I used to follow Donut a bit (as a car enthusiast myself) until the controversy and stuff occurred and they split to Speeed, which I was aware of but keep forgetting to check out their content.

I was really surprised to even learn that James reads books, let alone has a book club but that’s pretty cool regardless - watched the video and added some new books to my ā€œto-grabā€ list. Definitely will start following their content.

As for what I am reading now:
I’ve been lazy about reading books but currently 80% through the book Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams.
Yes - that book about Facebook (now Meta), it is… rather eye-opening albeit not that surprising when you observe Zuckerberg and the entire ā€œbillionaire tech headā€ community as a whole, but there’s some shit that still grinds your gears knowing what they do behind closed doors.

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Can second Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, I’m only like half way through but yeah, some of their logic is just crazy.

Oh yeah, Jerimiah and Jobe started Bigtime (more of the builds car content) and James with Speeed. I like the variety and how topics are what James finds interesting.

Yeah this month we are reading cat’s cradle. So far it isn’t holding my attention like the other two books

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im going to read:


on summer holiday. Apparently, the book is very different
i don’t really read fiction.