Books and bathrooms

It’s the middle of the month, I have two weeks of furlough left probably. I’ve gotten quite a few overdue personal projects done, but I have a bad habit of having so many projects on the go that even if I complete several I don’t maintain much of a sense of accomplishment. It’s tricky.

Still, one of them is tidying up the website a bit, cleaning up the menus and links, and updating the art pages. It needed doing anyway, but if I’m planning on entering any virtual art shows, an up to date website seems critical. It’s also nice to have something to keep tidy, since the house is going to be in disarray while our bathroom is being fixed. It’ll be really great to have a shower again though!

Meanwhile the Hugo reading chugs along, I’m halfway through The City in the Middle of the Night and am digging it. I’m also reading This is How You Lose the Time War, which I had trouble starting and am reading more slowly but am interested in finding out where it is heading.

John had the day off on Friday so we set it aside to just sit and read Superior: The Return of Race Science, by Angela Saini. A lot of the bare facts I already knew, many I did not, but the most valuable aspect of the book the clarification of a timeline and narrative – so many times the separate facts of any situation feel important but almost anecdotal. Like all good writing on this sort of topic, what Saini does is reveal the bigger picture of how systems are connected, tracing their origins and their modern effects, while also making the point that these are not just passive cultural holdovers that live on despite being obsolete, they are nurtured, revived, reinvented, and disseminated by people and organizations that profit from them. It’s an essential read, even if you know the basics already.