Cory Doctorow taking on Proctorio by proxy is such a delight. This story on how dumb proctoring software is, how it could be beat technically, and how it needs to be beat politically ought to be required reading for everyone in ed tech. It also has compelling characters, enough food porn to remind you who the author is, some fun technical asides (learned a lot about WannaCry!), and is just fun.

I’ve been feeling like reading some Turtledove recently, but I’m a lot more mixed on him than I’ve been in the past. I read nearly this entire series back in high school and thought it might be worth revisiting. The premise of this book (World War I in a timeline where the Confederacy successfully seceded) is super interesting. Woodrow Wilson as Confederate POTUS feels plausible, as do a lot of the other details, and it’s interesting to see how the story plays out.

This is the story of when the FBI ran an encrypted phone company marketed to criminals. Working with Australian Federal Police and European partners, they had a glimpse into gangsters’ and drug dealers’ conversations for years before they wrapped it up with a series of worldwide arrests. It’s a wild story that sounds like fiction but happens to be true. In fact, that’s Cory Doctorow’s blurb on the back—his recommendation on his blog is what got me to check this out.

I put this book on hold at the library after Cory Doctorow recommended it on his blog. It became available at the same time as two other Doctorow-recommended books that I’m now trying to rush through before other holds take them away from me. This is a book about the great excesses of tech bros and the many tiny excesses of the people using their tech in slightly off ways. It’s about misogyny, both subtle and severe, and (in the background) how scary climate change, American politics, and the Internet of Things are.

I’ve passed this up a couple of times at the library, but an article at BoingBoing got me to give it a try. It’s a fun, meta take on the comics industry through comics themselves, even if it feels melodramatic at times.

Bors has some great political cartoons in this collection, but I also don’t like political cartoons in large doses, even if that doesn’t necessarily reflect on him!

I’ve read this at least twice before, but it’s a fast read and a delightful one. I know it’s my favorite of the series based on my fuzzy recollections of the sequels, but reading this one again makes me feel like I should give the sequels another shot.

I dedicated most of my early career to Twitter and probably owe my tenure to the ease of collecting Twitter data once upon a time. Were it not for some timely decisions to diversify what platforms I was looking at, the API cutoff documented in this book would have really messed me up. Because of how important Twitter was to me professionally, I followed a lot of this news as it was happening.

It’s really hard to know how to rate this book! It is meandering to the point of tangential—Graeber confesses that it evolved out of an essay that didn’t stop growing, and I wonder if it would have been better if forced to be more concise. It also has some of the same issues that I saw in The Dawn of Everything (indeed, this could have been a section of that book), in that it’s working with data and history that are impossible to nail down for sure.

This story has an interesting premise—a Nazi officer is plucked from a falling Berlin into a fantasy world where he learns a lesson about all peoples being people—but both fails to deliver and muddles its efforts. I like didactic fiction fine (it’s the reason I love Cory Doctorow so much), but the intended lesson of this story is clear from the beginning, and it’s never really obvious whether or why the main character undergoes any personal development.

This is hands-down the best book in the Little Brother series and may even be my favorite Doctorow book? It’s hard to beat Walkaway, but this book is so perfectly written for our time (and such a perfect self-critique of earlier books in the series) that I’m not sure I’ll ever get tired of it.

First things first: I am not familiar with the source material or with the Michael Caine adaptation, so I can’t make any comparisons there. I enjoyed the beginning of the series more than the end: The fast pace usually worked for me but felt rushed in the last episode, and I preferred the more grounded elements to the semi-fantastical stuff that was eventually introduced. That said, I thought it was well shot, well acted, and interesting spy fiction!

This is another one of those books that’s hard to review—in part because it wasn’t always easy to get through. I’ve owned it for a while and tried to get through the ebook a couple of times, but it wasn’t until checking out the audiobook before some long drives this weekend that I finally made it through. The book is wonky, and while that’s a good thing, I confess that I didn’t follow all the details in either the laying out of the problem or the articulation of the solutions.

I bought this book in the beginning of the year after coming into some gift card money for my local indie bookstore. Last summer, a mental health counselor on campus had recommended it as something I might look into; he hadn’t read the book himself, but it had come highly recommended from a colleague. I’m glad I picked up a copy, but I’m not sure it’s as good as I hoped it would be.

Over a year ago, I listened to Little Brother, with the intent of revisiting this whole series. Homeland is my least favorite of the three, though, and so I stalled out pretty quickly and put it off until now. The book is better than I remembered it being, with some good themes and interesting plot developments. It does a good job of exploring WikiLeaks-style activism as something complex and not easily resolved, but it still comes down on the side of protest, activism, and pushback in a way that I find inspiring.

This is a goofy but fun book about demon hunters from a 1990s evangelical church. It came highly recommended by Cory Doctorow, which is why I checked it out from my local library even though I wasn’t sure it would be my thing. I enjoyed reading it, but I don’t think it was my thing after all. I followed enough of the 1990s gags and enjoyed enough of the story to have a good time.

My spouse has been trying to get me to read this book for ages. I’ve never been resistant to the idea, but I just never got around to it! Finally, I made some time this week to try it, and I see why she was so keen on it. The sense of humor reminds me of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but whereas H2G2 is goofy to be goofy, this has a really cozy story and important message at the heart of it.

This is also a darker novella, and reading a post-apocalyptic story that touches on death and disease stresses me out. More than the last time I read it, though, I get what Doctorow is going for with this story. It’s a critique of survivalist go-it-on-your-own mentalities with optimism that even in the worst of times, humans can come together and help each other out—if they’re willing to try. I don’t like reading the story, but I appreciate the message.

This is much darker than the last two Doctorow novellas I read: It involves domestic terrorists taking their revenge on the insurance companies that screwed them over. I know I haven’t read this since first reading this collection in 2019, because it’s almost too dark for me. It’s better than I remembered it being, though, and while I am not in a hurry to reread it any time soon, I appreciate why Doctorow went dark on this one.

This is one of the most interesting riffs on Superman and Batman I’ve ever read (though, of course, their serial numbers are carefully filed off). It’s a fascinating exploration of race, prejudice, technology, and police excess. I can’t remember if I’ve read this any time except the first, but it’s one I need to read again and again.

This is one novella in Doctorow’s “Radicalized” collection, so I guess I could wait until I read all four and review them together, but I’d rather do four separate reviews. This story is so, so good. It’s an excellent anti-DRM screed and a compelling example of the social harms that can be done by technology to marginalized groups. Reading this back in 2019 is what got me (back) into Doctorow’s fiction, because it’s a perfect example of what he does best.

It’s not the best of Astro City (and it feels awkward when trying to work with race and gender), but it’s not the worst either. I enjoyed reading some stories I hadn’t read before, and some of them were really well done.

I should start by acknowledging that this is a hard book for me to review honestly and thoroughly. First, it’s long and dense! I’m not sure I would have made it through if it hadn’t been via audiobook, and even then, I was sometimes listening at 3x speed to make it through before my loan expired. I know I missed some details along the way. Second, these authors are clearly making a big argument that takes on much of the received wisdom in fields like anthropology and archaeology.

This was good! Not perfect: there were some rough edges, it’s hard to take some scenes seriously if you’ve watched The Good Place, and there’s a bad case of the Force working as the plot needs it to. Despite all that, though, I love the franchise leaning into a “actually, the Jedi kind of suck” story, and there were some interesting fight scenes and compelling story elements. Happy to see Star Wars experimenting like this… though, of course, it should be moving into the public domain so that everyone (not just Disney) can do that experimentation.

Well, I did it! This is my second readthrough of Dumbing of Age (up through Book 13 at least) in 2024. I enjoyed it, and I’m glad I’m done so I can read some other PDFs I’ve been waiting on. I like where this series is going (mostly), and I’m sure I have a lot to learn from it still.

I think this collection has some of my favorite Joyce moments in them. The way Willis treats religion is something I really respect. Past me might not have loved it so much, but he gets a lot of things right about faith transition, including the way some people immediately take up new dogmas that are just as inflexible and judgmental as the ones they left behind. Can’t believe I’m almost caught up!

Comic continues to be good post timeskip! I am glad to almost be done with this reread, since I’d like to turn my attention to other books, but the reread is totally worth it for additional Willis insight and bonus strips.

You know, I’d kind of been dreading getting to this book because I remembered the climax, and I remembered not liking it. After reading it, though, I’m starting to think that it’s better done than I remembered but just that it stresses me out. At any rate, this comic continues to be good, and I also feel like we’re getting more Carla, which I appreciate. She’s the best.

Once you read enough Cory Doctorow, you start to pick up on the story elements that he reuses and recycles, and that’s pretty obvious here. Not only is this a graphic novel adaptation of a short story, but it’s very close to the premise of For the Win, too. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though! In fact, I really like this comic. The plot is interesting, and the art is AMAZING.

This actually has an absurdly long(er) title that I refuse to include in its entirety. I appreciate the effort, but I think it might break something somewhere on my web workflow. It’s interesting to read this volume with knowledge of what’s coming up in the series! I can see plots being set up that I might not notice otherwise. Not all of those plots are my favorite, but I still really like this comic, so I’m looking forward to them anyway.

I don’t remember when I learned that Leo Tolstoy had written his own, Thomas Jefferson-style miracle-free New Testament mashup, but I do know I immediately wanted to read it. Then, I spotted a copy at my local indie bookstore while looking for things to spend a gift card on, and that’s how I picked up a copy. Like The Kingdom of God is Within You, I like some of Tolstoy’s ideas, but getting through them can be a drag.

In some ways, I can’t at all relate to Dumbing of Age because my college experience was so wildly different. Yet, it’s funny how I can relate so much to parts of it now, well after my college years. I don’t know that I would have wanted to have this freshman year (especially not the melodramatic bits or superhero fights), but I do wish I could have learned some of the lessons in the story earlier in life.

There’s a certain flavor of bizarre that makes for great fiction, and this comic is that. It’s a story about gender transition and transphobia, a critique of tech bros and libertarian business types, and… a science fiction story featuring a Cthulhuesque cult? There’s a bit more gore than I normally tolerate in comics, and the art style isn’t what I’d identify as my go-to preference, but everything fits together in a surreal but profound way.

This continues to be good, the bonus material keeps getting better, and even though I can’t be bothered to write thorough reviews for these volumes (still 6 to go!), I’m really glad I own them.

The lines between books continue to blur, and as much as I like Becky’s growing importance, I’m not always a huge fan of Amazi-Girl scenes. This continues to be a good comic, though, and I’m enjoying the reread.

Lots of plot developments that will go on to define the comic here, and I enjoyed revisiting them. The bonus material is also really starting to pick up here with the inclusion of Patreon strips, so that’s fun, too.