follow me @eminencefont on twitter; check out my website at librarycallan.com. I am a library director/career librarian and huge supporter of libraries and I love books and this is my thingy where I will tell you about the books I am reading okay bye
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In 1937, the famed writer and activist Upton Sinclair published a novel bearing the subtitle …
These social geography/tech-and-business-history tellings of the present moment are so important, and this was an exceptionally good one. I can’t wait to use this in future classrooms
i'm not gonna lie - this is preaching to the choir to the point of it being sorta dull to read, but it is excellent! sorry if that sounds like faint praise. i am excited to use it for instruction
Why do we keep trying to solve poverty with technology? What makes us feel that …
One day, the mother was a mother but then, one night, she was quite suddenly …
This book is like no other. It’s a really stupid time for me to be writing this so I’m gonna go back to sleep ok bye
Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can’t remember exactly when the question took root, but the answer was …
Great writing, fascinating multi-layered story. Excited to read the companion novel. Great for YA LGBTQ collection dev. Fuck the book burning censors.
From acclaimed author Jeanne Thornton, an epic, singular look at fandom, creativity, longing, and trans …
I loved this and all the layers in it - the overlapping notions of identity & self-creation, the metaphors from all of time. Hard to describe it now, but the whole time I was reading it, I wanted to talk about it with someone. Seriously one of the best I’ve picked up in a while.
Starred Review. Chief Insp. Armand Gamache and his team investigate another bizarre crime in the …
I never thought I’d be one for a mystery series, but I love the Three Pines books and this one might be my favorite so far. The allusions, character development, and atmosphere can’t be beat. Louise Penny has some serious chops for introspection and marveling at all the shitty weirdness of the human condition. This one starts to shed much more light on things in the subplot and the twists are totally there for enriching characters, not trying to trick readers - that’s mastery.
It's been twenty years and two election cycles since Information, a powerful search engine monopoly, …
I wanted to read this because the description of it sounds fascinating, and there are some elements that are interesting to ponder over. But the character development is basically nonexistent and the plot is complicated in a way that makes it hard to stick with because you don’t really know/understand the people involved - and thus don’t really care. No offense to the author, who seems like a wonderful human and a deep thinker, but this is not good writing for a novel.
The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed …
I’m giving this a rare 5-star review because there’s no real criticism I have for it - it’s stunningly written, immersive and horrifying but ultimately hopeful. It is undoubtedly triggering for anyone with familial mental illness, and it can be too much at times. That said, it’s an incredible, fascinating book and I’m glad I picked it up.
In the annals of consumer crazes, nothing compares to Beanie Babies. With no advertising or …
This book was entertaining, depressing, and insightful. I am the perfect age to have been caught up in the Beanie Baby craze as a child, and I had a ton of them, but hadn’t really given it much thought for like 2 decades. It’s really interesting/terrifying to think about how Beanie Babies kind of launched and legitimized buying stuff online, and definitely gave a big leg up to eBay. Do we have Ty to thank for surveillance capitalism? Maybe!
This is an excellent takedown of Facebook, going hard on how the company created its own disinformation nightmare by treating extremist hate speech as “important political content.” Outstandingly written and devastating, it also sheds light on the epically gross working relationship between Zuck and Sheryl. If you can tolerate 300+ pages about some of the worst people in the world but want more ammunition against the selective applications of “intellectual freedom,” pick it up.
"Infrastructure is not only the underground pipes and wires that control our cities but also …
I will be thinking about this one for a long long time. Very interested in continuing to pull at the connections between engineering/tech, standards, and information science (and the differentiation between library science and information science). Also, so much yes to everything said about what organizations say they are doing and what they ARE doing… “…stories create ideological collisions and confusions, [and] organizations of every scale institutionalize techniques for overlooking or overriding the disconnect between what they are saying and what they are doing.”
Examines how (sometimes quasi-) authoritarian high-modernist planning fails to deliver the goods, be they increased …
I enjoyed this greatly and I am dyingggg to know about criticisms of big tech and surveillance capitalism that utilize the concepts in this book—particularly around legibility and the mechanization of people/minds. If you see this and you know of any, plz share! Such a good read for those of us in the interstitial spaces between the provably known and the experientially felt, and for those thinking about the pain and problems of objectivity.
whoa, I feel like this altered my brain in exactly the way you want critical theory to do. So many thoughts to unpack around the construction of disciplines, citation practices, what is considered valuable/usable knowledge in positivist frameworks… damn. Also, Drexciya.