It was an interesting year, though every year is in their own way. It was certainly a tough year. I was laid off in April and remain unemployed. Communication was a big theme throughout the year. There were some awesome highlights, too. My fiancé and I worked a lot on our upcoming wedding. We traveled to Europe and Mexico again this year for more weddings. We spent time with family, but also made an entire Thanksgiving dinner by / for ourselves. I read a lot of books, worked on some neat projects, and watched a lot of basketball and other media.
I also didn’t hit a lot of my other goals, but so it goes. I’ve given up learning programming languages besides Python for now, instead trying to dig deeper into other parts of the data ecosystem and connecting pieces of software. I didn’t write flash fiction every quarter, but I did write two stories and also published several basketball pieces to the Ottoneu forums. I had to port my blog over from Forestry to Tina, which is/was not without issue and definitely served as an excuse to not write more.
I didn’t bake quite as much as other recent years, but made panna cotta for the first time as well as pulled pork and baked beans, all for our 4th of July celebration. I didn’t go to any museums in San Francisco, despite that being a goal of unemployment. However, I watched many of Hayao Miyazaki’s films for the first time and truly enjoyed them (I think Nausicaa is my favorite).
## Favorite Books
It was a good year for books. I ended up reading [45 books](https://app.thestorygraph.com/books-read/wfordh?year=2023), which was a mix of physical, e-, and audiobooks. I like switching between the formats and each one suits certain books better than others. It can be tough knowing which format to pick, but it usually ends up okay. My overall preference is still a physical book in my hands, but e-books are tough to beat for travel and audio is great while walking my dog.
I can be easy to please with the books I read, but I try to counteract that by putting in the energy ahead of time to make sure I’m picking good books.
### Fiction
#### The Mountain In The Sea
Truly a great and novel book. It’s the debut book from Ray Nayler, who works at NOAA. As you might expect from that, the book involves the ocean. It’s mostly set on a deserted island off of Thailand where a scientist is called in by a billionaire to look into reports of a super sentient octopus, all with the help of a mysterious cybernetic mercenary and the first AGI replicant. Overall it’s great character development, pacing, writing, and storytelling.
#### The Actual Star
The second book from Monica Byrne (I also read and recommend her first, “The Girl in the Road”), this one follows three storylines set 1000 years apart from each other and incorporates the mystical and the technological. The sheer imagination and creativity in devising the world in 3012 is amazing, and the 1012 storyline also captivates with how historical details are matched by storytelling. Last but not least, the 2012 storyline pulls at the heart and keeps you powering through the book.
#### Mordew
A fantastic first entry in a promised trilogy that combines magic with some gothic elements, making it reminiscent of the Gormenghast series, which is a personal favorite. It’s set in a vaguely European context, with references to Paris and London, and has some experimental elements with a glossary that reveals many things about the history of the world and how it functions while occluding other bits of the world. It does a great job making every character complex to the point where at different times in the book you feel like many of them are the “good guy” while at others they seem like a villain. I’m excited to read Malarkoi, the second book in the series, sometime this year.
#### Kalpa Imperial
I learned about this book while listening to the fantastic Anarchy SF podcast (I think the one on Mordew!) and it was truly a joy to learn about Angelica Gorodischer and read this book. It’s a book about an empire that has risen and fallen many, many times, but it isn’t that concerned with those aspects of the empire. Instead the book consists of many short stories about people - some royalty, some your average citizen - inside the empire and their stories. It manages to keep a birds eye view and breeze through millennia of history for the empire while still connecting you to the individual characters and stories. I’m sure that there are technically holes in the storylines, but the messiness of the timeline and the map of the empire is part of the storytelling.
#### Always Coming Home
An experimental book by Ursula K Le Guin, it has anthropological elements weaved into stories about future communities that seem placed in what is currently California. It is fascinating to watch UKLG dive deeper into the cultures, norms, and structures of these communities, obviously taking inspiration from her father, famed and problematic anthropologist Alfred Kroeber.
#### Others
**Dawn** by Sevgi Soysal, a somewhat autobiographical story about a woman in Turkey being arrested and spending the night in jail during the 1960s. **Afterglow** is a collection of cli-fi stories, and the final one title **The Last Greenland Shark** was my favorite - greenland sharks are absolutely fascinating creatures and this is the first time I’ve seen them in fiction! **Sharks in the Time of Saviors** by Kawai Strong-Washburn and **Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow** by Gabrielle Zevin were both great reads that were really pulled together by an unexpected death. I enjoyed the indigeneous aspects of Sharks and the unexpected death part of TT\&T was one of the best segments of a book I read all year. **The Windup Girl** by Paolo Bacigalupi was set in future Thailand, similarly to The Mountain In The Sea, and was similarly compelling despite imagining a much different future than TMITS. **The Haunting Of Hajji Hotak** by Jamil Jan Kochai is a powerful collection of short stories, including some that are difficult to read in parts as an American. **Babel-17** by Samuel Delany and **The Dispossessed** by Ursula K. Le Guin are two sci-fi classics that I enjoyed immensely and don’t really need to add much. I’m working my way through UKLG’s Earthsea series and hope to read more Delany soon. **Ferdydurke** by Witold Gombrewicz is a hilarious novel covering youthful stupidity that I came across after reading [this blog post](https://idlewords.com/2005/11/dating_without_kundera.htm) recommending Eastern European books by people besides Milan Kundera - it was banned by both the Nazis and the Communists! (I also highly recommend reading [The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel](https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm) as it might be the funniest blog post I’ve ever read).
### Non-Fiction
I didn’t hit nearly as many non-fiction books last year as in years past, but I really enjoyed the three I did read. The pandemic got me a bit socialist-pilled, so your enjoyment may depend on how open you are to left-leaning ideas. **The Future is Degrowth** by Andrea Vetter, Aaron Vansintjan, and Matthias Schmelzer did a great job outlining how and why we need to embrace degrowth if we want humanity to continue functioning in any capacity at all in the future. **The Road to Nowhere** by Paris Marx covers the history of transportation, automative vehicles, and Silicon Valley’s role in those industries, particularly recently. It does a great job showing how our car-centric world came to be and why we can’t trust Silicon Valley to fix the problems that come with it. **Work Without the Worker** by Phil Jones is a great look at gig working, particularly those workers in the global South who do the data labeling that powers many of Silicon Valley’s promised AI and machine learning products.
I’m hoping to stay on top of my book reviews this year and post short ones more often, which would make this exercise easier!