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Falko

maxheadroom@books.mxhdr.net

Joined 4 years, 8 months ago

reading mostly non-fictional books to learn new stuff. But occasionally I'm reading Sci-Fi and History.

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Falko's books

Currently Reading

2026 Reading Goal

83% complete! Falko has read 5 of 6 books.

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Dan Nott: Hidden Systems (Paperback, 2023, Penguin Random House LLC, Random House Graphic)

Hope for sequels, but these 3 are important

Takes three pervasive infrastructures and in a simple graphic treatment breaks them down in systematic detail, in historical and social context, and prompts questioning inequities and future reconsiderations of these built systems and their relationships to our global ecological society.

@cowboy@bookwyrm.social while the Name of the Rose is certainly more "consumable" the Pendulum blow my mind. Thats actually one of my favorites books. So dense and full of history that largely actually happened ... a masterpiece.

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Ursula K. Le Guin, Laozi: Tao Te Ching (1998, Shambhala) No rating

No other English translation of this greatest of the Chinese classics can match Ursula Le …

To be in favor or disgrace is to live in fear. To take the body seriously is to admit one can suffer.

What does that mean, to be in favor or disgrace is to live in fear? Favor debases: we fear to lose it, fear to win it. So to be in favor or disgrace is to live in fear.

What does that mean, to take the body seriously is to admit one can suffer? I suffer because I'm a body; if I weren't a body, how could I suffer?

Tao Te Ching by ,

The final stanza relates this to the public good and body politic, but I like these bits on their own as well

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Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone: This Is How You Lose the Time War (Hardcover, 2019, Simon and Schuster)

Two time-traveling agents from warring futures, working their way through the past, begin to exchange …

a teapot in a tempest

"This is How You Lose the Time War" asks the reader to perch on the shoulders of two operatives on opposing sides of a time-traveling war.

Each chapter follows "Red" or "Blue" as they scurry up and down timelines and across dimensions. The book is both sweepingly broad and extremely contained and personal.

The settings flit by, dizzying: a temple for mechanized humans, an ancient holy cave, the assassination of Caesar - each sketched with broad, emotional strokes to give the setting an aesthetic. One gets the sense that a great web of cause and effect is being constantly constructed, altered, and destroyed, without ever seeing the full picture.

Against these backdrops, the characters "Red" and "Blue" write to each other - as nemeses, then as friends, ever deeper entangled even as they demolish each other's plans and forces. The letters make up an enormous part of …