Journal tags: book

My phone rang today. I didn’t recognise the number so although I pressed the big button to answer the call, I didn’t say anything.

I didn’t say anything because usually when I get a call from a number I don’t know, it’s some automated spam. If I say nothing, the spam voice doesn’t activate.

But sometimes it’s not a spam call. Sometimes after a few seconds of silence a human at the other end of the call will say “Hello?” in an uncertain tone. That’s the point when I respond with a cheery “Hello!” of my own and feel bad for making this person endure those awkward seconds of silence.

Those spam calls have made me so suspicious that real people end up paying the price. False positives caught in my spam-detection filter.

Now it’s happening on the web.

I wrote about how Google search, Bing, and Mozilla Developer network are squandering trust:

Trust is a precious commodity. It takes a long time to build trust. It takes a short time to destroy it.

But it’s not just limited to specific companies. I’ve noticed more and more suspicion related to any online activity.

I’ve seen members of a community site jump to the conclusion that a new member’s pattern of behaviour was a sure sign that this was a spambot. But it could just as easily have been the behaviour of someone who isn’t neurotypical or who doesn’t speak English as their first language.

Jessica was looking at some pictures on an AirBnB listing recently and found herself examining some photos that seemed a little too good to be true, questioning whether they were in fact output by some generative tool.

Every email that lands in my inbox is like a little mini Turing test. Did a human write this?

Our guard is up. Our filters are activated. Our default mode is suspicion.

This is most apparent with web search. We’ve always needed to filter search results through our own personal lenses, but now it’s like playing whack-a-mole. First we have to find workarounds for avoiding slop, and then when we click through to a web page, we have to evaluate whether’s it’s been generated by some SEO spammer making full use of the new breed of content-production tools.

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing about how this could spell doom for the web. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. It might well spell doom for web search, but I’m okay with that.

Back before its enshittification—an enshittification that started even before all the recent AI slop—Google solved the problem of accurate web searching with its PageRank algorithm. Before that, the only way to get to trusted information was to rely on humans.

Humans made directories like Yahoo! or DMOZ where they categorised links. Humans wrote blog posts where they linked to something that they, a human, vouched for as being genuinely interesting.

There was life before Google search. There will be life after Google search.

Look, there’s even a new directory devoted to cataloging blogs: websites made by humans. Life finds a way.

All of the spam and slop that’s making us so suspicious may end up giving us a new appreciation for human curation.

It wouldn’t be a straightforward transition to move away from search. It would be uncomfortable. It would require behaviour change. People don’t like change. But when needs must, people adapt.

The first bit of behaviour change might be a rediscovery of bookmarks. It used to be that when you found a source you trusted, you bookmarked it. Browsers still have bookmarking functionality but most people rely on search. Maybe it’s time for a bookmarking revival.

A step up from that would be using a feed reader. In many ways, a feed reader is a collection of bookmarks, but all of the bookmarks get polled regularly to see if there are any updates. I love using my feed reader. Everything I’ve subscribed to in there is made by humans.

The ultimate bookmark is an icon on the homescreen of your phone or in the dock of your desktop device. A human source you trust so much that you want it to be as accessible as any app.

Right now the discovery mechanism for that is woeful. I really want that to change. I want a web that empowers people to connect with other people they trust, without any intermediary gatekeepers.

The evangelists of large language models (who may coincidentally have invested heavily in the technology) like to proclaim that a slop-filled future is inevitable, as though we have no choice, as though we must simply accept enshittification as though it were a force of nature.

But we can always walk away.

I can’t resist bookshelves.

If I’m shown into someone’s home and left alone while the host goes and does something, you can bet I’m going to peruse their bookshelves.

I don’t know why. Maybe I’m looking for points of commonality. “Oh, you read this book too?” Or maybe it’s the opposite, and I’m looking for something new and—pardon the pun—novel. “Oh, that book sounds interesting!”

I like it when people have a kind of bookshelf on their website.

• Mandy’s reading list is always worth browsing.
• Remy has a comprehensive record of his reading history.
• Maggie has her library and her anti-library.
• Molly White has one shelf for fiction and another shelf for non-fiction.

Here’s my ad-hoc bookshelf, which is manually mirrored on Bookshop.org.

I like having an overview of what I’ve been reading. One of the reasons I started keeping track was so that I could try to have a nice balance of fiction and non-fiction.

I always get a little sad when I see someone’s online reading list and it only consists of non-fiction books that are deemed somehow useful, rather than simply pleasurable. Cameron wrote about when he used to do this:

I felt like reading needed to have some clear purpose. The topic of any book I read needed to directly contribute to being an “adult”. So I started to read non-fiction – stuff that reflected what was happening in my career. Books on management, books on finance, books on economics, books on the creative process. And for many years this diet of dry, literary roughage felt wholesome … but joyless. Each passage I highlited in yellow marker was a point for the scoreboard, not a memory to be treasured.

Now he’s redressing the imbalance and rediscovering the unique joy of entering other worlds by reading fiction.

For a while, I forced myself to have perfect balance. I didn’t allow myself to read two non-fiction books in a row or two fiction books in a row. I made myself alternate between the two.

I’ve let that lapse now. I’m reading more fiction than non-fiction, and I’m okay with that.

But I still like looking back on what I’ve been reading and seeing patterns emerge. Like there’s a clear boom in the last year of reading retellings of the Homeric epics (all kicked off by reading the brilliant Circe by Madeline Miller).

I also keep an eye out for a different kind of imbalance. I want to make sure that I’m not just reading books by people like me—middle-aged heterosexual white dudes.

You may think that a balanced reading diet would emerge naturally, but I’m not so sure. Here’s an online bookshelf. Here’s another online bookshelf. Plenty of good stuff in both. But do either of those men realise that they’ve gone more than a year without reading a book written by a woman?

It’s almost certainly not a conscious decision. It’s just that in the society we live in, the default mode tends towards what’s been historically privileged (see also films, music, and painting).

It’s like driving in a car that subtly pulls to one side. Unless you compensate for it, you’ll end up in the ditch without even realising.

I feel bad for calling attention to those two reading lists. It feels very judgy of me. And reading is something that doesn’t deserve judgement. Any reading is good reading.

Mind you, maybe being judgemental is exactly why I’m drawn to people’s bookshelves in the first place. It might be that I’m subsconsciously looking for compatibility signals. If I see a bookshelf filled with books I like, I’m bound to feel predisposed to like that person. And if I see a bookshelf dominated by Jordan Peterson and Ayn Rand, I’m probably going to pass judgement on the reader, even if I know I shouldn’t.

It’s been dispiriting but unsurprising to see American commentators weigh in on the EU’s Digital Markets Act. I really wish they’d read Baldur’s excellent explainer first.

John has been doing his predictable “leave Britney alone!” schtick with regards to Apple (and in this case, Google and Facebook too). Ian Betteridge does an excellent job of setting him straight:

A lot of commentators seem to have the same issue as John: that it’s weird that a governmental body can or should define how products should be designed.

But governments mandate how products are designed all the time, and not just in the EU. Take another market which is pretty big: cars. All cars have to feature safety equipment, which varies from region to region but will broadly include everything from seatbelts to crumple zones. Cars have rules for emissions, for fuel efficiency, all of which are designing how a car should work.

But there’s one assumption in John’s post that Ian didn’t push back on. John said:

It’s certainly possible that Meta can devise ways to serve non-personalized contextual ads that generate sufficient revenue per user.

That comes with a footnote:

One obvious solution would be to show more ads — a lot more ads — to make up for the difference in revenue. So if contextual ads generate, say, one-tenth the revenue of targeted ads, Meta could show 10 times as many ads to users who opt out of targeting. I don’t think 10× is an outlandish multiplier there — given how remarkably profitable Meta’s advertising business is, it might even need to be higher than that.

It’s almost like an article of faith that behavioural advertising is more effective than contextual advertising. But there’s no data to support this. Quite the opposite. I wrote about this four years ago.

Once again, I urge you to read the excellent analysis by Jesse Frederik and Maurits Martijn.

There’s also Tim Hwang’s book, Subprime Attention Crisis:

From the unreliability of advertising numbers and the unregulated automation of advertising bidding wars, to the simple fact that online ads mostly fail to work, Hwang demonstrates that while consumers’ attention has never been more prized, the true value of that attention itself—much like subprime mortgages—is wildly misrepresented.

More recently Dave Karpf said what we’re all thinking:

The thing I want to stress about microtargeted ads is that the current version is perpetually trash, and we’re always just a few years away from the bugs getting worked out.

The EFF are calling for a ban. Should that happen, the sky would not fall. Contrary to what John thinks, revenue would not plummet. Contextual advertising works just fine …without the need for invasive surveillance and tracking.

Like I said:

Tracker-driven behavioural advertising is bad for users. The advertisements are irrelevant most of the time, and on the few occasions where the advertising hits the mark, it just feels creepy.

Tracker-driven behavioural advertising is bad for advertisers. They spend their hard-earned money on invasive ad tech that results in no more sales or brand recognition than if they had relied on good ol’ contextual advertising.

Tracker-driven behavioural advertising is very bad for the web. Megabytes of third-party JavaScript are injected at exactly the wrong moment to make for the worst possible performance. And if that doesn’t ruin the user experience enough, there are still invasive overlays and consent forms to click through (which, ironically, gets people mad at the legislation—like GDPR—instead of the underlying reason for these annoying overlays: unnecessary surveillance and tracking by the site you’re visiting).

I’m at day two of Indie Web Camp Brighton.

Day one was excellent. It was really hard to choose which sessions to go to because they all sounded interesting. That’s a good problem to have.

I ended up participating in:

• a session on POSSE,
• a session on NFC tags,
• a session on writing, and
• a session on testing your website that was hosted by Ros

In that testing session I shared some of the bookmarklets I use regularly.

Bookmarklets? They’re bookmarks that sit in the toolbar of your desktop browser. Just like any other bookmark, they’re links. The difference is that these links begin with javascript: rather than http. That means you can put programmatic instructions inside the link. Click the bookmark and the JavaScript gets executed.

In my mind, there are two different approaches to making a bookmarklet. One kind of bookmarklet contains lots of clever JavaScript—that’s where the smart stuff happens. The other kind of bookmarklet is deliberately dumb. All they do is take the URL of the current page and pass it to another service—that’s where the smart stuff happens.

I like that second kind of bookmarklet.

Here are some bookmarklets I’ve made. You can drag any of them up to the toolbar of your browser. Or you could create a folder called, say, “bookmarklets”, and drag these links up there.

Validation: This bookmarklet will validate the HTML of whatever page you’re on.

Validate HTML

Carbon: This bookmarklet will run the domain through the website carbon calculator.

Calculate carbon

Accessibility: This bookmarklet will run the current page through the Website Accessibility Evaluation Tools.

WAVE

Performance: This bookmarklet will take the current page and it run it through PageSpeed Insights, which includes a Lighthouse test.

PageSpeed

HTTPS: This bookmarklet will run your site through the SSL checker from SSL Labs.

SSL Report

Headers: This bookmarklet will test the security headers on your website.

Security Headers

Drag any of those links to your browser’s toolbar to “install” them. If you don’t like one, you can delete it the same way you can delete any other bookmark.

2010 was a good year for me. I moved into a new home. Salter Cane released an album. We had a really good dConstruct. And I wrote a book.

It was HTML5 For Web Designers, the very first title from a new indie publisher called A Book Apart.

Back then, I wrote about the writing process, Jason wrote about the design, Mandy wrote about editing, and Jeffrey wrote a lovely foreword. What a dream team!

From there, A Book Apart went from strength to strength. Under Katel’s stewardship, they released the must-have books for web design and development.

One of the perks of being an author for A Book Apart is that I get a copy of every book published. I have a shelf of slim but colourful book spines.

Now, after 14 years and 60 titles, the collection is complete. A Book Apart won’t be publishing any more new books. Don’t worry—you can still buy the existing titles at all good bookshops, like bookshop.org. They made sure to prepare the way for this decision.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to express how grateful I am to everyone at A Book Apart. They treated me very, very well. Heck, they even let me publish a second book.

Thank you, team—it was a pleasure and honour to collaborate with you.

I’m a little obsessed with web performance. I like being able to check a page’s core web vitals quickly and easily.

Four years ago, I made a Lighthouse bookmarklet. Whatever web page you were on, when you clicked on the bookmarklet you’d get the Lighthouse results for that page. Handy!

It doesn’t work anymore. This is probably because Google are in the loop. Four years is pretty good innings for anything involving that company.

I kid (mostly). Lighthouse itself is still going strong, despite being a Google product. But the bookmarklet needs updating.

Rather than just get Lighthouse results, I figured that the full PageSpeed Insights results would be even better. If your website is in the Chrome UX report, you get to see those CrUX details too.

So here’s the updated bookmarklet:

PageSpeed Insights

Drag that up to your desktop browser’s bookmarks toolbar. Press it whenever you want to test the page you’re on.

I read 25 books in 2023. That’s exactly the same amount that I read in 2022.

15 of the 25 books were written by women—a bit of a dip from last year.

I read a lot more fiction than non-fiction this year. I’m okay with that.

There was plenty of sci-fi as usual, but 2023 was also the year I went down a rabbit hole of reading retellings of the Homeric epics. I’ve had a copy of The Odyssey on my coffee table while I’ve been diving into the works of Madeline Miller, Natalie Haynes, Pat Barker, and more. I’m really enjoying this deep dive and I don’t intend to stop anytime soon.

It’s funny; reading different takes on the same characters and interweaving storylines is kind of like dipping into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, just a few millennia older. In some ways, it feels like reading fantasy, but as Ursula Le Guin points out, things aren’t so black and white:

The Trojan war is not and you cannot make it be the War of Good vs. Evil. It’s just a war, a wasteful, useless, needless, stupid, protracted, cruel mess full of individual acts of courage, cowardice, nobility, betrayal, limb-hacking-off, and disembowelment. Homer was a Greek and might have been partial to the Greek side, but he had a sense of justice or balance that seems characteristically Greek—maybe his people learned a good deal of it from him? His impartiality is far from dispassionate; the story is a torrent of passionate actions, generous, despicable, magnificent, trivial. But it is unprejudiced. It isn’t Satan vs. Angels. It isn’t Holy Warriors vs. Infidels. It isn’t hobbits vs. orcs. It’s just people vs. people.

I’ve been reading some Ursula Le Guin this year too, and that’s something else I intend to keep on doing. Like the retellings of Troy, her work just keeps on giving.

Anyway, in my usual manner, here’s my end-of-year summary of what I’ve read, along with a pointless rating out of five.

To recap, here’s my scoring system:

• One star means a book is meh.
• Two stars means a book is perfectly fine.
• Three stars means a book is a good—consider it recommended.
• Four stars means a book is exceptional.
• Five stars is pretty much unheard of.

The Star Of The Sea by Joseph O’Connor

A nautical tale of The Great Hunger. It’s a tricky subject but this book mostly tackles it well. It’s fairly dripping in atmosphere.

★★★☆☆

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor

Another rivetting tale from Nnedi Okorafor, this one set in a world that seems quite different from ours, where magic is a powerful force.

★★★☆☆

The Rosewater Insurrection by Tade Thompson

The second book in the trilogy—this time it’s war. Once again, the setting and the vibe are unlike any other alien invasion story. I’m looking forward to reading the final installment.

★★★☆☆

Understanding Privacy by Heather Burns

On the one hand, this book feels like homework because it really is required reading for any web designer or developer. On the other hand, Heather does an excellent job in making what could be a very dry topic as interesting as possible. The contrasts between the US and Europe are particulary eye-opening.

★★★☆☆

Children Of Time by Adrian Tschaikovsky

Absolutely top-notch hard sci-fi! It feels like two of the biggest characters in the book are time and evolution. For a tale that’s told over thousands of years, the pace never lets up. Now I get why this book won so many awards. It’s quite a feat of story-telling. I loved it!

★★★★☆

The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier by Bruce Sterling

A fairly by-the-numbers retelling of the early days of computer hackers. To be honest, I found the pre-computer part (detailing telephone hacks) to be the most interesting bit.

★★☆☆☆

Circe by Madeline Miller

Everyone was going on about how great this book was so my expectations were high. They were exceeded. This book is just wonderful. When I finished it, I found myself craving more. That set me on the path of reading other retellings of Homeric characters, but none of them could quite match the brilliance of Circe.

★★★★☆

Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words by The Steve Jobs Archive

An assembly of speeches, memos, and emails. It’s refreshingly un-hagiographic, given the publisher. And of course it’s beautifully typeset.

★★★☆☆

The Song Of Achilles by Madeline Miller

After reading and loving Circe, I went back to Madeline Miller’s previous story of the Trojan War. The Song Of Achilles didn’t quite match Circe for me, but it came very close. Once again, everything is described vividly and once again, it stayed with me long after I finished reading it.

★★★★☆

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes

Another retelling of the Trojan war. This is an episodic book that weaves its threads together nicely. Sometimes it’s a little on-the-nose about its intentions but it mostly works very well.

★★★☆☆

Rocannon’s World by Ursula K. Le Guin

Le Guin’s first novel is far from her best work but it’s still better than most sci-fi. A good planetary romance.

★★★☆☆

The Intelligence Illusion by Baldur Bjarnason

Refreshingly level-headed and practical. If you work somewhere that’s considering using generative tools built on large language models, read this before doing anything.

★★★☆☆

Planet Of Exile by Ursula K. Le Guin

The second of Le Guin’s Hainish books. Another planetary romance that’s perfectly fine but not in the same league as her later work.

★★★☆☆

City Of Illusions by Ursula K. Le Guin

The third of the Hainish novels, this one gets pretty trippy. I enjoyed the sensation of not knowing what was going on (much like the protaganist).

★★★☆☆

Babel by R.F. Kuang

This was such a frustrating read! On the one hand, the world-building as absolutely superb. The idea of magic being driven translation is brilliant. So is the depiction of a British empire that exploits and colonises foreign languages. But then the characters in this world are not well realised. The more the book went on, the less believable they seemed.

There’s also a really strange disconnect in the moods of the book; one minute it’s gritty revolutionary fare, the next it’s like Harry Potter goes to Oxford.

It didn’t work for me. And I know that my opinion can be easily dismissed as that of a mediocre middle-aged white man, but I really wanted to like this. I was totally on board with the politics of the book, but the way it hammered me over the head constantly didn’t do it any favours.

A message like “racism is bad” or “colonialism is bad” might work as subtext, but here, where it’s very much the text-text, it doesn’t succeed.

★★☆☆☆

That Old Country Music by Kevin Barry

A collection of short stories set in the west of Ireland. Good stuff.

★★★☆☆

The Silence Of The Girls by Pat Barker

Back to the Trojan war in the first of a series by Pat Barker. She takes a naturalistic tone with the dialogue, modernising it. It works quite well. By this time, having read Madeline Miller’s The Song Of Achilles and Natalie Hayne’s A Thousand Ships, I really felt like I was looking at the same series of events from different angles.

★★★☆☆

An Immense World by Ed Yong

Another great accessible science book from Ed Yong, this time about senses in the animal world. It sometimes feels a bit like a series of articles rather than a single book, but when the articles are this good, that’s absolutely fine.

★★★☆☆

The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi

Okay, this might get a bit ranty…

The plot and the writing style in this book are perfectly fine, gripping even. It’s got that Gibsonesque structure of having two or three different characters in very different settings being propelled towards an inevitable meeting point (it happens pretty much exactly at the half-way point in this book).

But this is a cli-fi book that fails. It will not encourage anyone to take action other than turn into a doomer. Instead of asking what the future might actually be like, it instead asks “what’s the absolute worst that could happen?” Frankly, it’s a cop-out.

The book takes a similar tack with its characters. It assumes everyone’s terrible and will do terrible things. It’s lazy.

So you’ve got an unrelenting series of people behaving terribly in a horrific setting. It gets boring.

I was trying to cut the book some slack, but when there was a rare scene of actual consensual sex, it quickly turned into an adolescent male fantasy.

Reading this was like reading the opposite of Kim Stanley Robinson. Avoid.

★★☆☆☆

The Women Of Troy by Pat Barker

Back to Troy we go for the second in Pat Barker’s series. More good stuff.

★★★☆☆

How to Make the World Add Up: Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers by Tim Harford

A recommendation from Chris. He thought I’d enjoy this and he was not wrong. Tim Harford strikes just the right tone as he relays stories of statistics gone wrong as well as statistics done right.

★★★☆☆

Translation State by Ann Leckie

I’ll read anything by Ann Leckie. I loved her Imperial Radch series and this book is set in the same universe. There’s a strange juxtaposition of body horror in places with a Becky Chambers style cosiness. It’s partly a courtroom drama, but one where the courtroom gets very dramatic indeed. And there are lots of questions around identity and belonging. I liked it.

★★★☆☆

Trespasses by Louise Kennedy

Full disclosure: the author is a cousin of a friend of mine. She told me how much of this book was based on actual family history. It’s set in Belfast in the 70s and it is very vivid in a very kitchen-sink kind of way. It feels all-too real. Recommended.

★★★☆☆

Children Of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The sequel to Children Of Time doesn’t quite hit the same high bar, but it’s still an excellent rip-roaring space adventure that continues the themes of evolution and time. Thoroughly enjoyable.

★★★☆☆

Clytemnestra by Costanza Casati

My final foray to ancient Greece for the year. This is a debut novel that’s absolutely on par with the other Homeric writers I’ve been reading. Even though you know where things are headed, you can’t turn away. In other words, it’s a classic Greek tragedy.

★★★☆☆

Extra(ordinary) People by Joanna Russ

I had’t read any Joanna Russ before, which was something I’ve been meaning to rectify. I picked up a second-hand copy of this slim volume of short stories that was published by The Women’s Press back in the 80s but which is now out of print. Stories are vaguely connected and they all explore identity, gender, disguises and passing. But it’s the opening award-winning story Souls that’s the real stand-out. Well worth reading.

★★★☆☆

So that was my reading year. There were some disappointments in the sci-fi category, with both Babel and The Water Knife, but generally the quality was high.

I didn’t really read enough non-fiction to choose a best one of the year.

When it came to fiction, there was a clear winner: Circe by Madeline Miller.

If you fancy reading any of the books I’ve reviewed here, there’s a list of them on bookshop.org. Or go to your local library.

If you’re interested in my round-ups from previous years, here they are:

• Books I read in 2022,
• Books I read in 2021,
• Books I read in 2020,
• Books I read in 2019,
• Books I read in 2018, and
• Books I read in 2017.

I was doing some housekeeping on my website recently, tidying up some broken links, that kind of thing. I happened on the transcript and video for the talk I gave two years ago called “Sci-fi and Me.”

I really enjoyed preparing and giving that talk. It’s the kind of topic I’d love to speak/podcast about more.

Part of the structure of the talk involved me describing ten topics that might be encountered in the literature of science fiction. I describe the topic, mention some examples, and then choose one book as my pick for that topic.

For the topic of post-apocalypse stories, I chose Emily St. John Mandell’s Station Eleven. I love that book, and the equally excellent—though different—television series.

I’ve written in the past about why I love it:

Station Eleven describes a group of people in a post-pandemic world travelling around performing Shakespeare plays. At first I thought this was a ridiculous conceit. Then I realised that this was the whole point. We don’t have to watch Shakespeare to survive. But there’s a difference between surviving and living.

You’ve got a post-apocalyptic scenario where the pursuit of art helps giving meaning to life. That’s Station Eleven, but it also describes a film currently streaming on Netflix called Apocalypse Clown. Shakespeare’s been swapped for clowning, the apocalypse is set in Ireland, and the film is a comedy, but in a strange way, it tackles the same issue at the heart of Station Eleven: survival is insufficent.

I really enjoyed Apocalypse Clown, mostly down to Natalie Palamides’s scene-stealing performance. It very much slipped by under the radar, unlike the recent Netflix production Leave The World Behind

If you haven’t watched Leave The World Behind yet, stop reading please. Because I want to talk about the ending of the film.

SPOILERS

I never read the Rumaan Alam novel, but I thoroughly enjoyed this film. The mounting dread, the slow trickle of information, all good vibey stuff.

What I really liked was the way you can read the ending in two different ways.

On the large scale, we hear how everything that has unfolded is leading to the country tearing itself apart—something we see beginning to happen in the distance.

But on the smaller scale, we see people come together. When the final act was introduced as “The Last One” I thought we might be in for the typical trope of people turning on one another until there’s a final survivor. But instead we see people who have been mistrustful of one another come to help each other. It felt very true to the reality described in Rebecca Solnit’s excellent A Paradise Built In Hell.

The dichotomy between the large-scale pessimism and the smale-scale optimism rang true. It reminded me of The Situation. The COVID-19 pandemic was like a Rorscharch test that changed as you zoomed in and out:

I’ve noticed concentric circles of feelings tied to geography—positive in the centre, and very negative at the edges. What I mean is, if you look at what’s happening in your building and your street, it’s quite amazing how people are pulling together.

But once you look further than that, things turn increasingly sour. At the country level, incompetence and mismanagement seem to be the order of the day. And once you expand out to the whole world, who can blame you for feeling overwhelmed with despair?

But the world is made up of countries, and countries are made up of communities, and these communities are made up of people who are pulling together and helping one another.

Quite a few people have been linking to this list on The Verge of what they consider the greatest tech books of all time.

To be clear, this is a fairly narrow definition of technology. It’s really a list of books about the history of computing. But there’s some great stuff in there.

I’ve been thinking the books about computing and technology that I’ve managed to get around to reading, and which ones made an impact on me. Some of these made it on The Verge’s list too, which is nice to see.

Broad Band by Clare L. Evans

I was blown away by the writing and the stories uncovered in “the untold story of the women who made the internet.” Here’s what I wrote when I read the book:

This book is pretty much the perfect mix. The topic is completely compelling—a history of women in computing. The stories are rivetting—even when I thought I knew the history, this showed me how little I knew. And the voice of the book is pure poetry.

It’s not often that I read a book that I recommend wholeheartedly to everyone. I prefer to tailor my recommendations to individual situations. But in the case of Broad Band, I honesty think that anyone would enjoy it.

Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener

I read this one in 2020, not too long after it came out. In my end of year round-up, I described it like this:

A terrific memoir. It’s open and honest, and just snarky enough when it needs to be.

Close to the Machine by Ellen Ullman

I read this in 2018, many years after it first came out. Here’s how it came across to me:

Lots of ’90s feels in this memoir. A lot of this still resonates today. It’s kind of fascinating to read it now with the knowledge of how this whole internet thing would end up going.

Abolish Silicon Valley by Wendy Liu

This book is mostly excellent. But as I wrote when I got my hands on an advance copy, the juxtaposition of memoir and manifesto didn’t work for me:

Abolish Silicon Valley is 80% memoir and 20% manifesto. I worry that the marketing isn’t making that clear. It would be a shame if this great book didn’t find its audience.

The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage

Okay, this isn’t technically about computing, it’s about the telegraph. But it’s got the word “internet” in the title, and it’s a terrific read. Here’s what I wrote when I put it in Matt’s book-vending machine:

A book about the history of telegraphy might not sound like the most riveting read, but The Victorian Internet is both fascinating and entertaining. Techno-utopianism, moral panic, entirely new ways of working, and a world that has been utterly transformed: the parallels between the telegraph and the internet are laid bare. In fact, this book made me realise that while the internet has been a great accelerator, the telegraph was one of the few instances where a technology could truly be described as “disruptive.”

When Jason linked to the list of books on The Verge he said:

I’m baffled that Tracy Kidder’s amazing The Soul of a New Machine didn’t make the top 5 or even 10.

I’m more surprised that this book is held in such high esteem. It has not aged well. I read it in 2019 and had this to say:

This is a well-regarded book amongst people whose opinion I value. It’s also a Pulitzer prize winner. Strange, then, that I found it so unengaging. The prose is certainly written with gusto, but it all seems so very superficial to me. No matter how you dress it up, it’s a chronicle of a bunch of guys—and oh, boy, are they guys—making a commercial computer. Testosterone and solder—not my cup of tea.

I’ve been banging the drum for a button type="share" for a while now.

I’ve also written about other potential button types. The pattern I noticed was that, if a JavaScript API first requires a user interaction—like the Web Share API—then that’s a good hint that a declarative option would be useful:

The Fullscreen API has the same restriction. You can’t make the browser go fullscreen unless you’re responding to user gesture, like a click. So why not have button type=”fullscreen” in HTML to encapsulate that? And again, the fallback in non-supporting browsers is predictable—it behaves like a regular button—so this is trivial to polyfill.

There’s another “smell” that points to some potential button types: what functionality do browsers provide in their interfaces?

Some browsers provide a print button. So how about button type="print"? The functionality is currently doable with button onclick="window.print()" so this would be a nicer, more declarative way of doing something that’s already possible.

It’s the same with back buttons, forward buttons, and refresh buttons. The functionality is available through a browser interface, and it’s also scriptable, so why not have a declarative equivalent?

How about bookmarking?

And remember, the browser interface isn’t always visible: progressive web apps that launch with minimal browser UI need to provide this functionality.

Šime Vidas was wondering about button type="copy” for copying to clipboard. Again, it’s something that’s currently scriptable and requires a user gesture. It’s a little more complex than the other actions because there needs to be some way of providing the text to be copied, but it’s definitely a valid use case.

• button type="share"
• button type="fullscreen"
• button type="print"
• button type="bookmark"
• button type="back"
• button type="forward"
• button type="refresh"
• button type="copy"

Any more?

There are two kinds of time-travel stories.

There are time-travel stories that explore the many-worlds hypothesis. Going back in time and making a change forks the universe. But the universe is constantly forking anyway. So effectively the time travel is a kind of universe-hopping (there’s a big crossover here with the alternative history subgenre).

The problem with multiverse stories is that there’s always a reset available. No matter how bad things get, there’s a parallel universe where everything is hunky dory.

The other kind of time travel story explores the idea of a block universe. There is one single timeline.

This is what you’ll find in Tenet, for example, or for a beautiful reduced test case, the Ted Chiang short story What’s Expected Of Us. That gets straight to the heart of the biggest implication of a block universe—the lack of free will.

There’s no changing what has happened or what will happen. In fact, the very act of trying to change the past often turns out to be the cause of what you’re trying to prevent in the present (like in Twelve Monkeys).

I’ve often referred to these single-timeline stories as being like Greek tragedies. But only recently—as I’ve been reading quite a bit of Greek mythology—have I realised that the reverse is also true:

Greek tragedies are time-travel stories.

Hear me out…

Time-travel stories aren’t actually about physically travelling in time. That’s just a convenience for the important part—information travelling in time. That’s at the heart of most time-travel stories; informaton from the future travelling back to the past.

William Gibson’s The Peripheral—very much a many-worlds story with its alternate universe “stubs”—takes this to its extreme. Nothing phyiscal ever travels in time. But in an age of telecommuting, nothing has to. Our time travellers are remote workers.

That book also highlights the power dynamics inherent in information wealth. Knowledge of the future gives you an advantage that you can exploit in the past. This is what Mark Twain’s Connecticut yankee does in King Arthur’s court.

This power dynamic is brilliantly inverted in Octavia Butler’s brilliant Kindred. No amount of information can help you if your place in society is determined by the colour of your skin.

Anyway, the point is that information flow is what matters in time-travel stories. Therefore any story where information travels backwards in time is a time-travel story.

That includes any story with a prophecy. A prophecy is information about the future, like:

Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother.

You can try to change your fate, but you’ll just end up triggering it instead.

Greek tragedies are time-travel stories.

I read 25 books in 2022. I wish I had read more, but I’m not going to beat myself up about it. I think no matter how many books I read in any given year, I’ll always wish I had read more.

18 of the 25 books were written by women. I think that’s a pretty good ratio. But only 6 of the 25 books were written by Black authors. That’s not a great ratio.

Still, I’m glad that I’m tracking my reading so at least I can be aware of the disparity.

For the first half of the year, I stuck with my usual rule of alternating between fiction and non-fiction, never reading two non-fiction books or two fiction books back-to-back. Then I fell off the wagon. In the end, only 7 of the 25 books I read were non-fiction. We’ll see whether the balance gets redressed in 2023.

As is now traditional, I’m doing my end-of-year recap, complete with ridiculous star ratings.

I’m very stingy with my stars:

• One star means a book is meh.
• Two stars means a book is perfectly fine.
• Three stars means a book is a good—consider it recommended.
• Four stars means a book is exceptional.
• Five stars is pretty much unheard of.

Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar And Grille by Steven Brust

★★☆☆☆

Even the author doesn’t think this is a particularly good book, and he’s not wrong. But I have a soft spot for it. This was a re-read. I had already read this book years before, and all I rememberd was “sci-fi with Irish music.” That’s good enough for me. But truth be told, the book is tonally awkward, never quite finding its groove. Still a fun romp if you like the idea of a teleporting bar with a house band playing Irish folk.

A Ghost In The Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

★★★★☆

Stunning. I still don’t know whether it’s fiction, autobiography, translation, or some weird mix of all of the above. All that matters is that the writing is incredible. It’s so evocative that the book practically oozes.

Parable Of The Talents by Octavia E. Butler

★★★★☆

A terrific follow-up to The Parable Of The Sower. It seems remarkably relevant and prescient. So much so that I’m actually glad I didn’t read this while Trump was in power—I think it would’ve been too much. It’s a harrowing read, but always with an unwavering current of hope throughout.

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks by David Rooney

★★★☆☆

A great examination of history and colonialism through the lens of timekeeping. Even for a time-obsessed nerd like me, there are lots of new stories in here.

The Lathe Of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin

★★★★☆

While I was reading this, I distinctly remember thinking “Oh, so this is what Philip K. Dick was trying to do!” And I say that as a huge fan of Philip K. Dick. But his exuction didn’t always match up to his ideas. Here, Le Guin shows how it’s done. Turns out she was a fan of Philip K. Dick and this book is something on an homage. I found its central premise genuinely disconcerting. I loved it.

Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit

★★★★☆

When someone asked me what I was reading, I was honestly able to respond, “It’s a book about George Orwell and about roses.” I know that doesn’t sound like a great basis for a book, but I thought it worked really well. As a huge fan of Orwell’s work, I was biased towards enjoying this, but I didn’t expect the horticultural aspect to work so well as a lens for examining politics and power.

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

★★★☆☆

A solid sequel to the classic The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s not more of the same: we get a different setting, and a very different set of viewpoints. It didn’t have quite the same impact as the first book, but then very little could. As with The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood stuck with her rule of only including shocking situations if they have actually occurred in the real world.

On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder

★★☆☆☆

I wrote about this book in more detail:

For a book that’s about defending liberty and progress, On Tyranny is puzzingly conservative at times.

No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

★★★★☆

Astonishing. I know that a person’s reaction to a book is a personal thing, but for me, this book had a truly emotional impact. I wrote about it at the time:

When I started reading No One Is Talking About This, I thought it might end up being the kind of book where I would admire the writing, but it didn’t seem like a work that invited emotional connection.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. I can’t remember the last time a book had such an emotional impact on me. Maybe that’s because it so deliberately lowered my defences, but damn, when I finished reading the book, I was in pieces.

East West Street by Philippe Sands

★★★☆☆

An absorbing examination of the origins of international war crimes: genocide and crimes against humanity. The book looks at the interweaving lives of the two people behind the crime’s definitions …and takes in the author’s own family history on the way. A relative of mine ran in the same legal circles in wartime Lviv, and I can’t help but wonder if their paths crossed.

A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine

★★★☆☆

Just as good as A Memory Called Empire, maybe even more enjoyable. Here we get a first contact story, but there’s still plenty of ongoing political intrigue powering the plot. I can’t wait for the next book in this series!

The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win by Maria Konnikova

★★★☆☆

A thoroughly enjoyable piece of long-form journalism. It’s ostensibly about the world of high-stakes poker, but there are inevitable life lessons along the way. The tone of this book is just right, with the author being very open and honest about her journey. Her cards are on the table, if you will.

The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett

★★★☆☆

I wonder how much of an influence this book had on Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle For Leibowitz? They’re both post-apocalyptic books of the Long Now. While this is no masterpiece, Brackett writes evocatively of her post-nuclear America.

Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth

★★★☆☆

A compelling and accessible examination of a big subject. It doesn’t shy away from inherently complex topics, but manages to always be understable and downright enjoyable. I liked this book so much, I asked Anil to speak at dConstruct.

All Systems Red by Martha Wells

★★★☆☆

A good fast-paced sci-fi story that acts as a vehicle for issues of identity and socialisation. It’s brief and peppy. I’ll definitely be reading the subsequent books in the Murderbot Diaries series.

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

★★★☆☆

Not in the same league as Station Eleven, but a solid work, looking at the events before and after the collapse of a Ponzi scheme. It’s not a ghost story, but it’s also not not a ghost story. And it’s not about crypto …but it’s not not about crypto.

The Alchemy Of Us by Ainissa Ramirez

★★☆☆☆

I was really looking forward to reading this, but I ended up disappointed. All the stories about historical inventions were terrifically told, but then each chapter would close with an attempt to draw parallels with modern technology. Those bits were eye-rollingly simplistic. Such a shame. I wonder if they were added under pressure from the publisher to try to make the book “more relevant”? In the end, they only detracted from what would’ve otherwise been an excellent and accessible book on the history of materials science.

Looking back, I notice that The Alchemy Of Us was the last non-fiction book I read this year.

Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler

★★★☆☆

After reading this, I decided to read the rest of the Patternist series in one go. This scene-setter is almost biblical in scope. The protagonist is like an embodiment of matriarchy, and the antogonist is a frightening archetype of toxic masculinity.

Mind Of My Mind by Octavia E. Butler

★★★☆☆

All of Butler’s works are about change in some way (as exemplified in the mantra of Earthseed: “God is change”). Change—often violent—is at the heart of Mind Of My Mind. As always, the world-building is entirely believable.

Clay’s Ark by Octavia E. Butler

★★★☆☆

This works as a standalone novel. Its connection to the rest of the Patternist series is non-existient for most of the book’s narrative. That sense of self-containment is also central to the tone of the novel. You find yourself rooting for stasis, even though you know that change is inevitable.

Pattern Master by Octavia E. Butler

★★★☆☆

By the final book in the Patternist series, the world has changed utterly. But as always, change is what drives the narrative. “The only lasting truth is Change.”

The Unreal And The Real: Selected Stories Volume 2: Outer Space, Inner Lands by Ursula K. Le Guin

★★★★☆

I’ve read quite of few of Le Guin’s novels, but I don’t think I had read any of her short stories before. That was a mistake on my part. These stories are terrific! There’s the classic The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas to kick things off, and the quality is maintained with plenty of stories from the Hainish universe. I was struck by how many of the stories were anthropological in nature, like the centrepiece story, The Matter of Seggri.

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers

The fourth and final book in the Wayfarers series was a satisfying conclusion. I still preferred Record Of A Spaceborn Few, but that’s probably just because I preferred the setting. As always, it’s a story of tolerance and understanding. Aliens are people too, y’know.

★★★☆☆

The Táin translated by Ciaran Carson

As a story, this is ludicrous and over the top, but that’s true of any near-mythological national saga. Even though this is an English translation, a working knowledge of Irish pronunciation is handy for all the people and places enumerated throughout. In retrospect, I think I would’ve liked having the source text to hand (even if I couldn’t understand it).

★★★☆☆

The Star Of The Sea by Joseph O’Connor

I’m less than half way through this, but I’m enjoying being immersed in its language and cast of characters. You’ll have to wait until the end of 2023 for an allocation of stars for this nautical tale of the Great Hunger.

---

There we have it. I think the lesson this year is: you can’t go wrong with Octavia E. Butler or Ursula K. Le Guin.

And now it’s time for me to pick one favourite fiction and one favourite non-fiction book that I read in 2022.

The pool is a bit smaller for the non-fiction books, and there were some great reads in there, but I think I have to go for Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses.

Now I have to pick a favourite work of fiction from the 18 that I read. This is hard. I loved The Lathe Of Heaven and Ghost In The Throat, but I think I’m going to have choose No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood.

If you want to read any of the books I’ve mentioned, you can find them all in this list on Bookshop.org—support independent bookshops! I bought Octavia Butler’s Patternist books at Brighton’s excellent Afori Books, located in Clearleft’s old building at 28 Kensington Street. Do swing by if you’re in the neighbourhood.

Or try your local library. Libraries are like a sci-fi concept made real.

If you’re interested in previous installments of my annual reading updates, you can peruse:

• Books I read in 2021,
• Books I read in 2020,
• Books I read in 2019,
• Books I read in 2018, and
• Books I read in 2017,

I’ve mentioned before that I like to read a mixture of fiction of non-fiction. In fact, I try to alternate between the two. If I’ve just read some non-fiction, then I’ll follow it with a novel and I’ve just read some fiction, then I’ll follow it with some non-fiction.

But those categorisations can be slippery. I recently read two books that were ostensibly fiction but were strongly autobiographical and didn’t have the usual narrative structure of a novel.

Just to clarify, I’m not complaining! Quite the opposite. I enjoy the discomfort of not being able to pigeonhole a piece of writing so easily.

Also, both books were excellent.

The first one was A Ghost In The Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa. It’s sort of about the narrator’s obsessive quest to translate the Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire. But it’s also about the translator’s life, which mirrors the author’s. And it’s about all life—life in its bodily, milky, bloody, crungey reality. The writing is astonishing, creating an earthy musky atmosphere. It feels vibrant and new but somehow ancient and eternal at the same time.

By contrast, No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood is rooted in technology. Reading the book feels like scrolling through Twitter, complete with nervous anxiety. Again, the narrator’s life mirrors that of the author, but this time the style has more of the arch detachment of the modern networked world.

It took me a little while at first, but then I settled into the book’s cadence and vibe. Then, once I felt like I had a handle on the kind of book I was reading, it began to subtly change. I won’t reveal how, because I want you to experience that change for yourself. It’s like a slow-building sucker punch.

When I started reading No One Is Talking About This, I thought it might end up being the kind of book where I would admire the writing, but it didn’t seem like a work that invited emotional connection.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. I can’t remember the last time a book had such an emotional impact on me. Maybe that’s because it so deliberately lowered my defences, but damn, when I finished reading the book, I was in pieces.

I’m still not quite sure how to classify A Ghost In The Throat or No One Is Talking About This but I don’t care. They’re both just great books.

On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder is a very short book. Most of the time, this is a feature, not a bug.

There are plenty of non-fiction books I’ve read that definitely could’ve been much, much shorter. Books that have a good sensible idea, but one that could’ve been written on the back of a napkin instead of being expanded into an arbitrarily long form.

In the world of fiction, there’s the short story. I guess the equivelent in the non-fiction world is the essay. But On Tyranny isn’t an essay. It’s got chapters. They’re just really, really short.

Sometimes that brevity means that nuance goes out the window. What might’ve been a subtle argument that required paragraphs of pros and cons in another book gets reduced to a single sentence here. Mostly that’s okay.

The premise of the book is that Trump’s America is comparable to Europe in the 1930s:

We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.

But in making the comparison, Synder goes all in. There’s very little accounting for the differences between the world of the early 20th century and the world of the early 21st century.

This becomes really apparent when it comes to technology. One piece of advice offered is:

Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.

Wait. He’s not actually saying that words on screens are in some way inherently worse than words on paper, is he? Surely that’s just the nuance getting lost in the brevity, right?

Alas, no:

Staring at screens is perhaps unavoidable but the two-dimensional world makes little sense unless we can draw upon a mental armory that we have developed somewhere else. … So get screens out of your room and surround yourself with books.

I mean, I’m all for reading books. But books are about what’s in them, not what they’re made of. To value words on a page more than the same words on a screen is like judging a book by its cover; its judging a book by its atoms.

For a book that’s about defending liberty and progress, On Tyranny is puzzingly conservative at times.

I read 26 books in 2021, which is a bit more than I read in 2020. That said, some of them were brief books. I don’t think I actually read any more than my usual annual allotment of words.

I’m glad that I’m tracking my reading here on my own site. About halfway through the year I thought that I was doing a pretty good job of reading a mix of books from men and women, but a glance at my reading list showed that wasn’t the case at all and I was able to adjust my intake accordingly. I wasn’t doing as badly as some but by just keeping an ongoing reading list is a handy to spot any worrying trends.

I continued my practice of alternating between fiction and non-fiction. It’s working for me.

Now that the year is at an end, I’m going to my traditional round-up and give a little review of each book. I’m also going to engage in the pointless and annoying practice of assigning a rating out of five stars for each book.

To calibrate:

• a one-star book would be rubbish,
• a two-star book would be perfectly fine,
• a three-star book would be good,
• a four-star book would be excellent, and
• a five-star book is unheard of.

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

★★★☆☆

I was reading this at the end of 2020 and finished it at the start of 2021. I let it wash over me, which I think is how this impressionistic and rightly short book is meant to be enjoyed. But I might just be telling myself that because I wasn’t following it closely enough.

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

★★★★☆

A terrific book about human nature. As I wrote at the time, it makes a great companion piece to—and is influenced by—Rebecca Solnit’s excellent A Paradise Built In Hell.

The only frustrating facet of Bregman’s book is that it’s also influenced by Yuval Noah Harari’s mess Sapiens. That’s probably where it gets its wrong-headed fantasy about the evils of the agricultural revolution and the glories of a pre-civilisational nomadic lifestyle. Fortunately it sounds like this pernicious myth is in for a well-earned skewering in Davids Graeber and Wengrow’s new book The Dawn of Everything

Apart from that though, Humankind is pretty darn wonderful.

The Stinging Fly Issue 43/Volume Two Winter 2020-21 — The Galway 2020 Edition edited by Lisa McInerney and Elaine Feeney

★★★☆☆

Reading this collection of stories, poems and essays was my way of travelling to Galway when a global pandemic prevented me from actually going there. The quality was consistently high and some of the stories really stayed with me.

The Moment of Eclipse by Brian Aldiss

★★☆☆☆

Another pulp paperback of short stories from Brian Aldiss. I wrote about reading this book.

Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood

★★★☆☆

Reading a title from A Book Apart almost feels like a cheat—the books are laser-focused into a perfectly brief length. This one is no exception and the topic is one that every web designer and developer needs to be versed in.

Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor

★★★☆☆

A thoroughly enjoyable first-contact story set in Nigeria. It’s absolutely dripping in atmosphere and features fully-formed characters that feel grounded even when in the middle of fantastical events.

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

★★★★★

Yeah, that’s right: five stars! This books is superb, the perfect mix of subject matter and style as I wrote as soon as I finished it. What a writer!

British Ice by Owen D. Pomery

★★☆☆☆

This is a bit of a cheat on my part. It’s a short graphic novel, and the story is told more through pictures than words. The story is somewhat slight but the imagary, like the landscape being described, is hauntingly sparse.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

★★★☆☆

This one divided opinion. I thought that, on the whole, the novel worked. There are moments of seeing the world through a robot’s eyes that feel truly alien. It’s not in the same league as Never Let Me Go, but it does share the same feeling of bleak inevitability. So not a feelgood book then.

It pairs nicely with Ian McEwan’s recent Machines Like Us to see how two respected mainstream authors approach a genre topic.

Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez

★★★☆☆

Sharp and scathing, this is a thorough exposé. Sometimes it feels a little too thorough—there are a lot of data points that might have been better placed in footnotes. Then again, the whole point of this book is that the data really, really matters so I totally get why it’s presented this way.

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

★★★☆☆

Properly good human-level space opera with oodles of political intrigue. I will definitely be reading the next book in the series.

My Rock ‘n’ Roll Friend by Tracey Thorn

★★★☆☆

I really enjoyed this account of the friendship between Tracey Thorn and Lindy Morrison. I’m a huge Go-Betweens fan, but the band’s story is almost always told from the perspective of the boys, Grant and Robert. You could say that those narratives have (puts on sunglasses) …Everything But The Girl.

Anyway, this was a refreshing alternative. Writing about music is notoriously tricky, but this might be the best biography of a musician I’ve read.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

★★★★☆

I loved this! If I tried to give a plot synopsis, it would sound ridiculous, like someone describing their dreams. But somehow this works in a way that feels cohesive and perfectly internally consistent. Just read it—you won’t regret it.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

★★★☆☆

I enjoy reading books about the craft of writing and this is one that I had been meaning to read for years. It didn’t disappoint. That said, I think I might have enjoyed it more as an autobiography of an American childhood than as a guide to writing. Some of the writing advice is dispensed as gospel when really, that’s just like your opinion, man.

A Brilliant Void: A Selection of Classic Irish Science Fiction edited by Jack Fennell

★★☆☆☆

A quirky collection of 19th century and early 20th century short stories. Today we’d probably classify them as fantasy more than science fiction. What was really interesting was reading the biographies of the writers. The collection has an impressive amount of stories by fascinating women. Kudos to Jack Fennell for the curation.

Let The Game Do Its Work by J.M. Berger

★★☆☆☆

An enjoyable little study of dystopian film sports (I’ve always wanted to do a movie marathon on that theme). The format of this work is interesting. It’s not a full-length book. Instead it’s like a quick exploration of the topic to see whether it should be a full-length book. Personally, I think this is enough. Frankly, I can think of plenty of full-length non-fiction books that should’ve been more like this length.

The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin

★★★☆☆

Sci-fi? Fantasy? Magical realism? This has a premise that’s tricky to pull off, but it works. That said, I think it could’ve been shorter. I enjoyed this but I’m not sure if I’ll be reading any sequels.

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Roennlund

★★★★☆

Wonderful! A book about facts and figures with a very human soul. It can be summed up in this quote:

The world cannot be understood without numbers. And it cannot be understood with numbers alone.

Sometimes the self-effacing style of the late Hans Rosling can be a little grating, but overall this is a perfectly balanced book.

The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison

★★★☆☆

Dripping with creepy Brexity atmosphere, this is more of a slow rising damp than a slow burn. But while the writing is terrific at the sentence level, it didn’t quite pull me in as a book. I admired it more than I enjoyed it.

The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal

★★★☆☆

More escapist wish fulfilment in the Lady Astronaut series. These books aren’t great literature by any stretch, but I find the premise of an alternative history of the space race very appealing (like For All Mankind). This third book has a change of narrator and a change of scene: the moon.

Let It Go: My Extraordinary Story - From Refugee to Entrepreneur to Philanthropist by Dame Stephanie Shirley

★★★★☆

Absolutely brilliant! Both the book and the author, I mean. Steve Shirley is a hero of mine so it’s gratifying to find that she’s a great writer along with being a great person. Her story is by turns astonishing and heartbreaking. She conveys it all in an honest, heartfelt, but matter-of-fact manner.

I didn’t expect to find resonances in here about my own work, but it turns out that Clearleft wouldn’t have been able to become an employee-owned company without the groundwork laid down by Steve Shirley.

If you’re ever tempted to read some self-help business autobiography by some dude from Silicon Valley, don’t—read this instead.

Binti: The Night Masquerade by Nnedi Okorafor

★★★☆☆

The third in the Binti series of novellas is just as good as the previous two. This is crying out to be turned into a television show that I would most definitely watch.

Design For Safety by Eva PenzeyMoog

★★★☆☆

Another excellent addition to the canon of A Book Apart. I found myself noting down quotations that really resonated.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

★★★★☆

Excellent writing once again from Octavia Butler. Like Kindred, this can be harrowing at times but there’s a central core of humanity running through even the darkest moments. I’ll definitely be reading Parable of the Talents.

Responsible JavaScript by Jeremy Wagner

★★★☆☆

It will come as a surprise to absolutely no one that this book was right up my alley. I was nodding my head vigorously at many passages. While I might talk about progressive enhancement at the theoretical level, my fellow Jeremy dives deep into the practicalities. If you write JavaScript, you have to read this book.

Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers

★★★☆☆

I wasn’t that into the first book in the Wayfarers series. I enjoyed the second one more. When it came to this third installment, I was completely won over. I was in just the right mood for it after the heaviness of Parable of the Sower. There’s not much in the way of threat, but plenty in the way of warmth. I’m also a sucker for stories of generation starships.

The Road from Castlebarnagh: Growing Up in Irish Music, A Memoir by Paddy O’Brien

★★★☆☆

An enjoyable series of vignettes told from the viewpoint of a young boy growing up in rural Ireland. I was hoping for more stories of the music, but if you’re involved in trad music in any way, this is well worth a read.

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Now it’s time to choose one book of the year from the fiction stack and one book of the year from non-fiction.

In any other year I think Parable of the Sower would be the fiction winner, but this year I’m going to have to go for Piranesi.

There’s stiff competition in the non-fiction category: Humankind, Factfulness, and Let It Go are all excellent. But it’s got to be Broad Band.

Most of these books are available on Bookshop if you fancy reading any of them.

And for context, here’s:

• Books I read in 2020,
• Books I read in 2019,
• Books I read in 2018, and
• Books I read in 2017.

Firefox has a nifty extension—made by Mozilla—called Facebook Container. It does two things.

First of all, it sandboxes any of your activity while you’re on the facebook.com domain. The tab you’re in is isolated from all others.

Secondly, when you visit a site that loads a tracker from Facebook, the extension alerts you to its presence. For example, if a page has a share widget that would post to Facebook, a little fence icon appears over the widget warning you that Facebook will be able to track that activity.

It’s a nifty extension that I’ve been using for quite a while. Except now it’s gone completely haywire. That little fence icon is appearing all over the web wherever there’s a form with an email input. See, for example, the newsletter sign-up form in the footer of the Clearleft site. It’s happening on forms over on The Session too despite the rigourous-bordering-on-paranoid security restrictions in place there.

Hovering over the fence icon displays this text:

If you use your real email address here, Facebook may be able to track you.

That is, of course, false. It’s also really damaging. One of the worst things that you can do in the security space is to cry wolf. If a concerned user is told that they can ignore that warning, you’re lessening the impact of all warnings, even serious legitimate ones.

Sometimes false positives are an acceptable price to pay for overall increased security, but in this case, the rate of false positives can only decrease trust.

I tried to find out how to submit a bug report about this but I couldn’t work it out (and I certainly don’t want to file a bug report in a review) so I’m writing this in the hopes that somebody at Mozilla sees it.

What’s really worrying is that this might not be considered a bug. The release notes for the version of the extension that came out last week say:

Email fields will now show a prompt, alerting users about how Facebook can track users by their email address.

Like …all email fields? That’s ridiculous!

I thought the issue might’ve been fixed in the latest release that came out yesterday. The release notes say:

This release addresses fixes a issue from our last release – the email field prompt now only displays on sites where Facebook resources have been blocked.

But the behaviour is unfortunately still there, even on sites like The Session or Clearleft that wouldn’t touch Facebook resources with a barge pole. The fence icon continues to pop up all over the web.

I hope this gets sorted soon. I like the Facebook Container extension and I’d like to be able to recommend it to other people. Right now I’d recommed the opposite—don’t install this extension while it’s behaving so overzealously. If the current behaviour continues, I’ll be uninstalling this extension myself.

Update: It looks like a fix is being rolled out. Fingers crossed!

I gave my sci-fi talk last week at Marc’s Stay Curious event. I really like the format of these evening events: two talks followed by joint discussion, interspersed with music from Tobi. This particular evening was especially enjoyable, with some great discussion points being raised.

Steph and I had already colluded ahead of time on how we were going to split up the talks. She would go narrow and dive into one specific subgenre, solarpunk. I would go broad and give a big picture overview of science fiction literature.

Obviously I couldn’t possibly squeeze the entire subject of sci-fi into one short talk, so all I could really do was give my own personal subjective account. Hence, the talk is called Sci-fi and Me. I’ve published the transcript, uploaded the slides and the audio, and Marc has published the video on YouTube and Vimeo. Kudos to Tina Pham for going above and beyond to deliver a supremely accurate transcript with a super-fast turnaround.

I divided the talk into three sections. The first is my own personal story of growing up in small-town Ireland and reading every sci-fi book I could get my hands on from the local library. The second part was a quick history of sci-fi publishing covering the last two hundred years. The third and final part was a run-down of ten topics that sci-fi deals with. For each topic, I gave a brief explanation, mentioned a few books and then chose one that best represents that particular topic. That was hard.

1. Planetary romance. I mentioned the John Carter books of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the Helliconia trilogy by Brian Aldiss, and the Riverworld saga by Philip José Farmer. I chose Dune by Frank Herbert.
2. Space opera. I mentioned the Skylark and Lensman books by E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, the Revelation Space series by Alastair Reynolds, and the Machineries of Empire books by Yoon Ha Lee. I chose Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie.
3. Generation starships. I mentioned Non-Stop by Brian Aldiss. I chose Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson.
4. Utopia. I mentioned the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks. I chose The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin
5. Dystopia. I mentioned The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. I chose 1984 by George Orwell.
6. Post-apocalypse. I mentioned The Drought and The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard, Day Of The Triffids by John Wyndham, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. I chose Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.
7. Artificial intelligence. I mentioned Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan and Klara And The Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. I chose I, Robot by Isaac Asimov.
8. First contact. I mentioned The War Of The Worlds by H.G. Wells, Childhood’s End and Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke, Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, and Contact by Carl Sagan. I chose Stories Of Your Life And Others by Ted Chiang.
9. Time travel. I mentioned The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes, and The Peripheral by William Gibson. I chose Kindred by Octavia Butler.
10. Alternative history. I mentioned A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! by Harry Harrison. I chose The Man In The High Castle by Philip K. Dick.
11. Cyberpunk. I mentioned Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson. I chose Neuromancer by William Gibson.

Okay, that’s eleven, not ten, but that last one is a bit of a cheat—it’s a subgenre rather than a topic. But it allowed me to segue nicely into Steph’s talk.

Here’s a list of those eleven books. I can recommend each and every one of them. Still, the problem with going with this topic-based approach was that some of my favourite sci-fi books of all time fall outside of any kind of classification system. Where would I put The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester, one of my all-time favourites? How could I classify Philip K. Dick books like Ubik, The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch, or A Scanner Darkly? And where would I even begin to describe the books of Christopher Priest?

But despite the inevitable gaps, I’m really pleased with how the overall talk turned out. I had a lot of fun preparing it and even more fun presenting it. It made a nice change from the usual topics I talk about. Incidentally, if you’ve got a conference or a podcast and you ever want me to talk about something other than the web, I’m always happy to blather on about sci-fi.

Here’s the talk. I hope you like it.

I like to alternate between reading fiction and non-fiction. The fiction is often of the science variety. Actually, so is the non-fiction.

There was a non-fiction book I had queued up for a while and I finally got around to reading. Broad Band by Claire L. Evans. Now I’m kicking myself that I didn’t read it earlier. I think I might’ve been remembering how I found Mar Hicks’s Programmed Inequality to be a bit of a slog—a fascinating topic, but written in a fairly academic style. Broad Band covers some similar ground, but wow, is the writing style in a class of its own!

This book is pretty much the perfect mix. The topic is completely compelling—a history of women in computing. The stories are rivetting—even when I thought I knew the history, this showed me how little I knew. And the voice of the book is pure poetry.

It’s not often that I read a book that I recommend wholeheartedly to everyone. I prefer to tailor my recommendations to individual situations. But in the case of Broad Band, I honesty think that anyone would enjoy it.

I absolutely loved it. So did Cory Doctorow:

Because she is a brilliant and lyrical writer she brings these women to life, turns them into fully formed characters, makes you see and feel their life stories, frustrations and triumphs.

Even the most celebrated women of tech history – Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper – leap off the page as people, not merely historical personages or pioneers. Again, these are stories I thought I knew, and realized I didn’t.

Yes! That!

Read it for yourself and see what you think.

I’m going to be speaking at the Beyond Tellerrand “Stay Curious” event on June 16th. But I’m not going to be talking about anything (directly) web-related…

The topic for the evening is science fiction. There’ll be a talk from me, a talk from Steph, and then a discussion, which I’m really looking forward to.

I got together with Steph last week, which was really fun—we could’ve talked for hours! We compared notes and figured out a way to divvy up the speaking slots. Steph is going to do a deep dive into one specific subgenre of sci-fi. So to set the scene, I’m going to give a broad but shallow overview of the history of sci-fi. To keep things managable, I’m only going to be talking about sci-fi literature (although we can get into films, TV, and anything else in the discussion afterwards).

But I don’t want to just regurgitate facts like a Wikipedia article. I’ve decided that the only honest thing to do is give my own personal history with sci-fi. Instead of trying to give an objective history, I’m going to tell a personal story …even if that means being more open and vulnerable.

I think I’ve got the arc of the story I want to tell. I’ve been putting slides together and I’m quite excited now. I’ve realised I’ve got quite a lot to say. But I don’t want the presentation to get too long. I want to keep it short and snappy so that there’s plenty of time for the discussion afterwards. That’s going to be the best part!

That’s where you come in. The discussion will be driven by the questions and chat from the attendees. Tickets are available on a pay-what-you-want basis, with a minimum price of just €10. It’ll be an evening event, starting at 6:30pm UK time, 7:30pm in central Europe. So if you’re in the States, that’ll be your morning or afternoon.

Come along if you have any interest in sci-fi. If you have no interest in sci-fi, then please come along—we can have a good discusison about it.

See you on June 16th!

I got a text this morning at 9:40am. It was from the National Health Service, NHS. It said:

You are now eligible for your free NHS coronavirus vaccination. Please book online at https://www.nhs.uk/covid-vaccination or by calling 119. You will need to provide your name, date of birth and postcode. Your phone number has been obtained from your GP records.

Well, it looks like I timed turning fifty just right!

I typed that URL in on my laptop. It redirected to a somewhat longer URL. There’s a very clear call-to-action to “Book or manage your coronavirus vaccination.” On that page there’s very clear copy about who qualifies for vaccination. I clicked on the “Book my appointments” button.

From there, it’s a sequence of short forms, clearly labelled. Semantic accessible HTML, some CSS, and nothing more. If your browser doesn’t support JavaScript (or you’ve disabled it for privacy reasons), that won’t make any difference to your experience. This is the design system in action and it’s an absolute pleasure to experience.

I consider myself relatively tech-savvy so I’m probably not the best judge of the complexity of the booking system, but it certainly seemed to be as simple as possible (but no simpler). It feels like the principle of least power in action.

SMS to HTML (with a URL as the connective tissue between the two). And if those technologies aren’t available, there’s still a telephone number, and finally, a letter by post.

This experience reminded me of where the web really excels. It felt a bit like the web-driven outdoor dining I enjoyed last summer:

Telling people “You have to go to this website” …that seems reasonable. But telling people “You have to download this app” …that’s too much friction.

A native app would’ve been complete overkill. That may sound obvious, but it’s surprising how often the overkill option is the default.

Give me a URL—either by SMS or QR code or written down—and make sure that when I arrive at that URL, the barrier to entry is as low as possible.

Maybe I’ll never need to visit that URL again. In the case of the NHS, I hope I won’t need to visit again. I just need to get in, accomplish my task, and get out again. This is where the World Wide Web shines.

In five days time, I will get my first vaccine jab. I’m very thankful. Thank you to the NHS. Thank you to everyone who helped build the booking process. It’s beautiful.