by Jordan Ellenberg

I always feel mixed about reading popular surveys of a topic. They're never as exciting as reading something more targeted and idiosyncratic. It's a lot like listening to a greatest hits album - you sort of miss the rhythm and groundedness of living with an album or targeted investigation.

But it does give you a big picture that can help orient and bridge future reading. This book helped me connect graphs (of topics, of ideas) to the origins of geometry - and to think about how it's built on spatial intuition that we abstract out of the physical world. That is fun to think about in terms of how to represent knowledge in a spatial interface.

by becky chambers

After feeling like Light was too mean I went back to the second book in this series which gets called (and is) cozy sci-fi. For most of the book, I thought it was pleasant if not gripping, then I got pretty drawn in and emotional toward the end. I still like chambers' Monk and Robot series better, but I'm definitely going to return to the other books in this series.

I liked the treatment of AI in this - though maybe surprisingly I didn't feel like it was too connected to current AI stuff. I think the portrayal of the AI characters was more about examining our own relationship to our bodies, boundaries, and psychology. That's true of the alien portrayals as well. I thought Sidra (the AI) feeling most comfortable high up in the corner of the room (like a security camera) was a nice, funny touch.

by M. John Harrison

I had to push to get through this, mostly because the present-day story felt mean to me without purpose. It opened up towards the end, as I was hoping it would, and maybe it will continue to open up as I sit with it, but I don't think it will ever morph into a favorite.

It touched a bunch of themes I was hoping it would: making decisions through randomness (dice rolls) and how that might match with quantum theory; a multi-threaded narrative that weaves together.

by Peter Watts

This was my second time reading Blindsight, the first was as an audiobook. I'm not sure what drew me back - I think I saw someone mention the vampire-thing online, which I remembered. And I remembered it being somehow about consciousness in general, but I couldn't remember the specifics. I've been enjoying rereading fiction I read a long time ago lately so I picked it up.

I definitely feel some connection with Siri Keaton. I can remember at times trying to decipher middle school social behavior and adjust my own actions to fit. And somewhere in that was the sense that "I'm smart. This is a puzzle I can figure out". But having that layer of analysis running all the time can be a hindrance, and can pull you out of sync with yourself. I had totally forgotten that some of Siri's relation stuff hit emotionally close to home for me. The trap of getting caught up trying to understand and enact the social rules of a situation rather than showing up genuinely definitely resonated.