The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
There are only three books on this shelf that were there at the beginning of the month, which tells you two things: 1) I got a lot of reading done in June, and 2) I ordered way too many damn books in June. The weird thing is I’m super excited about all three of the books.
Looks a little different from last time, doesn’t it?
The Project is continuing apace, and since I doubt I’m going to finish reading the book I’m working on right now by the end of the month, I may as well go ahead and do this update now. The numbers are always kept up-to-date on the spreadsheet to the right there– because nothing good can exist without a spreadsheet, but let’s take a halfway-through-2021 (no, seriously, we are) snapshot of the numbers:
This means that technically I’m on pace– slightly ahead, in fact– to complete all 50 states by the end of the year, but it’s definitely getting more difficult across the board. I was at 17 countries and 15 states at the end of March, so you’ll notice neither of those numbers have doubled; I’ve pretty well plucked all the low-hanging fruit by now, and while there’s a few new countries represented on my Unread Shelf right now I don’t think there are any new states. More authors than I would have guessed live in Texas, and while there’s at least a couple of easy states left (I can always read a Stephen King book to get Maine, and, well, I live in Indiana) most of what’s left are going to have to be states that I specifically Google “authors from XXX” to find something to read.
I’m also starting to run low on countries where it’s easy to find authors whose work has been translated into English. This, in turn, leads to me ordering books that it’s less likely that I’m going to enjoy, simply because a lot of the time I’m just grabbing what I can find, and while there have definitely been some exceptions, I’m not finding that I’m discovering a huge number of hidden gems with this particular project the way I might have wanted to. I’m also backlogging books that “don’t count,” and probably 3/4 of my Unread Shelf right now is books that are repeat states or repeat countries. I got a lot of new places done in June, but July is going to have to be a month with not a lot of progress.
That said, filling in the map is still super fun. Ultimately I am going to finish this, because I’m that guy, it just remains to be seen how much of a slog those last few states create. I’m hoping for 40 countries right now, which actually ought to be manageable since I’ll be at 32 or so just with the books I’m due to read right now. And I’ve still got a solid six weeks of summer left, when my reading rate shoots way up. We’ll update again in September, but you can always check the links to the right if you’re curious.
This is not a post about my stupid YouTube channel, although I’m not gonna lie: it’s related. Part of the reason I started the channel with Little Nightmares II specifically is that LNII is a game that isn’t especially challenging on either my PS5 or my computer. I wanted to start off with Sekiro, but I couldn’t get the Elgato and the computer to play nice with each other, and any time I tried to stream or record anything complicated it came off really blurry and ugly with tons of frame drops and stuff like that. Little Nightmares II recorded very smoothly, so I figured I’d start with that, and then I embarked upon this ridiculous stream of minor and major upgrades to my system to get everything working the way I wanted. New HDMI cables were the first move– I have learned so much about cables in the last two weeks that it’s flat-out absurd. I had already been looking for an excuse to upgrade my desktop’s memory, since it shipped with only 8gb, so I fixed that next, upgrading to 40gb. When that didn’t make any difference, I spent last night researching the USB standard.
And … Christ.
Long story short: there are a mess of overlapping standards for USB, both the ports and the cables, and then there’s Apple’s own answer to USB, which is the Thunderbolt standard, and even that has a couple of different versions out there. As it works out, my computer has a spare Thunderbolt port available, which supposedly can push 40gb a second? That’s … a lot, so I decided to upgrade the USB cable today.
And I don’t think the story’s funny enough to recount in full, but doing that required the following steps:
Slightly separate issue: the Apple store also has curbside pick-up, and in fact has designated parking spots in the mall parking lot for same, but the Apple store itself is deep enough inside the mall that getting to it from (I think) the closest available external door(*) is a 5-minute walk. Not a lot in the long term, but I wouldn’t want to be the employee who got tasked with spending all fucking day lugging shit from the store to those two parking spots. Not without, like, a Segway or something like that. It’s not remotely as hot here as it is in a lot of the country (particularly the West Coast) right now, but it’s about as humid as I’ve ever experienced, and that would be an “I quit” moment real quick for me, particularly since you know those curbside pick-up people are going to be impatient as hell.
(*) I mean, it would have to be, right? That’s where the parking spaces were. Surely they wouldn’t put their designated curbside spots next to the second closest door, although that might be giving mall management too much credit.
Both my wife and I slept like utter shit last night; I think every time one of us drifted off the other one did something, and we both kept each other up all damn night, and as a result we’ve both been just oozing around the house and moaning all day. We have three episodes of Avatar left and God damn it, if I get through all three of them, I’m going to call today a victory and not worry about it. It’s Sunday, I ain’t gotta do nothing I don’t want to.
You, on the other hand, should go watch my stupid vidya gaemz videos instead of reading a post.
This is one of those times where I admit that I’m never really sure what I consider an “official” book review; there have been times when I labeled something a reviewlet and then talked about it more than I did in full “reviews,” and I want y’all to know that I read this book and I like it and I recommend it but having finished it I’m not sure what to say about it.
In a way, this book is a triumph of the #readaroundtheworld project; I picked it up on the recommendation of a (white, or perhaps I should say haole) friend in Hawai’i because I needed a book written by a Hawaiian and I wanted one written by an Indigenous Hawaiian specifically. She tossed me a few titles and I grabbed this one because it seemed the most up my alley: a family saga that begins with a seven-year-old falling off a boat in the middle of the ocean and being actually rescued and delivered back to his parents by the sharks. Then he touches a friend at a Fourth of July party who has blown part of his hand off with a firecracker and heals the wound.
And then you think you have an idea where the book is going, and there’s a big twist in the middle and you were wrong, and then you think you know where the book is going, and you’re probably still wrong, because ultimately this book is about what a weight The Future can be, when you think you’re being raised to be one thing and then you’re not that thing anymore, and it’s also about what happens to a family when all of their futures get taken away from them at once. The book follows four characters– the mom and the three kids– in a sort of first-person rotating chapters sort of thing, and the father of the family gets to be the POV character a time or two but not very often. There’s a lot of Hawaiian vocabulary sprinkled into the book, but not so much that it’s a problem for people who aren’t familiar with the language or the islands themselves, which I’ve never visited. It’s about the same amount as the Diné you see sprinkled throughout Rebecca Roanhorse’s Sixth World books, with the advantage that Hawaiian is a lot easier to parse and read for a native English speaker than Diné is. Washburn’s prose is lovely throughout, and the voices of the main characters are distinct enough that after a while you can pick out who’s talking from just a couple of paragraphs, which is definitely something you want in a book structured this way.
I’ll talk about this more in a few days when I do the June update for #readaroundtheworld, but this book is exactly what I was looking for when I started this project. There’s not really anything I’m learning or being exposed to when I read a book by someone from Michigan or New York or Texas, y’know? I have a pretty good idea of what those places are like already. Hawai’i is a little different, for obvious reasons, and this is definitely an author and a book I wouldn’t have come across were I not deliberately looking for it. I probably missed some cultural nuances here and there, of course, but the book was still plenty accessible for all that. If you’re looking for something new on your reading list, definitely check it out.
This post has almost been about several things already; Gift of Gab, one of my favorite hiphop artists, passed away earlier today, and there will still likely be a post about him in the next couple of days. I’ve had a post about critical race theory brewing as well.
And then this murdering shitbag cop’s sentencing came down, and, well, that’s probably the most timely thing I could be writing about right now.
270 months. He murdered someone he knew by kneeling on his neck for nine and a half minutes and for that he will serve 22 and one-half years in jail. If the crime hadn’t been filmed, we’d likely never have heard of it, and he would no doubt have continued to be a murdering, racist asshole for the rest of his career.
I’m of two minds– well, several, really– about all this. He was convicted of second degree murder, for which the recommended sentence was 10 years, and the prosecution was pushing for probation. So the fact that he got over twice the recommended sentence is a good thing even if the defense was hoping for 30 years. I brought this up on Twitter earlier about an entirely different criminal; I don’t know that I’m any good about determining how long sentences should be for crimes.
The person I was talking about then was one of the Capitol rioters; she was in the building for around 10 minutes and committed no acts of violence while she was in there, and she got three years of probation. Is that “enough”? Hell, I don’t know. Would jail time have been better? 3o days of jail, to pick a number, instead of three years of probation? Six months? Is that too much for participating in an insurrection for ten minutes and not being one of the ringleaders of the crowd?
And this man gets 22.5 years for cold-blooded murder in broad daylight. Which doesn’t sound like enough; life without possibility of parole sounds great to me. Sure, there are more direct ways he could have murdered George Floyd; he was convicted of 2nd degree and not 1st for a reason. But George Floyd will still be dead when and if this man gets out of jail.
Well, okay, but he’s going to be spending that entire time in solitary, and when I am in a less bloodthirsty mental state I recognize that any amount of time in solitary confinement in America’s jails amounts to psychological torture, to say nothing of fifteen years, which is what I’m seeing would be the minimum amount of time he’d serve (who knows if that’s right, because Twitter, but whatever.). Fifteen years of solitary confinement 23 hours a day is not a sentence that many people can be expected to survive, and if they survive it, what emerges is not the person that went in. And I’m strugging, right now, to balance that need for justice and vengeance (not the same thing) with my disgust at the carceral state in America. I would prefer that jail be a place for rehabilitation and not for punishment. But it isn’t, and it likely won’t be in my lifetime. And this creature is not about to be the hill I choose to die on to fight the badly broken American justice system. The fact that he was convicted at all is remarkable, to say nothing of the sentence being more than the bare available minimum.
So.
I don’t want this to happen to anyone, but if it’s going to happen to anyone, it may as well happen to him. I’m not sure how that stands as a moral position, but it’s what I have at the moment. If he doesn’t like it, he probably should have listened to the crowd of people begging him to stop strangling another human being under his knee until that man died crying for his mother.
I promise I’m not going to get into the habit of doing this a lot, but I figure early on it can’t hurt: we’re up to Day 3 of our Little Nightmares II playthrough, with new episodes being posted at noon EST daily until I’ve beaten the game. You can subscribe to the channel here, and really, you should go do that even if you don’t use YouTube. In fact, especially if you don’t use YouTube, because then my silly vidya gaemz videos won’t even annoy you.
More later, by which I mean “I’m going to start writing the post now, so this isn’t a bluff.”
Man, guys, WordPress really wants me to know about that 200th post.
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