Reading Wednesday

Just finished: The Red Power Murders by Thomas King. I ended up liking this way more than the first one, which I liked quite a bit. It was just more grounded in politics and the characters more interesting than in the last one. I did call the murderer about halfway though, but I think that's just because I've read books before.

One thing I really enjoyed about it was Noah Ridge, the AIM-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off activist whose arrival in town kickstarts the plot. He's deeply unlikeable but also right, at least to a point, which felt very true to life and something that only a person grounded in movement politics is going to pull off correctly. I have known so many activists like him, people who get subsumed to the point where the struggle is the only thing in their lives and they have no identity outside of it, and this makes them useful but also assholes. He's an excellent foil to DreadfulWater, who swings too far in the other direction. There's an amazing line towards the end about how sometimes good ideas don't come from good people, and that resonated a lot.

Currently reading: Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein. This is another tech-bros-are-assholes book, but it's also some really good investigative journalism and that I wish I read before writing my novel. Pein loses his job at Corbis (remember them?) because Bill Gates is reprehensible. Seriously. Basically Corbis was a repository that paid freelance photographers for their work, and when it got bought out, they basically left some of those photographers stranded in war zones. Anyway, Pein decides to write a book about starting a startup—the new iteration of the American Dream—and obviously it goes very badly because the one thing that they don't tell you is that to launch the next big thing, you actually need loads of inherited wealth. He paints a picture of a nasty gold rush, where everyone fights for scraps and the soap bubble illusion of prosperity. Also everyone is a Nazi (I haven't gotten to that point yet, but I heard of this book because they interviewed him on "I Don't Speak German" so I assume it's going there eventually).

Today's morbid thought

Are there meetings where the Ontario government sits around debating exactly how many dead kids and teachers (and EAs, and office support staff, and caretakers, but no one is talking about any of them) are acceptable before it jeopardizes their re-election prospects? Or are they just not thinking at all?

I'm guessing dead kid numbers need to stay in the single digits but are fine as long as all the kids who die have underlying conditions or aren't white. Teacher numbers can go up higher; probably as long as it's under about 300 or so. Caretakers won't even get counted other than by their union.