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Reading Wednesday
Dec. 15th, 2021 07:03 pmJust finished: The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behavior, Health, and Happiness by Emily Anthes. This is a fun book about architecture and the built environment. It largely focuses on institutions—hospitals, schools, prisons, and so on—and how they can be re-engineered to benefit the humans living in them.
This book was published in early 2020 and feels like a weird artifact of a very different, better age. She writes a great deal about ventilation, for example, which of course is important but not as important as it would become a scant few weeks later. It's also breathlessly optimistic in a way that feels particularly cringe now—the way she writes about Google's planned Alphabet City in Toronto is particularly grating. But overall I find the subject fascinating and wish I lived in that universe and not this one.
Currently reading: Leviathan Falls by James S.A. Corey. This is the final book of the Expanse, holy shit! I put a hold on it as soon as I could and did not expect that it would arrive any time within the next six months, but it did, requiring a very sudden change of plans so that I can binge it before I read any spoilers. I have been having a pretty rough week for a variety of reasons so escaping into a world where a number of interesting things can kill you in horrible ways is maybe what I need right now.
This book was published in early 2020 and feels like a weird artifact of a very different, better age. She writes a great deal about ventilation, for example, which of course is important but not as important as it would become a scant few weeks later. It's also breathlessly optimistic in a way that feels particularly cringe now—the way she writes about Google's planned Alphabet City in Toronto is particularly grating. But overall I find the subject fascinating and wish I lived in that universe and not this one.
Currently reading: Leviathan Falls by James S.A. Corey. This is the final book of the Expanse, holy shit! I put a hold on it as soon as I could and did not expect that it would arrive any time within the next six months, but it did, requiring a very sudden change of plans so that I can binge it before I read any spoilers. I have been having a pretty rough week for a variety of reasons so escaping into a world where a number of interesting things can kill you in horrible ways is maybe what I need right now.
