My two TA jobs are keeping me fairly busy, but I am also reading a diverse set of interesting books:
Naoki Higashida’s Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8: A Young Man’s Voice from the Silence of Autism: the second book written by a young autistic man who can only communicate verbally to a very limited degree but who writes using an alphabet grid on a computer. He mostly writes about his life experiences and his views on how people with autism should be understood and treated.
Chris Turner’s The Patch: The People, Pipelines, and Politics of the Oil Sands: discussing the history of Canada’s bitumen sands, life through the booms and bust in Fort McMurray, and the major climate and energy policy questions facing Canada and Alberta.
Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage: the first part of a three-part series set before the His Dark Materials trilogy. Starts with doings in an around Oxford at the time when Lyra is an infant.
Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta’s Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements: part of the key reading list for my PhD thesis. Along with working on the pre-interview phases of my research (while awaiting ethical approval), I need to make a more determined effort to progress through the background reading identified in my proposal.
There are also a heap of books which have been in progress for ages, from What is History? to Yiddish for Pirates.
I also have some reviews to write, including for Napoleon’s Buttons: 17 Molecules that Changed History and Environmentalism of the Rich.
I should eventually write detailed reviews of some of these:
Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8: A nice opportunity to learn about someone else’s perspective and experience of the world, along with practical advice on how to be helpful and courteous to people with autism.
The Patch: The People, Pipelines, and Politics of the Oil Sands: Not much new information for someone who has been following the topic. Canada has put tens of billions of dollars into a superproject which global climatic stability now requires us to wind down rapidly.
The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage: Well-written, but much less of a stand-alone story than The Golden Compass. I prefer the parts of the His Dark Materials trilogy which are based on plausible real-world events, rather than those which are forays into myth/the supernatural. Contrast the Bolvangar rescue from The Golden Compass with the weird underworld stuff later in the series.