Early 2025: Reading List and Media Diet

03 April 2025

I forget how useful it is to look back on posts like this, so I'm going to post these more often, and go back over last year's highlights.

Books

Murakami's The City and Its Uncertain Walls and Karl Ove Knausgaard's The Third Realm

I've been reading both of these authors for years, and what really sticks with me is the architecture of their output, and how individual books fit in.

I'm sure these kinds of connections are there in any author's output if you look hard enough, though I see these connections so clearly in the work of these two. Characters appear in different books, sometimes under different names, forming connective tissue across stories and challenging you to recall where you last saw them.

This Karl Ove book is the third of a series of books, the latest to be translated to English, the fifth of which has just come out in Norwegian. Everything story line is connected in an arbitrary way, mentioning the 'new star in the sky', always in passing. It may come up in conversation or be a news item on a television in the next room, but that's all the binding agent so far. Characters in these books have different timelines that span the books, but at some point in present day they come together to cross paths with the star.

I've read Murakami's newest book dismissed by critics for some bullshit reasons. He's in trouble because he's returning to favorite locations and not doing anything innovative with them - it's the same old library in the small country town, it's an underground windowless room instead of a well but the same thing. His readers are in trouble too: we are only reading these for comfort, as if there's no challenge. I think M is world-building still and–consciously or not–I hear echos of most of his classics in this new one. The next book will build on this, trust me.

Tove Jansson's The True Deceiver

I've been up to the Lopez Island bookstore over the last 3 years maybe five times, and noticed this little paperback on the recommendations table every time, so I picked it up a few weeks ago and dove in this week. Two characters, one poor, blunt, direct, careless of what others think, the other rich, self-important, conventional, polite. They move in together and a contest of wills begins for who sees reality clearest. What's objectivity and what's subjectivity, is either better than the other? Lot's of questions raised in this super-minimal piece that I'll likely re-read.

Tech

Enso

My new friend Rafał has some unique directions on design and ux. I started reading his untested blog and quite soon struck up a convo with him which has turned into zooms and text threads. So grateful for these real connections with like-minded people - I learn so much from connections like this. Hey Rafał!

Enso is an app that takes the idea of distraction-free writing to a new level–the user only sees the last three lines of what they've written. It's an experiment in flow state and attention span that puts me into the same headspace I'm in when improvising on an instrument. I'm really only conscious of the last idea or two I played and look forward more to where I'm headed than I would in a regular text editor.

MVSEP

Every week or so someone asks me if I've played with any AI models that separates elements in an audio recording. This is the one site I have played with, and gotten some interesting results - checkit here and here for more.

Videos and Articles

100 Rabbits on tech auserity measures

I've been inspired over the years by these two shit-disturbers living on their sailboat, building rad shit in assembly and their own lightweight platform. Their philosophy is laid out well in this article linked above - or this video if you prefer. Of course I missed this talk in Seattle!

NYTimes on all the gen-xers being driven out of their creative careers

This article is making the rounds right now, and is oddly a therapeutic read. "“When photography went digital, photo lab technicians and manual retouchers were suddenly as inessential as medieval scribes." Related Article on the current state of selling out

Liber Indigo

Rafał shared this with me today and I was sucked into all seven parts. Very thought-provoking, McLuhan-adjacent look at how the desktop metaphor has sucked wonder out of technology.