Currently Reading

06 December, 2025

I've been reading a fair bit recently. In fact, it seems like I'm always reading something. When I'm in Second Life I type and I read, as I don't use voice chat. If I'm coding I of course must read my code in order to write what comes next, no matter what language I'm writing it in. If I'm playing a game I must read the cards, the instructions, the health bar, and everything in between. Even when watching a video, I often have the subtitles on, following along with the text. Text is a comfortable and comforting way for data to move from the outer world into my inner mind.

But, what am I currently reading? Well, I just finished a book named "Sunward" about a mother seeking a cure for her sick child's illness, except it takes place in a post-Earth solar system and all of her children are robots spread out among the moons and planets. I also recently read "The Adventures of Sally" by P.G. Wodehouse, which was fun and irreverent, and had slightly more plot than his books usually do. I read "Ether Witch", the 9th(?) book in the House Witch series, which was excellent and cozy and had a wonderful feeling of a family coming together, but I can't say much about it since I won't assume that whoever's reading this has knowledge about the previous 8 books.

I read "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom", an early Cory Doctorow book which is available in Creative Commons licensing like many of his books, about a future without money where people are judged by their karma ratings alone, which are maintained electronically and can be viewed and voted on by passersby and people on the internet. Oh, and it's also about Disney World. And I read "Automatic Noodle", a shorter story by Annalee Newitz about a group of bots coming together to open a noodle shop together in a world where it's illegal for bots to really own anything, even though theoretically they have "rights" as sentient beings.

I have a pattern going where I'll try to read a book from Amazon, followed by a public domain book from Project Gutenberg. This way, I won't get stuck too much in the past or the present in my literary adventures. Well, that's the idea at least. I have KiwiX installed on my ereader, which many people use as a doomsday prep piece of software, storing Wikipedia locally so that they can rebuild society. I, personally, prefer to use it to store the 70,000+ books on Project Gutenberg locally so that I can peruse and read them at my leisure, without requiring an internet connection if I want to start something new.

Of course, in between and all amongst these things I read a multitude of blog posts, informational content, archived content on the Internet Archive and gopher, messages from friends and AI, visual novels, text-based games, etc. There's so much out there to read, and more every day. I already have more books stored locally on my reading device than I could ever read in several lifetimes. But I'll give it my best shot!