most singular...

Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, by Svetlana Alexievich (DNF):

Oral history of the end of the Soviet Union. I found this somewhat difficult to follow due to the choices of organization and internal editing of the interviews. I got over halfway through and then the library took the ebook back and I am not motivated to borrow it again... I never know if maybe I'm just not a good enough reader to understand these sorts of things.

Transcendent Kingdom, by Yaa Gyasi:

Novel about the life of a second gen Ghanian-American pursuing her PhD in neuroscience. Modeling the science after an actual person's (the author's friend) research means it's highly accurate, but does feel strange. (Something about taking someone else's exact experiences and not really fictionalizing them before putting it into the book?) It /is/ incorporated into the substance of the novel. This was a very easy read even though it felt like it shouldn't be, given it deals with heavy topics like depression and addiction (definitely not a light read). I did enjoy it overall though!
PS: One tenth of a centimeter is a weird way to say a millimeter.

Vita Nostra, by Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko, translated by Julia Meitov Hersey:

A dark magical school novel. Definitely makes me feel like dark academia is not the genre for me. I found this to be a very propulsive read, but the abuse was really extreme. I also felt like having magic based on speech and words just needs to be more at this point (though maybe not in 2012 when it originally came out?) I found the student characters to be interesting in their interactions. At one point, the main character's mom asks if she's in a cult, and she's.... totally in a cult haha. Anyway, definitely had that 'need to know what happens next' appeal, have not retained any of it in the last month.

You Dreamed of Empires, by Álvaro Enrigue, translated by Natasha Wimmer:

A dreamy retelling of the day Hernán Cortés entered the city of Tenochtitlan in his conquest. The beginning was kinda interesting, figuring out who was who, but the characters were kinda flat and one dimensional. Pass.

The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt:

On why phones are bad for childhood. Pop sociology/psych, emphasis on the pop, with extremely sweeping statements about cultures. Mainly repetitive and prescriptive, the only novel pieces to me were some psych studies. Not worth the read.

Julie Chan Is Dead, by Liann Zhang:

Protag takes over her dead twin's perfect influencer life. Unrealistic in the way of frothy beach read novels, but I enjoyed it a lot. A surprising amount of insight into the human condition from an ultimately light novel. Though the assistant did end up being unfortunately one dimensional, the other influencers were kinda hilarious sketches. The amount of tech addiction on display was a sharp contrast to the previous read! Would recommend as a light novel for sure.

Nettle & Bone, by Ursula Vernon:

Youngest of three princesses seeks to free her sister of an abusive husband in a fairytalesque kingdom. An annoying protag (too much superficial practicality without actual practicality). Twee isn't quite the right word for it, but something about the vibe is really, really not for me. Maybe the insertion of practicality into a fairytale setting, but not in the way I want? (Do I want that?) I can see how this type of book would be a nice soothing read for someone not me. (It's pretty clear who is who and who does what and how the story will go.)

The Mother of All Questions, by Rebecca Solnit (DNF):

Feminist essay collection. Another book snatched away by the library before I finished and I don't care to request again.

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.