The 19-ish books I read in 2025 :)
Only counting books I read (or soon-ish will have read) in their entirety…
Below are starting dates, titles, authors, and some quotes / comments that I could think of. :p Hopefully I have not typo-ed up the quotes too badly.
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22-Jan-2025: 1. Högt bland Saarijärvis moar (a.k.a. Under the North Star #1) by Väinö Linna
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26-Feb-2025: 2. The precipice: Existential risk and the future of humanity by Toby Ord
Weeeee: Morbidly fascinating disaster scenarios. Deep time. Mindfucks. Toby seems like a kind guy really, but -
Meh: A pronatalist position (unsurprisingly, heh), though he acknowledges the existence of antinatalism. Sometimes TTFMDA (Too Technical For My Dumb Ass).
“[The] passage of a star through our Solar System could disrupt planetary orbits, causing the Earth to freeze or boil or even crash into another planet. But this has only a one in 100,000 chance over the next 2 billion years.”
“On average, mammalian species last about one million years /.../ What can happen over such a span, ten thousand times longer than our century?
Such a timescale is enough to repair the damage that we, in our immaturity, have inflicted upon the Earth. In thousands of years, almost all of our present refuse will have decayed away. If we can cease adding new pollution, the oceans and forests will be unblemished once more. Within 100,000 years, the Earth’s natural systems will have scrubbed our atmosphere clean of over 90% of the carbon we have released, leaving the climate mostly restored and rebalanced. So long as we can learn to care rightly for our home, these blots on our record could be wiped clean, all within the lifespan of a typical species /.../
About ten million years hence, even the damage we have inflicted upon biodiversity is expected to have healed. This is how long it took for species diversity to fully recover from previous mass extinctions and our best guess for how long it will take to recover from our current actions.”
“But there is an alternative approach to population ethics according to which human extinction might not be treated as bad at all. The most famous proponent is the philosopher Jan Narveson, who put the central idea in slogan form: ‘We are in favor of making people happy, but neutral about making happy people.’ Many different theories of population ethics have been developed to try to capture this intuition, and are known as person-affecting views. Some of these theories say there is nothing good about adding thousands of future generations with high wellbeing – and thus nothing bad (at least in terms of the wellbeing of future generations) if humanity instead went extinct.”
“Investigate possibilities for making the deliberate or reckless imposition of human extinction risk an international crime.”
Me in margin: “Prison is better than breeding.” :D
NB: My non-breeding is extremely deliberate. Human extinction is a feature, not a bug, of my non-breeding. (Although I would remain childfree even if I knew Homo sapiens would “never” die out.) No, you can’t have my eggs for growing humans in vats. No, you can’t have my uterus after I die.
“Cosmologists believe that the largest coherent structures in the universe are on the scale of about a billion light years across, the width of the largest voids in the cosmic web. With the accelerating expansion of the universe tearing things apart, and only gravity to work with, lifeless matter is unable to organise itself into any larger scales.
However, there is no known physical limit preventing humanity from forming coherent structures or patterns at much larger scales – up to a diameter of about 30 billion light years. We might thus create the largest structures in the universe and be unique even in these terms. By stewarding the galaxies in this region, harvesting and storing their energy, we may also be able to create the most energetic events in the universe or the longest-lasting complex structures.”
...
Me in margin: “WOW! But, eh, meh, personally I kind of just want to upload photos and drink Monster.”
Toby: *disappointed noises*
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2-Mar-2025: 3. Sunnanäng by Astrid Lindgren
Collection of 4 Swedish fairytales, all of which begin with ”A long time ago, in the days of poverty…”
- Sunnanäng
- Spelar min lind, sjunger min näktergal?
- Tu tu tu!
- Junker Nils av Eka
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8-Apr-2025: 4. Röde Orm by Frans G. Bengtsson
Fave! Viking novel. Archaic language (as in, from the early 1900s or something…) and a number of Cool Girls^TM, but pretty funny. Also, they make a trip to Ukraine. :O
“Svarte Grim, hans fader, satt grinande i stor belåtenhet; han sade att han själv stundom känt sig lagd för skaldskap i sina unga dagar, fast annat kommit emellan.
- Men likväl är detta ett märkligt ting, sade han; ty pojken är folkskygg, och allra räddast är han när det finns flickor i närheten, fast han gärna själv ville ha det annorlunda.
- Dem behöver han inte vara rädd för nu längre, tro du mig, Grim, sade Ylva. Ty nu, sedan han visat att han är skald, komma de att hänga om halsen på honom, så många det finns plats till. Mer än en gång hörde jag min fader säga, och han var full av vishet i alla ting, att liksom flugorna kretsa kring all slags föda, och villigt smaka på allt, men lämna allt annat när de få lukt på honungskrukan, så är det också med ungmör när en skald kommer i närheten.”
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18-Apr-2025: 5. The fifth gospel by Ian Caldwell
Audiobook read by Jack Davenport, who has the second most beautiful voice in the world. (After Alan Rickman… D’: ) Haven't finished the book yet. I only listen to it at home where I can hear and fully concentrate on THE VOICE. :q
“On the bottom floor of our apartment building is Vatican Health Services. When Simon and I were boys, American priests would fly back to New York for their checkups rather than risk a trip to the Vatican doctors. Horror stories have followed every pope for half a century. Fifty years ago, Pius XII came down with recurring hiccups, so his doctor prescribed injections of ground lamb brains. Another papal doctor sold Pius’s medical records to newspapers and embalmed his dead body using an experimental technique that made the pope’s corpse bubble and fart like a tar pit while pilgrims queued up to view it. Ten years later, Paul VI needed his prostate removed, so Vatican doctors decided to perform the operation in his library. His successor, John Paul I, died thirty-three days into his papacy because our doctors didn’t yet know he took pills for a blood condition. So you might think our Vatican morticians would be world class, considering all the practice they get. But there’s no such thing as a Vatican mortician, and no such place as a Vatican morgue. Popes are embalmed in their apartments by volunteer undertakers from the city, and the rest of us settle for the back room at Health Services.”
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5-May-2025: 6. Superbugs: The race to stop an epidemic by Matt McCarthy
Fave!
“[It] turns out that humans have been consuming antibiotics for millennia, whether they knew it or not. Significant levels of tetracycline, a broad-spectrum antibiotic still used today, have been found in the skeletal remains of Sudanese mummies dating back to AD 350 to 550. (Beer brewed at the time appears to have been the source.) And in Egypt, samples taken from femoral bones of skeletons from the late Roman period at the Dakhla Oasis also show traces of tetracycline. (It’s unclear if booze was served there.) Not surprisingly, the rate of infectious diseases documented in these disparate populations has been exceedingly low.”
“[Henry Beecher] noticed that nurses were able to calm injured soldiers with injections of saline when they were administered as if they were shots of morphine. A single infusion of salt water enabled young men to tolerate agonizing surgeries without anesthesia, and it introduced the young doctor to the power of the placebo effect.”
“The FDA recently announced that there was insufficient evidence to recommend over-the-counter antibacterial soaps over washing with plain soap and water.”
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23-May-2025: 7. Radicalized by Cory Doctorow
Fave! A collection of 4 dystopian novellas. Short summaries from the book sleeve or whatever it’s called:
“If you want a better future tomorrow, you’re going to have to fight for it today. Here are four urgent stories from author and activist Cory Doctorow, four social, technological and economic visions of the world today and its near – all too near – future.
- ‘Unauthorized Bread’ is a tale of immigration, toxic economic stratification and a young woman’s perilously illegal quest to fix a broken toaster.
- In ‘Model Minority’ a superhero finds himself way out of his depth when he confronts the corruption of the police and justice system.
- ‘Radicalized’ is the story of a desperate husband, a darknet forum and the birth of a violent uprising against the US health care system.
- The final story, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, tracks an uber-wealthy survivalist and his followers as they hole up and attempt to ride out the collapse of society.”
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27-May-2025: 8. Butcher by Joyce Carol Oates
Fave!
“It was rare that I did not closely consult with a husband, a father, or a brother after having examined a female patient of a genteel background, before revealing my diagnosis to the patient; where coarser females seemed to wish to be confronted with the truth, more genteel females shrank from it, as from a blinding light. Every detail of the genteel woman’s treatment was with the approval of a husband or a male relative, of course, for it would be he who would be paying my fee, & it would be his satisfaction I would have to provide, particularly in the case of certain “controversial” surgeries with which I began to be entrusted: requests by husbands of women concerned for their well-being, whether extreme agitation in the woman, or lassitude; manic laughter, or helpless tears; “frigidity” of the lower body inhibiting conjugal relations, or, perversely, an unnatural “avidity” of the lower body during conjugal relations – all these, forms of hysteria.”
“Removal of the ovaries was frequently prescribed in medical journals for the cure of neurasthesia; in more extreme cases, the removal of the entire uterus (thus, “hysterectomy”) was advised; in other cases, the surgical removal of the vaginal “clitoris,” like the appendix a functionless part of the female body described in Galen as hypersensitive to any touch, with a propensity to exacerbate excitation, anemia, sleepwalking, hyperventilation, overeating, anorexia, morbid thoughts, migraine, insomnia, atheistical tendencies, madness, & certain unspeakable habits of a degenerate nature more often associated with the adolescent male of the species.”
“(Indeed, it should be noted here, how, if they were well enough, the Laboratory patients cared for one another; a feature of female patients in general, that, in dire situations, in which they themselves might well be afflicted, they will set aside their own discomfort, to care for others more in need. Thus it has long been recognized by the medical profession, that females are natural-born nurses, midwives, & caretakers; & much of this labor is out of pure charitable instinct, with no need for financial remuneration.)”
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29-May-2025: 9. Monstergeschichten by Cornelia Neudert & Betina Gotzen-Beek
Kiddy book in German…
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14-Jun-2025: 10. Upp, trälar (a.k.a. Under the North Star 2: The uprising) by Väinö Linna
“Björkdungarna hade fått en lätt rodnad. Vattenfåglarna skriade på sjön och Varg-Kustaa dök trumpen och sturande upp vid den ena dörren efter den andra med ett vidjefång präktiga gäddor i näven. Han bytte dem mot bröd hos kvinnfolket. Aldrig hände det att han själv sa hur mycket han ville ha för en gädda. Kvinnorna kämpade med sig själva där de stod i skafferiskrubben och gjorde i ordning brödknytet:
- Bord man lägg dit ett till . . . så int han blir arg.
Kustaa tog knytet utan att se åt innehållet, morrade någonting och gick sin väg.”
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24-Jun-2025: 11. Im Labyrinth der Finsternis by Fabian Lenk
Kiddy book in German.
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18-Jul-2025: 12. The future of life by Edward O. Wilson
Fave! And a re-read.
“[The] human population exceeded Earth’s sustainable capacity around the year 1978. By 2000 it had overshot by 1.4 times that capacity. If 12 percent of land were now to be set aside in order to protect the natural environment, as recommended in the 1987 Brundtland Report, Earth’s sustainable capacity will have been exceeded still earlier, around 1972.”
“Is the Sumatran rhino dying of old age? Has its time come, like Great Aunt Clarissa on her deathbed, and should we therefore just let it slip away?
No, absolutely not, ever. Banish the thought! The premise of such a notion is demonstrably and dangerously false. The Sumatran and every other species that disappears typically dies young, at least in a physiological sense. The idea that species pass through natural life stages is based on an erroneous analogy. An endangered species is not like a dying patient whose care is too expensive and futile to prolong. The opposite is true. The great majority of rare and declining species are composed of young, healthy individuals. They just need the room and time to grow and reproduce that human activity has denied them.”
“In 1997 an international team of economists and environmental scientists put a dollar amount on all the ecosystem services provided humanity free of charge by the living natural environment. Drawing from multiple databases, they estimated the contribution to be $33 trillion or more each year. This amount is nearly twice the 1997 combined gross national product (GNP) of all countries in the world, or gross world product, of $18 trillion. Ecosystem services are defined as the flow of materials, energy, and information from the biosphere that support human existence. They include the regulation of the atmosphere and climate; the purification and retention of fresh water; the formation and enrichment of the soil; nutrient cycling; the detoxification and recirculation of waste; the pollination of crops; and the production of lumber, fodder, and biomass fuel.
The 1997 megaestimate can be expressed in another, even more cogent, manner. If humanity were to try to replace the free services of the natural economy with substitutes of its own manufacture, the global GNP would have to be raised by at least $33 trillion. The exercise, however, cannot be performed except as a thought experiment. To supplant natural ecosystems entirely, even mostly, is an economic and even physical impossibility, and we would certainly die if we tried.”
“Today about 10 percent of the land surface protected on paper. Even if rigorously conserved, this amount is not enough to save more than a modest fraction of wild species. /.../ At the risk of being called an extremist, which on this topic I freely admit I am, let me suggest 50 percent. Half the world for humanity, half for the rest of life, to create a planet both self-sustaining and pleasant.”
“Ranching and mining also commonly benefit from perverse subsidies. In Germany government support for coal mining is so high that it would be more economical to close all the mines and send the workers home at full pay.
In an analysis published in 1998, Norman Myers and Jennifer Kent of Oxford University placed annual subsidies worldwide at $390 billion to $520 billion in agriculture, $110 billion in fossil fuels and nuclear energy, and $220 billion for water. All these and other subsidies combined exceed $2 trillion, much of which is harmful to both our economies and our governments. The average American pays $2000 a year in subsidies, giving the lie to the belief that the American economy runs in a truly free competitive market.”
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2-Aug-2025: 13. Veterinary technician’s manual for small animal emergency and critical care by Christopher L. Norkus
Textbook that I bought for school ca 2017, but I only read the 1-2 chapters we were told to read. Now I’m gonna read the whole thing. Slowly. I hope it isn’t 100% outdated. Anyway, I don’t see a shitload of emergency cases at work, but it isn’t a huge book and I’ve vaguely been meanin’ to read it because I suck and… Anyway, I haven’t finished it yet, unsurprisingly. :p
“Acknowledgment:
A special thank you is necessary to my best friend Mark Holloway for his superior IT support in rescuing a majority of this book off of my dead laptop after I clumsily spilled soda on it.
C.L.N.”
(DO YOUR BACKUPS, PEOPLE, AND KEEP ONE COPY OF YOUR COMPUTER ON THE OTHER SIDE OF TOWN IN CASE OF A HOUSE FIRE)
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15-Aug-2025: 14. Pope Joan by Donna Woolfolk Cross
Fave! And a re-read.
“In Winnemanoth, Gisla was married to Count Hugo. There had been some difficulty finding a date suitable for the immediate consummation of the marriage. The Church forbade all marital relations on Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, as well as for forty days before Easter, eight days after Pentecost, and five days before the taking of communion, or on the eve of any great feast or rogation day. In all, on some two hundred and twenty days of the year sexual intercourse was prohibited; when these, as well as Gisla’s monthly bleeding time, were taken into account, there were not many dates left to choose from. But at last they settled on the twenty-fourth of the month, a date that pleased everyone save Gisla, who was impatient for the festivities to begin.”
“’Your brother is skillfully attended, I trust?’
‘He is surrounded night and day by holy men offering prayers for his recovery.’
‘Ah!’ There was a silence. Both men were skeptical of the efficacy of such measures, but neither could own his doubt openly.”
“Rebuilding the aqueduct would be a monumental, perhaps impossible, undertaking, given the sorry state of engineering of the day. The books which had preserved the accumulated wisdom of the ancients regarding these complicated pieces of construction had been lost or destroyed centuries ago. The parchment pages on which the precious plans were recorded had been scraped clean and written over with Christian homilies and stories of lives of saints and martyrs.”
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13-Sep-2025: 15. Something happened by Joseph Heller
Fave!
“I know so many people I want to be mean to, but I just don’t have the character.”
“I have this constant fear something is going to happen to him. (He’s the kid who gets stabbed to death in the park or falls victim to Hodgkin’s disease or blastoma of the eyeballs. Every time I know he’s gone swimming. Every time he’s away from the house. Every time I know my daughter is driving in a car with older kids I expect to be told by telephone or policeman of the terrible automobile accident in which she has just been killed. There are times I wish they would both hurry up and get it over with already so I could relax and stop brooding about it in such recurring suspense. There are times I wish everyone I know would die and release me from these tender tensions I experience in my generous solicitude for them. /.../
I think about death.
I think about it all the time. I dwell on it. I dread it. I don’t really like it. Death runs in my family, it seems. People die from it, and I dream about death and weave ornate fantasies about death endlessly and ironically.”
“[Human dicks] are such fractional parts of the total construction they might easily be overlooked if we did not dwell on them. They are arrogant and absurd in their haughty, sniffing, pushy, egotistical pretensions. (We let them get away with an awful lot.) They can’t even hold their lordly pose for half a day a week. What a feeble weapon indeed for establishing male supremacy, a flabby, collapsing channel for a universal power drive ejaculated now and then in sporadic spoonfuls. No wonder we have to make fists and raise our voices at the kitchen table.”
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2-Oct-2025: 16. The showman: The inside story that made a war leader of Volodymyr Zelensky by Simon Shuster
Fave!
“For the moment, Zelensky had not attained enough confidence or experience as a wartime leader to override the decisions of the military brass. His role had less to do with the war itself than with the way it was perceived, and he had the skills to play it well. At the same time, he seemed to treasure the opportunity not only to witness history but to shape it. Many of his aides felt the same way; one told me that he derived a kind of ‘masochistic pleasure’ from his life in the bunker and the vantage it afforded onto world-shaping events. Zelensky rarely talked about these feelings. But he also found it gratifying to be in this singular position of power and influence. Despite the danger and the stress, the separation from his family, the weight of the responsibility he bore, and the horrors he witnessed each day, the president felt privileged, even happy, to do the job that fate had put in front of him. Even on the hardest days it gave him a profound sense of purpose, and it made him feel alive.
‘My life today is beautiful,’ he said at the end of the press conference, when a reporter asked how he was holding up. ‘I feel that I’m needed.’ The previous week, as horrifying and tragic as it had been for him and his country, was also among the most exciting and fulfilling of his life. He would not trade it for any of the comfort and security he knew in his old life as a movie star. ‘I think the main purpose in life is to be needed, not just to be a blank space that breathes, walks, and eats. But to live, to know that certain things depend on your being alive, and to feel that your life matters to others.’”
“The battle of Kyiv, which raged through the end of March 2022, had a greater impact on the course of European history than any since the end of World War II. Had it ended differently, the Kremlin could have replaced Zelensky with a marionette and pushed the edge of Moscow’s dominion right up to Poland’s eastern border, effectively erasing Ukraine from the map. Instead the defense of Kyiv shattered Russia’s image as a military powerhouse, an image that had shaped the balance of power in Europe for generations.”
“[Olena Zelenska] set up training programs for Ukrainian trauma counselors and hotlines to make their services widely available. Convincing Ukrainians to seek psychological support turned out to be a major challenge. When we talked about it, Olena borrowed the English phrase ‘mental health’ because the concept is hard to describe in Ukrainian. ‘We have a particular distrust for terms that include the word psycho,’ she said. The term psychotherapy often evokes images of state-run asylums in Ukraine, places that are designed to isolate the ill from society. A lot of that stigma, Zelenska told me, has its roots in the Soviet Union, where generations of Ukrainians were raised to deal with trauma by hiding it away. The attitude, she said, was: ‘Deal with it, get over it, and if you complain, you’re weak.’
/.../ The Ministry [of Health] estimated that /.../ a third of the population, or fifteen million people, would require some form of mental health care. Olena and her husband were no exception. ‘You absorb it,’ she said of the war. ‘Each of us, including myself, have felt that our psychological state is not what it should be.’ Four months into the invasion, she said ‘None of us are okay.’”
“A special forces commando turned spymaster, [Kyrylo] Budanov cut a dramatic figure, appearing frequently on television to issue vague threats and dark hints of his plans. /.../ He promised to hunt down and ‘physically exterminate’ the perpetrators of the Bucha massacre, and he said it gave him pleasure to hear Russian propaganda refer to him as a terrorist. His deputy later declared /.../ that GUR agents were plotting to assassinate Putin and a long list of his lieutenants, including the heads of the Russian military-industrial complex.
GUR’s handiwork soon became the subject of fervent speculation, which earned Budanov a kind of cult following in Ukraine. In the early months of the invasion, explosions and fires often ripped through Russian military sites and fuel depots in the regions closest to Ukraine, and Russian officials blamed these incidents on Ukrainian drone strikes or saboteurs. At least twice in April, low-flying helicopters swept across the border and struck targets in the Russian region of Belgorod. Ukraine denied responsibility for these attacks, and the Kremlin tended to downplay them to avoid embarrassment. At the end of summer, as President Zelensky and his team grew impatient for the start of a major counteroffensive, these covert strikes became more daring and dramatic. They reached deeper into Russian territory, while official denials of responsibility from Kyiv became halfhearted, routinely accompanied by a wink and a mischievous smile.
Oleksiy Arestovych, a former officer of the GUR and an adviser to Zelensky at the start of the invasion, mentioned some of these attacks when we met in early August. Then he leaned back in his chair, looked at my audio recorder, and silently mouthed the words: That was us.”
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31-Oct-2025: 17. Bröderna Lejonhjärta by Astrid Lindgren
Fave! And a re-read. Swedish kiddy novel. Some dark shit. Just like the above book, it’s about a really brave, young, handsome guy who stands up to a psychopathic old tyrant with nukes. Wait, what -
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8-Nov-2025: 18. Die Brüder Löwenherz by Astrid Lindgren
The above book in German… :B Thanks to having read it in Swedish so recently, I didn’t have to look up every other word. :p I'm... I'm gonna finish it this evening.
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22-Nov-2025: 19. Rare earth frontiers: From terrestrial subsoils to lunar landscapes by Julie Michelle Klinger
I haven’t finished it yet... Fun fact: Rare earths are not literally rare. :)
“Toward what end is the Brazilian government undoing its own indigenous and ecological protection laws to mine São Gabriel da Cachoeira, a historically contested border region, shared with Venezuela and Colombia, when there are more easily accessible deposits under production in existing mining sites elsewhere in the country? And why have NASA and the US Department of Defense chosen to partner with Silicon Valley start-ups to mine these elements from the Moon, while the United States throws away hundreds of tonnes of rare earths annually in mine tailings and e-waste?”
“This definition of the greater good sets up a false notion that terrible health and environmental devastation are the unavoidable price to pay for sourcing rare earths. Abundant research on recycling and flex mining shows otherwise /.../.”
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Vegan FAQ! :)
The Web Site the Meat Industry Doesn't Want You to See.
Please watch Earthlings.
-----
You can reach me at yoze83 [AT] yahoo.com
The 19-ish books I read in 2025 :)
Only counting books I read (or soon-ish will have read) in their entirety…
Below are starting dates, titles, authors, and some quotes / comments that I could think of. :p Hopefully I have not typo-ed up the quotes too badly.
------------------------------
22-Jan-2025: 1. Högt bland Saarijärvis moar (a.k.a. Under the North Star #1) by Väinö Linna
------------------------------
26-Feb-2025: 2. The precipice: Existential risk and the future of humanity by Toby Ord
Weeeee: Morbidly fascinating disaster scenarios. Deep time. Mindfucks. Toby seems like a kind guy really, but -
Meh: A pronatalist position (unsurprisingly, heh), though he acknowledges the existence of antinatalism. Sometimes TTFMDA (Too Technical For My Dumb Ass).
“[The] passage of a star through our Solar System could disrupt planetary orbits, causing the Earth to freeze or boil or even crash into another planet. But this has only a one in 100,000 chance over the next 2 billion years.”
“On average, mammalian species last about one million years /.../ What can happen over such a span, ten thousand times longer than our century?
Such a timescale is enough to repair the damage that we, in our immaturity, have inflicted upon the Earth. In thousands of years, almost all of our present refuse will have decayed away. If we can cease adding new pollution, the oceans and forests will be unblemished once more. Within 100,000 years, the Earth’s natural systems will have scrubbed our atmosphere clean of over 90% of the carbon we have released, leaving the climate mostly restored and rebalanced. So long as we can learn to care rightly for our home, these blots on our record could be wiped clean, all within the lifespan of a typical species /.../
About ten million years hence, even the damage we have inflicted upon biodiversity is expected to have healed. This is how long it took for species diversity to fully recover from previous mass extinctions and our best guess for how long it will take to recover from our current actions.”
“But there is an alternative approach to population ethics according to which human extinction might not be treated as bad at all. The most famous proponent is the philosopher Jan Narveson, who put the central idea in slogan form: ‘We are in favor of making people happy, but neutral about making happy people.’ Many different theories of population ethics have been developed to try to capture this intuition, and are known as person-affecting views. Some of these theories say there is nothing good about adding thousands of future generations with high wellbeing – and thus nothing bad (at least in terms of the wellbeing of future generations) if humanity instead went extinct.”
“Investigate possibilities for making the deliberate or reckless imposition of human extinction risk an international crime.”
Me in margin: “Prison is better than breeding.” :D
NB: My non-breeding is extremely deliberate. Human extinction is a feature, not a bug, of my non-breeding. (Although I would remain childfree even if I knew Homo sapiens would “never” die out.) No, you can’t have my eggs for growing humans in vats. No, you can’t have my uterus after I die.
“Cosmologists believe that the largest coherent structures in the universe are on the scale of about a billion light years across, the width of the largest voids in the cosmic web. With the accelerating expansion of the universe tearing things apart, and only gravity to work with, lifeless matter is unable to organise itself into any larger scales.
However, there is no known physical limit preventing humanity from forming coherent structures or patterns at much larger scales – up to a diameter of about 30 billion light years. We might thus create the largest structures in the universe and be unique even in these terms. By stewarding the galaxies in this region, harvesting and storing their energy, we may also be able to create the most energetic events in the universe or the longest-lasting complex structures.”
...
Me in margin: “WOW! But, eh, meh, personally I kind of just want to upload photos and drink Monster.”
Toby: *disappointed noises*
------------------------------
2-Mar-2025: 3. Sunnanäng by Astrid Lindgren
Collection of 4 Swedish fairytales, all of which begin with ”A long time ago, in the days of poverty…”
- Sunnanäng
- Spelar min lind, sjunger min näktergal?
- Tu tu tu!
- Junker Nils av Eka
------------------------------
8-Apr-2025: 4. Röde Orm by Frans G. Bengtsson
Fave! Viking novel. Archaic language (as in, from the early 1900s or something…) and a number of Cool Girls^TM, but pretty funny. Also, they make a trip to Ukraine. :O
“Svarte Grim, hans fader, satt grinande i stor belåtenhet; han sade att han själv stundom känt sig lagd för skaldskap i sina unga dagar, fast annat kommit emellan.
- Men likväl är detta ett märkligt ting, sade han; ty pojken är folkskygg, och allra räddast är han när det finns flickor i närheten, fast han gärna själv ville ha det annorlunda.
- Dem behöver han inte vara rädd för nu längre, tro du mig, Grim, sade Ylva. Ty nu, sedan han visat att han är skald, komma de att hänga om halsen på honom, så många det finns plats till. Mer än en gång hörde jag min fader säga, och han var full av vishet i alla ting, att liksom flugorna kretsa kring all slags föda, och villigt smaka på allt, men lämna allt annat när de få lukt på honungskrukan, så är det också med ungmör när en skald kommer i närheten.”
------------------------------
18-Apr-2025: 5. The fifth gospel by Ian Caldwell
Audiobook read by Jack Davenport, who has the second most beautiful voice in the world. (After Alan Rickman… D’: ) Haven't finished the book yet. I only listen to it at home where I can hear and fully concentrate on THE VOICE. :q
“On the bottom floor of our apartment building is Vatican Health Services. When Simon and I were boys, American priests would fly back to New York for their checkups rather than risk a trip to the Vatican doctors. Horror stories have followed every pope for half a century. Fifty years ago, Pius XII came down with recurring hiccups, so his doctor prescribed injections of ground lamb brains. Another papal doctor sold Pius’s medical records to newspapers and embalmed his dead body using an experimental technique that made the pope’s corpse bubble and fart like a tar pit while pilgrims queued up to view it. Ten years later, Paul VI needed his prostate removed, so Vatican doctors decided to perform the operation in his library. His successor, John Paul I, died thirty-three days into his papacy because our doctors didn’t yet know he took pills for a blood condition. So you might think our Vatican morticians would be world class, considering all the practice they get. But there’s no such thing as a Vatican mortician, and no such place as a Vatican morgue. Popes are embalmed in their apartments by volunteer undertakers from the city, and the rest of us settle for the back room at Health Services.”
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5-May-2025: 6. Superbugs: The race to stop an epidemic by Matt McCarthy
Fave!
“[It] turns out that humans have been consuming antibiotics for millennia, whether they knew it or not. Significant levels of tetracycline, a broad-spectrum antibiotic still used today, have been found in the skeletal remains of Sudanese mummies dating back to AD 350 to 550. (Beer brewed at the time appears to have been the source.) And in Egypt, samples taken from femoral bones of skeletons from the late Roman period at the Dakhla Oasis also show traces of tetracycline. (It’s unclear if booze was served there.) Not surprisingly, the rate of infectious diseases documented in these disparate populations has been exceedingly low.”
“[Henry Beecher] noticed that nurses were able to calm injured soldiers with injections of saline when they were administered as if they were shots of morphine. A single infusion of salt water enabled young men to tolerate agonizing surgeries without anesthesia, and it introduced the young doctor to the power of the placebo effect.”
“The FDA recently announced that there was insufficient evidence to recommend over-the-counter antibacterial soaps over washing with plain soap and water.”
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23-May-2025: 7. Radicalized by Cory Doctorow
Fave! A collection of 4 dystopian novellas. Short summaries from the book sleeve or whatever it’s called:
“If you want a better future tomorrow, you’re going to have to fight for it today. Here are four urgent stories from author and activist Cory Doctorow, four social, technological and economic visions of the world today and its near – all too near – future.
- ‘Unauthorized Bread’ is a tale of immigration, toxic economic stratification and a young woman’s perilously illegal quest to fix a broken toaster.
- In ‘Model Minority’ a superhero finds himself way out of his depth when he confronts the corruption of the police and justice system.
- ‘Radicalized’ is the story of a desperate husband, a darknet forum and the birth of a violent uprising against the US health care system.
- The final story, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, tracks an uber-wealthy survivalist and his followers as they hole up and attempt to ride out the collapse of society.”
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27-May-2025: 8. Butcher by Joyce Carol Oates
Fave!
“It was rare that I did not closely consult with a husband, a father, or a brother after having examined a female patient of a genteel background, before revealing my diagnosis to the patient; where coarser females seemed to wish to be confronted with the truth, more genteel females shrank from it, as from a blinding light. Every detail of the genteel woman’s treatment was with the approval of a husband or a male relative, of course, for it would be he who would be paying my fee, & it would be his satisfaction I would have to provide, particularly in the case of certain “controversial” surgeries with which I began to be entrusted: requests by husbands of women concerned for their well-being, whether extreme agitation in the woman, or lassitude; manic laughter, or helpless tears; “frigidity” of the lower body inhibiting conjugal relations, or, perversely, an unnatural “avidity” of the lower body during conjugal relations – all these, forms of hysteria.”
“Removal of the ovaries was frequently prescribed in medical journals for the cure of neurasthesia; in more extreme cases, the removal of the entire uterus (thus, “hysterectomy”) was advised; in other cases, the surgical removal of the vaginal “clitoris,” like the appendix a functionless part of the female body described in Galen as hypersensitive to any touch, with a propensity to exacerbate excitation, anemia, sleepwalking, hyperventilation, overeating, anorexia, morbid thoughts, migraine, insomnia, atheistical tendencies, madness, & certain unspeakable habits of a degenerate nature more often associated with the adolescent male of the species.”
“(Indeed, it should be noted here, how, if they were well enough, the Laboratory patients cared for one another; a feature of female patients in general, that, in dire situations, in which they themselves might well be afflicted, they will set aside their own discomfort, to care for others more in need. Thus it has long been recognized by the medical profession, that females are natural-born nurses, midwives, & caretakers; & much of this labor is out of pure charitable instinct, with no need for financial remuneration.)”
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29-May-2025: 9. Monstergeschichten by Cornelia Neudert & Betina Gotzen-Beek
Kiddy book in German…
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14-Jun-2025: 10. Upp, trälar (a.k.a. Under the North Star 2: The uprising) by Väinö Linna
“Björkdungarna hade fått en lätt rodnad. Vattenfåglarna skriade på sjön och Varg-Kustaa dök trumpen och sturande upp vid den ena dörren efter den andra med ett vidjefång präktiga gäddor i näven. Han bytte dem mot bröd hos kvinnfolket. Aldrig hände det att han själv sa hur mycket han ville ha för en gädda. Kvinnorna kämpade med sig själva där de stod i skafferiskrubben och gjorde i ordning brödknytet:
- Bord man lägg dit ett till . . . så int han blir arg.
Kustaa tog knytet utan att se åt innehållet, morrade någonting och gick sin väg.”
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24-Jun-2025: 11. Im Labyrinth der Finsternis by Fabian Lenk
Kiddy book in German.
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18-Jul-2025: 12. The future of life by Edward O. Wilson
Fave! And a re-read.
“[The] human population exceeded Earth’s sustainable capacity around the year 1978. By 2000 it had overshot by 1.4 times that capacity. If 12 percent of land were now to be set aside in order to protect the natural environment, as recommended in the 1987 Brundtland Report, Earth’s sustainable capacity will have been exceeded still earlier, around 1972.”
“Is the Sumatran rhino dying of old age? Has its time come, like Great Aunt Clarissa on her deathbed, and should we therefore just let it slip away?
No, absolutely not, ever. Banish the thought! The premise of such a notion is demonstrably and dangerously false. The Sumatran and every other species that disappears typically dies young, at least in a physiological sense. The idea that species pass through natural life stages is based on an erroneous analogy. An endangered species is not like a dying patient whose care is too expensive and futile to prolong. The opposite is true. The great majority of rare and declining species are composed of young, healthy individuals. They just need the room and time to grow and reproduce that human activity has denied them.”
“In 1997 an international team of economists and environmental scientists put a dollar amount on all the ecosystem services provided humanity free of charge by the living natural environment. Drawing from multiple databases, they estimated the contribution to be $33 trillion or more each year. This amount is nearly twice the 1997 combined gross national product (GNP) of all countries in the world, or gross world product, of $18 trillion. Ecosystem services are defined as the flow of materials, energy, and information from the biosphere that support human existence. They include the regulation of the atmosphere and climate; the purification and retention of fresh water; the formation and enrichment of the soil; nutrient cycling; the detoxification and recirculation of waste; the pollination of crops; and the production of lumber, fodder, and biomass fuel.
The 1997 megaestimate can be expressed in another, even more cogent, manner. If humanity were to try to replace the free services of the natural economy with substitutes of its own manufacture, the global GNP would have to be raised by at least $33 trillion. The exercise, however, cannot be performed except as a thought experiment. To supplant natural ecosystems entirely, even mostly, is an economic and even physical impossibility, and we would certainly die if we tried.”
“Today about 10 percent of the land surface protected on paper. Even if rigorously conserved, this amount is not enough to save more than a modest fraction of wild species. /.../ At the risk of being called an extremist, which on this topic I freely admit I am, let me suggest 50 percent. Half the world for humanity, half for the rest of life, to create a planet both self-sustaining and pleasant.”
“Ranching and mining also commonly benefit from perverse subsidies. In Germany government support for coal mining is so high that it would be more economical to close all the mines and send the workers home at full pay.
In an analysis published in 1998, Norman Myers and Jennifer Kent of Oxford University placed annual subsidies worldwide at $390 billion to $520 billion in agriculture, $110 billion in fossil fuels and nuclear energy, and $220 billion for water. All these and other subsidies combined exceed $2 trillion, much of which is harmful to both our economies and our governments. The average American pays $2000 a year in subsidies, giving the lie to the belief that the American economy runs in a truly free competitive market.”
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2-Aug-2025: 13. Veterinary technician’s manual for small animal emergency and critical care by Christopher L. Norkus
Textbook that I bought for school ca 2017, but I only read the 1-2 chapters we were told to read. Now I’m gonna read the whole thing. Slowly. I hope it isn’t 100% outdated. Anyway, I don’t see a shitload of emergency cases at work, but it isn’t a huge book and I’ve vaguely been meanin’ to read it because I suck and… Anyway, I haven’t finished it yet, unsurprisingly. :p
“Acknowledgment:
A special thank you is necessary to my best friend Mark Holloway for his superior IT support in rescuing a majority of this book off of my dead laptop after I clumsily spilled soda on it.
C.L.N.”
(DO YOUR BACKUPS, PEOPLE, AND KEEP ONE COPY OF YOUR COMPUTER ON THE OTHER SIDE OF TOWN IN CASE OF A HOUSE FIRE)
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15-Aug-2025: 14. Pope Joan by Donna Woolfolk Cross
Fave! And a re-read.
“In Winnemanoth, Gisla was married to Count Hugo. There had been some difficulty finding a date suitable for the immediate consummation of the marriage. The Church forbade all marital relations on Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, as well as for forty days before Easter, eight days after Pentecost, and five days before the taking of communion, or on the eve of any great feast or rogation day. In all, on some two hundred and twenty days of the year sexual intercourse was prohibited; when these, as well as Gisla’s monthly bleeding time, were taken into account, there were not many dates left to choose from. But at last they settled on the twenty-fourth of the month, a date that pleased everyone save Gisla, who was impatient for the festivities to begin.”
“’Your brother is skillfully attended, I trust?’
‘He is surrounded night and day by holy men offering prayers for his recovery.’
‘Ah!’ There was a silence. Both men were skeptical of the efficacy of such measures, but neither could own his doubt openly.”
“Rebuilding the aqueduct would be a monumental, perhaps impossible, undertaking, given the sorry state of engineering of the day. The books which had preserved the accumulated wisdom of the ancients regarding these complicated pieces of construction had been lost or destroyed centuries ago. The parchment pages on which the precious plans were recorded had been scraped clean and written over with Christian homilies and stories of lives of saints and martyrs.”
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13-Sep-2025: 15. Something happened by Joseph Heller
Fave!
“I know so many people I want to be mean to, but I just don’t have the character.”
“I have this constant fear something is going to happen to him. (He’s the kid who gets stabbed to death in the park or falls victim to Hodgkin’s disease or blastoma of the eyeballs. Every time I know he’s gone swimming. Every time he’s away from the house. Every time I know my daughter is driving in a car with older kids I expect to be told by telephone or policeman of the terrible automobile accident in which she has just been killed. There are times I wish they would both hurry up and get it over with already so I could relax and stop brooding about it in such recurring suspense. There are times I wish everyone I know would die and release me from these tender tensions I experience in my generous solicitude for them. /.../
I think about death.
I think about it all the time. I dwell on it. I dread it. I don’t really like it. Death runs in my family, it seems. People die from it, and I dream about death and weave ornate fantasies about death endlessly and ironically.”
“[Human dicks] are such fractional parts of the total construction they might easily be overlooked if we did not dwell on them. They are arrogant and absurd in their haughty, sniffing, pushy, egotistical pretensions. (We let them get away with an awful lot.) They can’t even hold their lordly pose for half a day a week. What a feeble weapon indeed for establishing male supremacy, a flabby, collapsing channel for a universal power drive ejaculated now and then in sporadic spoonfuls. No wonder we have to make fists and raise our voices at the kitchen table.”
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2-Oct-2025: 16. The showman: The inside story that made a war leader of Volodymyr Zelensky by Simon Shuster
Fave!
“For the moment, Zelensky had not attained enough confidence or experience as a wartime leader to override the decisions of the military brass. His role had less to do with the war itself than with the way it was perceived, and he had the skills to play it well. At the same time, he seemed to treasure the opportunity not only to witness history but to shape it. Many of his aides felt the same way; one told me that he derived a kind of ‘masochistic pleasure’ from his life in the bunker and the vantage it afforded onto world-shaping events. Zelensky rarely talked about these feelings. But he also found it gratifying to be in this singular position of power and influence. Despite the danger and the stress, the separation from his family, the weight of the responsibility he bore, and the horrors he witnessed each day, the president felt privileged, even happy, to do the job that fate had put in front of him. Even on the hardest days it gave him a profound sense of purpose, and it made him feel alive.
‘My life today is beautiful,’ he said at the end of the press conference, when a reporter asked how he was holding up. ‘I feel that I’m needed.’ The previous week, as horrifying and tragic as it had been for him and his country, was also among the most exciting and fulfilling of his life. He would not trade it for any of the comfort and security he knew in his old life as a movie star. ‘I think the main purpose in life is to be needed, not just to be a blank space that breathes, walks, and eats. But to live, to know that certain things depend on your being alive, and to feel that your life matters to others.’”
“The battle of Kyiv, which raged through the end of March 2022, had a greater impact on the course of European history than any since the end of World War II. Had it ended differently, the Kremlin could have replaced Zelensky with a marionette and pushed the edge of Moscow’s dominion right up to Poland’s eastern border, effectively erasing Ukraine from the map. Instead the defense of Kyiv shattered Russia’s image as a military powerhouse, an image that had shaped the balance of power in Europe for generations.”
“[Olena Zelenska] set up training programs for Ukrainian trauma counselors and hotlines to make their services widely available. Convincing Ukrainians to seek psychological support turned out to be a major challenge. When we talked about it, Olena borrowed the English phrase ‘mental health’ because the concept is hard to describe in Ukrainian. ‘We have a particular distrust for terms that include the word psycho,’ she said. The term psychotherapy often evokes images of state-run asylums in Ukraine, places that are designed to isolate the ill from society. A lot of that stigma, Zelenska told me, has its roots in the Soviet Union, where generations of Ukrainians were raised to deal with trauma by hiding it away. The attitude, she said, was: ‘Deal with it, get over it, and if you complain, you’re weak.’
/.../ The Ministry [of Health] estimated that /.../ a third of the population, or fifteen million people, would require some form of mental health care. Olena and her husband were no exception. ‘You absorb it,’ she said of the war. ‘Each of us, including myself, have felt that our psychological state is not what it should be.’ Four months into the invasion, she said ‘None of us are okay.’”
“A special forces commando turned spymaster, [Kyrylo] Budanov cut a dramatic figure, appearing frequently on television to issue vague threats and dark hints of his plans. /.../ He promised to hunt down and ‘physically exterminate’ the perpetrators of the Bucha massacre, and he said it gave him pleasure to hear Russian propaganda refer to him as a terrorist. His deputy later declared /.../ that GUR agents were plotting to assassinate Putin and a long list of his lieutenants, including the heads of the Russian military-industrial complex.
GUR’s handiwork soon became the subject of fervent speculation, which earned Budanov a kind of cult following in Ukraine. In the early months of the invasion, explosions and fires often ripped through Russian military sites and fuel depots in the regions closest to Ukraine, and Russian officials blamed these incidents on Ukrainian drone strikes or saboteurs. At least twice in April, low-flying helicopters swept across the border and struck targets in the Russian region of Belgorod. Ukraine denied responsibility for these attacks, and the Kremlin tended to downplay them to avoid embarrassment. At the end of summer, as President Zelensky and his team grew impatient for the start of a major counteroffensive, these covert strikes became more daring and dramatic. They reached deeper into Russian territory, while official denials of responsibility from Kyiv became halfhearted, routinely accompanied by a wink and a mischievous smile.
Oleksiy Arestovych, a former officer of the GUR and an adviser to Zelensky at the start of the invasion, mentioned some of these attacks when we met in early August. Then he leaned back in his chair, looked at my audio recorder, and silently mouthed the words: That was us.”
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31-Oct-2025: 17. Bröderna Lejonhjärta by Astrid Lindgren
Fave! And a re-read. Swedish kiddy novel. Some dark shit. Just like the above book, it’s about a really brave, young, handsome guy who stands up to a psychopathic old tyrant with nukes. Wait, what -
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8-Nov-2025: 18. Die Brüder Löwenherz by Astrid Lindgren
The above book in German… :B Thanks to having read it in Swedish so recently, I didn’t have to look up every other word. :p I'm... I'm gonna finish it this evening.
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22-Nov-2025: 19. Rare earth frontiers: From terrestrial subsoils to lunar landscapes by Julie Michelle Klinger
I haven’t finished it yet... Fun fact: Rare earths are not literally rare. :)
“Toward what end is the Brazilian government undoing its own indigenous and ecological protection laws to mine São Gabriel da Cachoeira, a historically contested border region, shared with Venezuela and Colombia, when there are more easily accessible deposits under production in existing mining sites elsewhere in the country? And why have NASA and the US Department of Defense chosen to partner with Silicon Valley start-ups to mine these elements from the Moon, while the United States throws away hundreds of tonnes of rare earths annually in mine tailings and e-waste?”
“This definition of the greater good sets up a false notion that terrible health and environmental devastation are the unavoidable price to pay for sourcing rare earths. Abundant research on recycling and flex mining shows otherwise /.../.”
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Vegan FAQ! :)
The Web Site the Meat Industry Doesn't Want You to See.
Please watch Earthlings.
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You can reach me at yoze83 [AT] yahoo.com