I’ll announce the name for my fern this weekend, but for now, I have a new poll! So, if you’ll come on to the site and cast your vote on the poll to the left, that would be awesome. The question is:
Would you read an ebook?
The choices are “yes,” “no,” and “maybe.” Simple enough. If you want to leave a more detailed response, feel free to do so in the comments for this post.
Why would someone make a list of important and interesting works of dystopian fiction? Or a suggested reading list of works that are relevant to those dystopian works? There is absolutely no reason other than raw interest. There’s nothing going on to compel this. There is nothing in particular one making such a list would hope you’d learn. The lists below are not an exhaustive list. There are bound to be texts I have forgotten or texts you think folks should read that are not listed. Feel free to make your own list and tell me about it OR leave a comment. I’ll add things I’ve missed! Anywhoodles. Here goes:
And so it came to pass that I finished up my annual Best of EDM [Insert Year Here] lists. I used to do these on Spotify before switching to Tidal, and I continued doing them on Tidal because I listen to an absurd amount of EDM and like keeping track of the tunes I love the most. Below, you will find a Tidal playlist that should be public. You can listen to the first 50 tracks right here, but the full playlist is available on Tidal proper (which has a free version just like Spotify does). For whatever reason, the embedded playlist breaks the page, and so I’ve opted to link to it here and at the bottom of this post. Embeds are weird. Or you can pull songs into your preferred listening app. It’s up to you. Some caveats before we begin:
We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
Dr. Shaun Duke © 2010 - 2025. All Rights Reserved.
6 Responses
I voted "maybe". eBooks are still way, way too expensive. Also, I don't want to get trapped into a proprietary format. I don't actually know any of the details of what the Kindle or Nook are capable of but if I'm going to spend any money on an ebook I expect to be able to download books from wherever I like.
Lynn: Thanks for the vote!
I'm sort of with you. I likely wouldn't buy many eBooks, but I would get an eReader so I could read things like online magazines and what not in pdf form. I find reading on a computer incredibly distracting. It's too easy to pop on to the net and…yeah.
And I agree with you about downloading from wherever you like. I take it you mean that in the sense that you can put the eBook on any device you own and don't have to purchase it for each device, yes?
I read eBooks all the time. Granted that's eBooks of the Project Gutenberg variety, but still.
Well, that counts just as much as anything else 🙂
I answered yes, because I do read eBooks. In fact my eReader came preloaded with 100 classics and it's prompting me to read and reread some really good stuff that otherwise wouldn't have popped up on my radar.
Elfy: Well, that's a good thing. If they're making you read, then it's doing a service to mankind.