bombs in bottles
The April 2025 IndieWeb Carnival topic is "renewal":
https://www.thingelstad.com/2025/03/27/renewal-indieweb-carnival.html
The post at the link talks about spring as a time of renewal. As a librarian, though, the word "renewal" immediately makes me think about book renewals. The thing where you haven't finished reading a book yet (or maybe haven't even started), but said book is about to be overdue, so you re-borrow it for another term.
I love when students renew books. It tells me that they haven't given up on reading this book. Maybe they haven't finished; maybe they haven't even started, but they're still sufficiently interested to give themselves that additional three-week chance. I dig that. Read on, you crazy diamonds!
I have the opposite problem (if it is a problem): As the person responsible for acquisitions around here and also a professional reviewer, I read 2-3 books per week on average.
(Before you get awed by that number: most of them are middle grade and YA fiction, which reads very quickly. Middle grade and YA fiction only have about ten plots between them.)
Lately, I've been noticing how fast facts add up when one reads that fast. This week, for example, my reads have been:
Technofeudalism is still processing somewhere in my brain. It's a lot, and it's heavy. But that plus knowing a whole lot more about Russia-Ukraine and Russia-world relations suddenly makes a lot of news make sense - and a lot of US decisionmaking since 2022 feel very shortsighted.
Today I learned that Robert E. Lee tried to get his wife's estate out of debt by hiring out their slaves for labor. Which feels exactly like how every corporation would treat its workers today if it could get away with it. Which makes me wonder what that looks like in a technofeudalist setting. (Are social media APIs just tech companies hiring out serfs to one another?)
The compost heap that is my reading brain is turning over very quickly in this, the season of renewal. So are the checkout requests from my students, as the "final date to turn in books" day gets ever closer. I wonder where we're all headed and what the world will look like come fall.
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