The month's coming to a close with four days left. I've all but finished my reading list for Black August, while managing to make some progress again with Livtet and picked up work again on Shock. I've added a new part to my site as well to document links I've been reading.

Reading

I'm realizing that, unless I have nothing else to do with my life (which is not likely), I won't finish the reading list I set out for Black August. I'm not disappointed, in fact, I'm very glad with the progress I've made of 4 out of 6 books for this month. Six was already a very high goal and I'm proud that I got this far.

We Do This 'Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba

This book has been a roller-coaster. There's so many things I want to quote from this but I'll hold off until I finish Livtet so I can add more context. Kaba's interviews are a treasure because both the interviewers and her responses have expanded so much (and left me with even more questions on how I view prison abolition). It becomes more and more difficult to accept the mainstream idea that we need to punish people in a way that does nothing but expand the harms we claim to be against even more so.

You can view a lot of my thoughts (as well as others in the Fediverse) on the book so far over on Bookwyrm.

Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

Listen, I am a fan of this man! I've read Apex Hides the Hurt by him and I loved the way he was able to talk such a difficult topic (integration of a Black and white neighborhood) with the overlay of branding. In Harlem Shuffle, he manages to do the same but with suspense. I am a bit disappointed with the ending but I understand why he did it that way. It relies a lot on a form of storytelling that's intrinsic to African American communities: that of the past to help design the future. I'm really glad that I got the ebook and audiobook combination for this; I imagine this kind of book being adaptable to some limited television series would go over pretty well.

You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat

This book threatened to make me cry and it almost succeeded, ha. The way Arafat closed the book was necessary and so healing — the need to understand where our definition of love comes from and how to evolve from it when it no longer serves us. Having to deal with family that refuses your identity in a country that refuses your identity is a double whammy that Arafat handles beautifully in this book; albeit in a drunken splendor.

None but the Righteous by Chantal James

This book is very different from ones I've read before. My knowledge of the South is limited and I've been working to expand that. James' approach to narrating this story; through the lens of a spirit is said to invoke the imagery of Toni Morrison's Beloved in a review. I haven't read anything from Morrison outside of The Source of Self Regard so this is both a learning exercise and a journey for me. Nonetheless, I am enjoying the story and eager to see Ham find what he's looking for (if he even knows what that is himself).

Writing

I wrote a longer piece about attempting to figure out how to engage people without holding resentment for the world; wrestling with the wrong ideas. I have yet to go through feedback for this post but it's something I'm hoping to routinely expand on. I've learned that a core component of being an activist - of any kind - is having a practice of self-reflection. I'm not the best at that.

Additionally, I've found myself wanting to write about links or essays I read in print or online and want to expand on what makes them interesting to me. I've written about adding bookmarks back to my site, in an IndieWeb fashion. Some things I've written about were things in DISSENT, like the right to strike or in Fifth Estate about pacifism and anarchy in relation to war.

Coding

I got a bit eager to work on Shock because I became immediately annoyed with how writing bookmarks in this very manual fashion. Sure, it effectively serves as a bulk ward to prevent me from "vomiting" on the Internet. It also slows down my ability to build out my digital garden of the things I'm exploring. Hence my slow rebooting of the project — for the fifth time. I'll write more about what's going on with it, but ideally with something more unique to it.

Livtet is still seeing work. I've done a bit of a refactor on how it handles books to focus on them being stored only on disk for now. I didn't see a good way, at the moment, to handle manipulation of libraries from the application. What I'm focusing on now is allowing for folks to connect to remote libraries from their local libraries and keeping those books linked. I aim to have something about this written out later this week.

Seeing

In response to a post on BlueSky about art in homes, I've taken some photos of what I have hanging up in my home. This isn't everything but it's the pieces I like: