Chapters: Ch 1 · Ch 2 · Ch 3 · Ch 4 · Ch 5
Fiction
Against the Day — Wikipedia Novel by Thomas Pynchon
A bare reference to Thomas Pynchon’s sprawling 2006 novel — nearly 1,100 pages covering the period from the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair through World War I, featuring anarchists, mathematicians, Zeppelin crews, and time travel. One of Pynchon’s most ambitious (and challenging) works. [→ books-literature]
Clarkesworld: Better Living Through Algorithms clarkesworldmagazine.com — https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_05_23/
A Hugo Award-winning science fiction short story by Naomi Kritzer, published in Clarkesworld (2023). The story explores AI-assisted life coaching and algorithmic optimization of daily habits in a warmly humanist, lightly satirical way. [→ books-literature; AI theme → machine-learning-ai]
Linguistics & Language Books
Sukhada: new book by Peggy Mohan on languages x.com — https://x.com/appadappajappa/status/1885035111412097525
A tweet announcing or recommending Peggy Mohan’s latest book on languages — Mohan is a Trinidad-born Indian linguist who writes accessibly about language, migration, and the Indic language family (Wanderers, Kings, Merchants). [→ books-literature; linguistics → kannada-language-linguistics]
Sreedharettan: The Beedi Worker Who Dreamt of Dictionaries https://youtu.be/KNXuGl5gAgU
A documentary about Njattyela Sreedharan, a beedi (hand-rolled cigarette) factory worker from Kerala who spent his life self-educating and compiling Malayalam dictionaries — a remarkable story of autodidactic scholarship from outside academia. [→ books-literature; linguistics/language → kannada-language-linguistics; documentary → arts-music-film]