Like the title says, what's on your list, what did you just finish, what did you think of it???
Personally I'm finally almost done with Resisting the Virtual Life, a collection of essays from the mid 90s about the negative outcomes, that were already being realized, and that they foresaw on the horizon, of forcing computers into every aspect of our lives. It's been pretty good so far. A bit of anticommunism in one essay, but many of the others have been spot on, and the authors' perspectives have given me a lot to chew on as someone probably born after most of the essays were written. A good focus on how not inevitable "progress" is, and how political the decisions on how and where to use this technology is, as well as a robust smackdown of the "everyone will be highly educated highly skilled highly paid computer workers in the future" narrative that came along with the rollout of computerization and the internet. I'd really love to talk to someone about this book honestly.
The second to last essay I read was about repetitive stress injuries and other workplace harms arising from increasing computerization, and I was really curious if the authors fears turned out to be overblown or if we are still mostly just ignoring and downplaying those as a serious issue. The last one was a bit unsettling and started giving me Psychopolitics/Mark Fisher vibes with the descriptions of how the enmeshing of computers, education, and psychology would serve to shape our very ways of thinking.
If anyone wants to read it I'll try to scan it, though my copy has writing in the earlier essays from a previous owner.
Satantango by László Krasznahorkai. I'm reading it after I watched the Béla Tarr's film and felt devastated about that decay and doom atmosphere of a post-soviet hungarian farm depicted trough the rain, wind and mud, but mostly through those miserable and peculiar characters full of contradictions and existential crisis after having their local economy ruined with the closing down of the farm. The book is just like the film but even more detailed in getting the whole picture. It reminds me a bit of Dostoevsky's or Kafka's style.