What are you reading in 2026?

[Eyes of Nine]

Ooh, Jane Jacobs! I just learned about her from the Origin Story podcast about 15 minute cities. I see you can do walks in Toronto based on her writings (she moved there after she got arrested protesting developers in New York.

According to the podcast, she spent a lot of her childhood having Jefferson, Franklin, and a Saxon warrior called Cerdic as imaginary friends to whom she’d be explaining the modern world, discussing why things were the way they were, and so on. Sounds like a childhood well spent.

Funny, I just read an article that sort of excoriated her that on the topic of why she moved to Canada said they moved when her sons were draft age in the late 60's to avoid them getting drafted.

Jane Jacobs’s Tunnel Vision | Literary Review of Canada

A deep dive into Jane Jacobs, journalist, activist and author of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

reviewcanada.ca

 

[Autumnal]

Jane Jacobs has been so widely ignored in practice because the people she (largely correctly, IMHO) identifies as sources of destructive action have immediate economic and social clout. It takes a lot to weaken them enough that people advocating alternatives can get any leverage. The story is long and depressing.

I blew through a re-read of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, enjoying it and being disappointed and/or annoyed by parts of it as ever. Mister, we could use a man like Marcus Aurelius again.

I’m currently listening to Worlds of Exile and Illusion by Ursula K. Le Guin, an omnibus of the first three Hainish novels, Rocannon’s World, Planet Of Exile, and City Of Illusions. Ahh, these are such a pleasure. It’s been so long since I read them. Even early in, Le Guin was superb. It looks like I may be alternating Le Guin and Tolkien do a while.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I finished reading Maddox's Halo. Really a shame that he only wrote one novel. It packs a lot of questions into its short length, and the author clearly did some heavy reading as part of the creation process. From it I learned that the Uncanny Valley term comes from the roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970.

Now it's over to the golden age of sci-fi with Isaac Asimov's I, Robot. Never read it before.

 

[jian]

My search for books by Jane Jacobs in the library because of this thread led me to A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska, which are the memoirs of a lady called Hannah Breece who taught in various schools in Alaska in the early 20th century. Jacobs was her niece and edited the book, including a foreword and several notes.

It’s a very impressive read, because Breece was clearly an outstanding teacher who got on very well with pupils from a wide range of backgrounds, such as Russian (the Alaska purchase had only happened 40 years earlier) and indigenous (mainly Aleut, Tlingit, and De’daina). She’s remarkably casual about the number of times she nearly died (falling through ice, generally) and is careful not to mention some of her tribulations (such as having a racist boss who was big on residential schools and general eradication of indigenous culture, or dealing with swindlers and criminals).