August 13, 2025

LaserWriter II by Tamara Shopsin

This is a short book, but I absolutely adored it. My first series of adult jobs were for Apple resellers in Melbourne and LaserWriter II is that, set a decade earlier and in New York's legendary TekServe (which Apple cloned their own Genius Bar on). It was nice to reminisce about that time in my life. I really miss that stores and repair places like this basically don't exist now. There's pixel art throughout the book that the author created themselves - very cool. If you ever worked at an Apple reseller, I thoroughly recommend reading this.

Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener

Did not like this book despite it being on The Verge's list of "greatest tech books of all time". It's so boring and I felt nothing while or after reading it. Maybe it's because I have been around the boring people she was working with and knew very early on that this is not a place I want to be - even if they do pay well. The story got a bit more interesting when she went to work for GitHub and when she befriended Patrick Collison (co-founder of Stripe), but overall a boring book about boring people. Maybe that was the point?

Stasiland by Anna Funder

East Germany has always been fascinating to me as I got to see it dismantled in my lifetime, but never got around to reading Stasiland until now. I wish I read it earlier, maybe before visiting Germany, as it is an excellent book. I thoroughly enjoyed how it was written, with the author talking to various people that lived in and under the GDR, re-telling and giving context to their incredibly moving and disturbing stories. Frau Paul's story is wild.

Conspiracy Nation by Ariel Bogle & Cam Wilson

I had a passing knowledge of most of the conspiracy theories laid out in this book, but to get detailed overviews of how they bubbled up and why they persist was enlightening, even more so from an Australian point of view as so much of it is American - and I care less about USA Americans every passing day. I can only imagine how much work went into understanding the fucked up views thousands, maybe even millions, of Australians have on random topics.