u/glowing-fishSCL

I have been collecting/reading Ace Doubles for a while, and they really run the spectrum. Some of them are really predictable sci-fi pulp stories. But then occasionally I find something like this, at a good price. This is an early novel by Samuel Delany, who would go on to be an important experimental and literary sci-fi writer. Well, he was already experimental at this point.
This is less than 100 pages, but it tells the story of an anthropologist trying to find out what happened to some destroyed space ships by investigating the lyrics to a song. And in under 100 pages, there are more answers and backstory than someone might expect!

Knut Hamsun was a Norwegian writer who won the Nobel Prize in 1920. This book is actually older than that, from the 1890s, but reads as a very modern book, telling the story of an abrasive longer living in the north of Norway. I enjoyed the book, but after reading it, found out that Hamsun would later support the nazi Quisling party in Norway in World War II.
Which changed how I viewed the book---I read the book at first as a satire at the loner protagonist, but maybe that was not the intention. So this is an important literary work, but it is best to be aware of some of the context!
Also, another Nobel Prize winner whose book I finished...there will be more of these coming up!

So this is how I fulfill my yearly goal---in May, but with three thin TPBs. As mentioned, I am going to try to get to 52 without any graphic novels as well.
As far as how these went...well, basically, Zdarsky was one of the more *fun* Spider-Man writers, which is somehow in short supply, as too many of them got too serious or complicated. So these were a good, fun read.

Born in 1934, Wole Soyinka won the prize in 1986. He is the oldest living recipient of the prize, and the earliest prize winner to still be alive today (the next was the winner in 2000).
Of the 122 people who have won the prize, his life has overlapped with 107 of them. Given that most winners receive the prize fairly late in their lives, this will probably continue to be the case into the 2080s.

This is all in good fun, and as mentioned many times, I will read any Spider-Man comic I can find (and pretty much anything Marvel or DC). I get these for light reading between other tasks.
But this TPB specifically has a problem, or at least is part of a problem. It explores the "Spider-Verse", a vast continuum of alternative Spider-Mans, and a crisis that threatens to end them. Which is all fun and creative, but what it leads to is kind of diluting the personal story of Peter Parker. Like, the drama of Peter Parker trying to make it in the world is overrun with the idea there are dozens and hundreds of wacky Spider-Man variants, and they are all being destroyed, but maybe not?
I am not complaining, I like fun stuff, but it is something they can overdo.
Anyway, on to other stories...

I am a big Tolkien fan, and like most of his fans, I am curious to know more about Middle Earth. And Tolkien wrote a lot, but a lot of what he wrote was fragmentary, and some of it was illegible. And a lot of it is about niche subjects, while big questions aren't always addressed. I have read, and will continue to read all of this additional material, but I have to admit it sometimes takes the magic out of his more literary works. Its also not a simple reading experience, since I am switching between fragments of writing and editorial commentary. And yet, I read it and finished it and liked it.

This might seem like a random "fun fact", and might be especially odd for people who don't even remember that there is a Vancouver in the United States!
But Vancouver, Washington, a suburb of Portland, Oregon, has more Amtrak ridership than 19 states, and also has more riders than any single station in five more states. Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Atlanta, Cleveland, and Cincinnati are all cities that have less riders than the Vancouver, Washington station, which isn't in a big city, isn't in a tourist city, and is just a little building in the middle of a freight yard.
But Vancouver does have regular corridor service: there are currently 12 total trips on the Amtrak Cascades, plus the Coast Starlight and the Empire Builder, so people have a variety of options for taking a trip. This is what seems to drive ridership, is when people have multiple options of when to take a trip per day.
(I chose Vancouver to make a point, but even the lesser used stations on the Amtrak Cascades, or any other corridor route, is going to be more active than even most big cities that only have long distance trains, especially when they stop once a day at inconvenient times).
Data from here:
https://www.amtrak.com/state-fact-sheets

This is a follow-up to a post I made about what people think of as suburbs.
I am using Salem, Oregon as an example, because its close to me and a good example, but this is a question about pretty much any metro area of less than 500,000 people in the US...

These aren't suburbs in the sense of being purely residential areas outside of a bigger city, but in a general sense they might be "suburbs" in the sense that they are mostly single family homes and low-density apartments, as well as low-density retail. They usually don't have a downtown retail or working district, or at least have a small one. They usually have limited transit systems and are car-dependent.

If you look at a list of metro areas in the US:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area

Would you consider everything from Lancaster, Pennsylvania to Lima, Ohio to be "suburbs"? And if you do, would you consider them hellish?

This is a Star Trek novel I read while travelling. It was predictable, but I am not complaining. This is the third Star Trek novel I've read this year, and all of them were appropriately comforting and kept me occupied when I didn't want to think of other things.

I made a map of Amtrak's state ridership, by quintiles. Or I tried to. Because so much is focused in a few big states, the last "quintile" ended up being only 13%
I also did this by ordering the states, not by region. So California and Pennsylvania are states 2 and 3, so they get a quintile, even though they are far apart. It would also be possible to make this map by region.
This map shows something obvious: Amtrak ridership is concentrated in a few big states that have regular corridor service. But I was surprised just how much...because states like Oregon, Michigan, Wisconsin Missouri and Florida all have lots of rail, but all fo them together, along with other smaller states, still make up only around 13% of Amtrak's ridership.
Data is from 2025, using:
https://www.amtrak.com/state-fact-sheets

Also, I did take this photo myself.

This is a comic book collection from Marvel's "snappy dialog" era, where they allowed comic books to be wacky and fun. Good writing, light but not too silly. As I have said here, I will read any Marvel material I can get my hands on, and I've been working through what my library has.

I found this book on the free rack of a library, and it was a lucky find!
This is a war book, but it is all first person, and there aren't maps and lines and explanations. Which makes it hard to follow, but gives a real depiction of what things are like. The author is driving around the North African desert in a tank, frequently lost, and frequently firing on, and being fired on, forces he can't see, some of whom might be "friendly". At one point, he even ends up describing accidentally firing on and killing a friendly tank, and what it was like to see the body. A lot of war memoirs that focus on lines and advances and dates wouldn't go there, but he does. This is a good book for people who might want to know more about the personal side of World War II.

(Also, I am starting to lose track of which week was which for reading and finishing these...)

This is another volume of Scott Pilgrim in Spanish. There is a lot of vocabulary I wouldn't pick up from other sources. So this is another accomplishment.
Along with the Spanish aspect, it reminds me of how fun the 2000s decade was, and how much I miss it. Despite how stylized the Scott Pilgrim series is, it is also so reminiscent of what it was like to be young and active at that time, when the internet was a way that people connected in the real world, instead of the pit of social media. Weird that a Canadian fantasy comic book is one of the things that encapsulates my 20s the best!

https://xkcd.com/198/

This is almost 20 years old. And this is one of those xkcd that now might need a lot of explanation to anyone under 30.
At one point, Microsoft had a monopoly and was pretty much the Big Bad of tech circles. Apple was a struggling company who had just recently developed some niche products. Google was a search engine. Facebook was a niche site for college students. Amazon was an online bookstore (not sure just when Amazon started to expand outwards, but I don't remember it being big, it was less important than eBay)

Anyway, as this strip says, browser choice was a political issue, and providing an alternative to the buggy Internet Explorer browser made by villain Microsoft was the heart of open source. It was about more than a browser---it was about freedom of information online. Somehow the logic went, that if people could choose their own browser, we would have an open internet! Like, the success of the Mozilla Browser really was tied up in many people's opinions with freedom of speech. There was actually a thing called "Download Day", where the Mozilla foundation tried to set a record for software downloads in a day! All of this was seriously imporant in the 2000s.

Anyway, 20 years later, we did learn that having a free choice of browser did not totally revolutionize society.

The second volume!
This also shows why what I've read might not always be what it seems. Reading a graphic novel, in Spanish, with more or less total comprehension, is a pretty nice accomplishment for me, more so than getting through 300 pages of English language text.