I’m not sure how to talk about my reading this year. My downwards trend continued—58 books in 2019, down from 72 in 2018 and 102 in 2017. I don’t love reading any less, but I am having a hard time figuring out what to read—as far as I can recollect, there are 19 books that I thought I would read or abandoned part-way through. And those are surely as much of my year in reading as the ones I did read through. How do we know what we want to read? How do we pick out what our moods are and read in sympathy with those moods (sad books for sad days) or decide to read against those moods (fluffy books for difficult days)? I read both ways according to some emotional process that I let wash over me without understanding. Sometimes I misunderstand and think I want fluff when…
Year: 2019
blogging days of yore
Remember how once upon a time I used to find weird old printing things and get excited about them and then blog about them? That was fun. I’m going to try doing that again, only this time in newsletter form. The tl;dr version is that you can head over to sarahwerner.substack.com and sign up for Early Printed Fun to get periodic (twice a month?) emails from me about some bit of early printed nerdery. It’s free, it’s easy, and it’ll replicate some of what I used to do here and at The Collation. The longer version is that I decided to do a Substack newsletter because I’m hoping, if I can build up enough momentum, to introduce paid subscriptions. There will always be free posts, I promise, because I can’t bear the thought of not providing some free excitement about books. But I also am shelling out money to run…
libraries and climate change
Today is the Global Climate Strike. I don’t know how anyone can look at the world around them and not be worried about how the climate is changing and how we are not taking action to prevent disaster. About a year and a half ago I started thinking more seriously about the relationship between libraries and archives and climate change, due largely in part to the ongoing work and activism from archivists Eira Tansey and Ben Goldman. So when I was invited to give a talk about whether digitization is a form of preservation at the Society of American Archivists meeting in August 2019, I jumped at the change to consider our complicity with the coal industry. I’m reviving that brief call to arms today to mark the climate strike. The talk itself is short. Take five minutes to watch (or listen) to the video below. And then browse through…