What I'm...

Taylor, Joseph E. Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis. University of Washington Press, 1999. A very well-written history of willful ignorance on the part of government and business leaders regarding the decimation of salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest. (Finished)

Egan, Timothy. The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest. Vintage Departures, 1991. A classic "following in the footsteps" travelogue and a snapshot of the PNW at the end of the logging era and before tech became the major industry. (Finished)

Spiedel, William C. Sons of the Profits or There's No Business Like Grow Business: The Seattle Story 1851-1901. Nettle Creek, 1967. A rather sarcastic look at the greed and rapaciousness in the colonization and early history of Seattle. (Finished)

Harvey, Samantha. Orbital: A Novel. Grove Press, 2024. The winner of the 2024 Booker Prize, and so far, evocative novel about what it means to be human when you are so far removed from most of humanity. (Finished).

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Purple Hibiscus. Algonquin Books, 2003. A Bildungsroman in a time of crisis in Nigeria and in the narrator's family that takes a dark turn. (Finished)

Bleecker, Julian and Nicolas Nova. "A Synchroncity: Design Fictions for Asynchronous Urban Computing." Situated Technologies Pamphlets 5, editors Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz, and Mark Shepherd. The Architectural League of New York, 2009. Before IOT really took off, Bleeker and Nova published this discussion of what on the creative possibilities and undesirable outcomes from location-based and spatial computing technologies. (Finished)

Noessel, Christopher. Designing Agentive Technology: AI That Works for People. Rosenfeld Media, 2017.  A slightly older book on designing AI technology that is even more applicable in the era of LLM applications. (Finished)

Ai Qing. Selected Poems, translated by Robert Dorsett. Crown Press, 2021. A collection of Ai Qing's poems on nature, art, and freedom. (Finished)

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Blackwell, 1991. Originally published by Editions Anthropos, 1974. Lefebvre argues for a "science of space" separate from anthropology, geography, or systems theory and proposes three aspects of analysis: spatial practice, representational space, and representations of space. (Finished).

Phoenix, James and Mike Taylor. Prompt Engineering for Generative AI: Future-Proof Inputs for Reliable AI Outputs. O'Reilly, 2024. 

Dent, Borden D., Jeffrey S. Torguson, and Thomas W. Hodler. Cartography: Thematic Map Design, Sixth Edition. McGraw Hill, 2009. Textbook covering the elements of map design.  (In progress)

Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. Hachette, 1993. Butler's first volume in a dystopian future of the United States that feels very prescient today. (Finished)

Reyes, Lawney. The Last Fish War: Survival on the River. American True Stories, 2016. A book that covers the individual and tribal stories with the conflicts over salmon fishing and Native rights in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s in Western Washington. (Finished)

Li, Yuzhuo, Mariam Mughees, Yize Chen, Yunwei Ryan Li. "The unseen AI disruptions for power grids: LLM-induced transients." arXiv, 2024. A proposed set of mathematical models and future directions for understanding the impact of LLM training, fine-tuning, and inference on power grids. (Finished)

Thom, Brian. "The paradox of boundaries in Coast Salish territories." Cultural Geographies 16 (2009): 179-205. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474774008101516.  An investigation of the contrasts between the cartography demands for land claims in the Canadian land claims process and the ideals of Coast Salish territorialization based on kinship. (Finished)

Itäranta, Emmi. The Moonday Letters. Titan Books, 2022. An animist healer and a scientist who's an ethical bioterrorist share a love story across the Solar System through letters, messages, and imagination. (Finished)

Itäranta, Emmi. The Memory of Water. Harper Collins, 2014. A young tea-master sifts through government disinformation to discover a truth that could overthrow the authoritarian regime she and much of the world live under. (Finished)

Arènes, Alexandra, Bruno Latour, and Jérome Gaillardet. "Giving depth to the surface: an exercise in Gaia-graphy of critical zones." The Anthropocene Review 5, no. 2 (2018): 121-135. Arènes and her co-authors propose a new cartography for localized site studies of Critical Zones, so as to capture the dynamic and ongoing processes that make and remake local landscapes. (Finished)

Luccioni, Alexandra Sasha, Emma Strubell, and Kate Crawford. "From efficiency gains to rebound effects: The problem of Jevons' Paradox in AI"s polarized environmental debate." arXiv.2501.16548v1 (2025). Luccioni and her co-authors discuss evidence that increasing energy efficiency in AI are going to lead to greater energy consumption due to larger overall use of generative AI. (Finsihed)

Laestadius, Ann-Helén. Punished. Translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles. Scribner, 2023.  A novel with a central group of Sámi adults who live with the long-term consequences of attending a Swedish boarding school. (Finished)

Joukhadar, Zeyn. The Map of Salt and Stars. Atria, 2019. The story of the journey of a Syrian girl fleeing with her family from Homs to Ceuta in 2011, with a framing story that is a fictionalized account of al-Idrisi's mapping expedition around the eastern Mediterranean. (Finished)

Blili-Hamelin, Borhane, Christopher Graziul, Leif Hancox-Li, Hananel Hazan, El-Mahdi El-Mhamdi, Avijit Ghosh, Katherine Heller, Jacob Metcalf, Fabricio Murai, Eryk Salvaggio, Andrew Smart, Todd Snider, Mariame Tighanimine, Talia Ringer, Margaret Mitchell, and Shiri Dori-Hacohen. "Stop treating 'AGI' as the north-star goal of AI research." arXiv:2502.03689v2 (2025). A concise coverage of the massive shortcomings in the pursuit of AGI as a goal in AI research, recommending specific "traps" to avoid in AI research and recommendations for further research.. (Finished)

Emezi, Akwaeke. Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir. Riverhead Books, 2021. An epistoloary memoir of Emezi's life of love, loss, rebirth, and powerful self-determination. (Finished)

Gebru, Timnit and Émile P. Torres. "The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence." First Monday 29, no.4 (2024). Gebru and Torres trace the intellectual history of AGI from 19th-century colonialism and eugenics. (Finished)

Itämanta, Emii. The Weaver. HarperCollins, 2016. A young weaver falls in love and challenges the dystopian power structures in her island city.

Gordillo, Gastón.  "The power of terrain: The affective materiality of planet Earth in the age of revolution." Dialogues in Human Geography 11, no.2 (2021): 190-194. Gordillo argues that terrain, not only landforms, but air, water, lifeforms, are powerful in and of themselves and rejects the anthropocentric and Eurocentric notion this redefined notion of terrain does not have agency. (Finished)

Keegan, Claire. Small Things Like These. Grove Press, 2021. A working-class man in 1980s Ireland defies the church to rescue a young Magdalen from the prison-like convent in which she was trapped. (Finished)

Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. University of Minnesota Press, 1977. Tuan explores what place-making means for humans from embodied experience and cultural perspectives. (Finished).

Neimanis, Astrida. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.  Neimanis explores water in its situated existence as part of the human body, its perception within sociocultural milieus, and its economics in the Anthropocene. (In progress).

Pasternak, Boris. Doctor Zhivago. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Vintage Classics, 2011 (Originally published 1957).  I don't need to give a summary of this book. If you know, you know. (In progress).