Reading Diary
a) No Sense in Wishing, by Lawrence Burney
Lawrence and I both started out our writing careers at Baltimore City Paper and did some cool shit together when he was on staff at the Baltimore Banner. There's always been lots of mutual respect there, so I love that his first book and my first book were published just a few weeks apart, we're both appearing at the Baltimore Book Festival this weekend so hopefully I'll see him there. Lawrence really excels at writing about music and Baltimore and Baltimore music from a personal perspective and explaining why he likes what he likes or how it shaped him, and this collection of essays really plays to that strength. You get these engrossing vignettes about how he became a Three 6 Mafia or Lupe Fiasco fan and what their music means both to him and to the rest of the world, or his personal memories of family crab feasts set against the context of Black history in Maryland and how slavery shaped the state. Nobody's ever written better about Young Moose and the late Lor Scoota and it's interesting to see how he looks back now on how they redefined Baltimore hip-hop in the 2010s and influenced what came after them.
b) Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture, by Simon Reynolds
When I was working on Tough Breaks, I read a lot of books about dance music and house music, partly because I came to Baltimore club via hip-hop rather than dance music and wanted to make sure I had the right grounding and context. And this one is definitely deservedly regarded as one of the great dance music books, I really appreciated Reynolds giving this very detailed account of how the raves and club culture took over in the UK in the late '80s, the way all these different factions and legal and cultural forces shaped where people danced and what they danced to.
c) Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Since I was reading non-fiction books about music most of the time that I was working on mine, I was kind of ready to jump into fiction again, and when we went on vacation a few months ago I asked my wife, who reads over 50 novels every year, to recommend me a couple things to take. Children of Time is pretty good, although it's the first in a series and I don't know if I have the appetite to read the others, it has some pretty interesting ideas about how humanity could try to colonize the rest of the universe after the destruction of Earth by basically spreading intelligence as a virus to new species, including a race of large spiders. Tchaikovsky does a good job of jumping between the human plotline and the spider plotline and communicating how the cognition of an intelligent nonverbal spider would differ from ours.
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