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This book explains at the beginning that it is the conversion of a Master's Thesis into a publication, and that is exactly how it reads. It's a good documentation of the project 'A Transversal Network of Feminist Servers' (ATNOFS), which was an EU-wide project where different organisations set up data servers under feminist principles. The documentation goes into detail on how this works, and focuses on how sharing and making space is central to the servers.

It does feel a little light on critique and future considerations, but again this is not unsurprising given its origins.

Referenced in the book H is for Hawk as a semi-autobiographical (or at lease self-referential) work by White set in Ireland, which piqued my curiosity so I got this out of the library.

While it's nice to read the story of the origins of the WWW, the voice of the ghostwriter is very strong here. Berners Lee is great at crediting his colleagues, and how it was not him, but a team that developed the protocols and technologies that led to the web, but there is a tension with the need to have a 'heroes journey' narrative here, which fills the book with contradiction. Each chapter tells a little bit of something interesting, but overall the book is a bit too Hollywood to enjoy.

This was included in the recent Institute of Network Cultures e-newsletter. All of their publications are free to download. I'm researching exactly this topic over the last two years, so it's timely and I'm looking forward to reading this.

Found this in a second hand furniture shop in Buncrana north Donegal. Owner wanted 50 cent so I decided to have a look.

Have had this one on the pile for a while. Need something with a different pace so here we go.

The authors of Bad Language were careful to condemn pedantry and deride disinformation about language and dialect when they wrote this enjoyable book in 1990. More than that, they were at pains to dismiss any notion of correctness in language, regularly pointing out classism and elitism in this. The book breaks down ideas considered "bad" in English, from swearing to malapropisms, and presents them as part of a living, loved language. And they had fun along the way.

And so did I.

Günther Grass' last book is a fitting conclusion. It's a wittily funny, perfectly curmudgeonly, and surprisingly touching account of the end of his life, documented through short essays, poems and drawings. There is narrative here, and a deep love for humanity coupled with a mild hopelessness about a future that he will never see. And a final tooth that perhaps he cannot save.

Picked up in a second-hand bookshop where it just asked to come home.

Gifted to me a few years ago by my partner and put on the long finger. Now I'm trying to get through that pile of books that other people felt I would love.

James Bridle's writing and art about the complexity of network technologies is often so careful about saying everything succinctly and clinically that it's tempting to believe that he might be part machine. So if anything, this book has proven his humanity, if a little disappointingly.

In content, writing in 2017, Bridle is ahead of his time. His topics range from bias in image machine learning models to secrecy in corporate and government surveillance. However, the structure of the chapters often reads like a Wikipedia dive, leaping between stories and vaguely connected ideas with gleeful abandon. The result is a little chaotic and difficult to connect together. By no means a bad book, but there are better examples that deal with these topics more coherently.

This short book documents some models and ways of using Distributed Co-operative Organisations as a structural model. It's a useful reference and resource point for a relatively novel structure of organisation. The stronger chapters are those that cross theory with practical examples, best exemplified in Chapter 3: Last Night A Distributed Cooperative Organization Saved My Life. Overall, the book is playful, nicely designed, coherent, and a useful guide for trying our something with this organisational model.

Recommended by the editor of COMPOST magazine as a good introduction to Distributed Cooperative Organisations, an area I'm very interested in right now.

My partner had some credit left on a gift card in a nice bookshop. We spotted this, and we had both enjoyed her book Three Strong Women so picked this up on a whim.