2018 in Crime Fiction

As usual, I’m trying to highlight ten books read in 2018 that seemed especially memorable. Most of these have a political edge, with immigration playing a role in several. A couple are more introspective and psychological. Many are by authors making a repeat visit on my Top Ten list. Emma Viskic is the best discovery of the year – compelling writing and a vivid Australian setting.

Previous lists (not sure what happened to 2010 and 2011) – 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2009 2008 2007

Resurrection BayResurrection Bay / Emma Viskic
An Australian private investigator who happens to be deaf has to go home to Resurrection Bay to solve the murder of his associate, and to see if he can reconcile with his wife, an Aboriginal artist. I also loved the sequel, AND FIRE CAME DOWN, but this is one to read in order to sort out the complicated backstory.

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innocence and experience

Maybe some chickens are coming home to roost. Tech stocks have become less irrationally exuberant. People seem annoyed about Amazon’s stunt extort bribes from cities in return for making housing more unaffordable and transit more crowded, just to attract some high-paying jobs to cities that already have a big wealth gap. UK members of parliament have grown so irritated that Facebook has ignored their inquiries that they dragged a tech startup founder who was visiting London to Parliament, forcing him to turn over documents about Facebook that he had obtained thanks to a pending lawsuit. (He just happened to be carrying copies of documents obtained through discovery on his laptop. Let that be a lesson to us all.) And whoops, turns out Facebook’s chief operating officer actually was aware that they’d hired a sleazy firm to discredit Facebook opponents, including George Soros who has become a useful all-purpose boogeyman for anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists.
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British libraries under threat

5th of November library demonstration

Reposted from Inside Higher Ed ; photo courtesy of @5thNovDemo

There’s something pretty amazing about the idea of a public library. It’s the one place where everyone in the community is welcomed – all ages, all races, all religions, all political persuasions. It’s a place where you can borrow things for free and nobody sneers at your taste or uses marketing techniques to persuade you to choose differently. It’s a place where you can hang out for hours without having to buy coffee to justify the space you’re taking up. It doesn’t invade your privacy in order to “improve the user experience.” It’s a place that, according to Pew Research, has amazingly high approval ratings, rare among social institutions these days.

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hello world!

typewriter innards[waves] Yes, I’m starting a new website. I have a couple of reasons to do this. First, I am working on a book proposal, and if this goes well, I’ll probably be blogging the process here, just as I previously blogged my sabbatical project a while back. Consider it my messy but public scratchpad for ideas. This also seems like the right time to renovate my public identity, which has always been held together with string, duct tape, and bad html.

Second, I’m beginning to revise a course I teach and one of my goals is to have students create their own website. I haven’t totally figured out how I will do this as an assignment. I want students to fully control their own web presence, which would include not having one if that’s their preference. But I think it’s time to shift from having students contribute to a joint blog (an assignment they’ve never loved) to inviting students to craft their own online identity for academic and professional self-representation. Who knows – they may not love that, either, but it’s time to try something new. I’ve been interested in the Domain of One’s Own project (see Audrey Watters being intelligent as usual about the concept), and while my institution isn’t doing that, it would be easy for students to get a domain and hosting from Reclaim Hosting. One they can keep for as long as they like.

Of course, if I’m going to assign creating a website using this service, I have to do it first myself, which is why I have this new front door for my own online presence. It will take a while to finish painting and cleaning and get my stuff moved in, but it’s a start.

(image courtesy of Rachel Knickmeyer)