Tourist Season – Carl Hiaasen

In Florida, a trash private detective chases trashy murderers, killing trashy victims in trashy ways for trashy reasons.

Fantastic low-brow fun. Occasionally gruesome, but never enough to spoil the ride.

Station Eleven – Emily St. John MandeL

A great bit of post-apocalyptic speculative fiction. Most post-apocalyptic stories pick up many years after the collapse of society. Not Station Eleven. Its touching narrative tunnels through the hours, days, months, and years before and after a lethal flu wipes out most of humanity.

Your Money or Your Life...

By Vicki Robin

Be frugal. Time is money. Look at your money as hours of life-- when you buy things, you really are trading off your fee time. Is it worth it?

This book advocates for a much more rigorous budget tracking and spending process than I currently have. I'm lucky in that I'm naturally frugal and live far below my income.

A Hidden Wholeness

By Parker Palmer

My quest to learn more about the strength of being non-judgmental takes me here. Palmer teaches about conversion circles where one must not speak to fix, save or advise. 

“This is the first and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists and that it is built entirely out of attentiveness.” Mary Oliver

“No fixing, no saving, no advising, no setting each otjer straight.”

The Brain-Dead Megaphone

I keep rereading the essay "Thought Experiment" by George Saunders.

"If, at the moment when someone cuts us off in traffic or breaks our heart or begins bombing our ancestral village, we could withdraw from judging mode, and enter this other, more accepting mode, we would, paradoxically, make ourselves more powerful. By resisting the urge to reduce, in order to subsequently destroy, we keep alive--if only for a few seconds more--the possibility of transformation."

For some time, I've been struggling to wrap my head around people who label others as "bad" or "evil." I think this essay explains my struggles well. By blaming others, by deciding we are victims, we back away from our obligation to transform ourselves and take action.

I see this in many debates, and it clouds our thinking. Take the debate on undocumented/illegal workers. Deporting them ignores the fact that the U.S. is a rich country next to a poor country. The economies and cultures have been integrated and porous for centuries. Americans are eager customers for drugs and cheap labor. We aren't charging the employers of undocumented labor. Building walls has failed. Deporting undocumented immigrants isn't actually addressing the causes of the problems. It lets us point the finger at a villain and stop taking responsibility for ourselves and the world we have created.

Our rush to judgment closes the doors we want to open. Transformation happens when we resist our urge to fix, save, or advise.

Street Trees of Seattle: An Illustrated Walking Guide

By Taha Ebrahimi

A good local read. The book covers notable public trees of Seattle. Largest Yew, Fir, Sequoia for example. 

Every now and then Tycho writes something that perfectly balances depth and wit.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2025/05/14/parts-per-million

...people we don't like will sometimes be correct. Because we live in a world largely made of information now, we can curate ourselves utterly out of any functional mode of self-correction. It hasn't made us any smarter, and when we become aware of just how thoroughly we have invested ourselves in illusion it falls on you like a guillotine.

It's medicine. Of course you don't like the taste.