Reading Wednesday
Feb. 4th, 2026 06:45 amJust finished: Nothing.
Currently reading: Changelog by Rich Larson. Whenever I mention Rich Larson to normies, they go, "Who?" Whenever he comes up among writers, the discussion invariably includes the adjective "underrated," which is a bit weird for someone who's kindasorta won an Emmy. It's absolutely true, though. He's prolific af and everything I've read by him so far is an absolute banger.
Changelog is a short story anthology. It's all cyberpunk, a lot of it set in the same cyberpunk future, spanning from Niger to Nuuk, wildly inventive and beautifully written. There are obvious Black Mirror and Love, Death + Robots (the Emmy was for an episode of that adapted from one of his stories) but the cyberpunk aspect of it is mostly backgrounded to focus on character.
It's hard to pick a favourite because there's not a single weak link here, but the standouts so far are "Animals Like Me," which is about a young gig worker recruited to do motion capture work for increasingly disturbing AI-generated children's animation, "Quandary Aminu vs The Butterfly Man," which is about a low-level gangster targeted by a genetically modified assassin that only lives for about a day and a half but is otherwise nearly unstoppable, and "Tripping Through Time," which is the most hopeful story I have read in forever (positive; I don't normally like hopeful stories).
Currently reading: Changelog by Rich Larson. Whenever I mention Rich Larson to normies, they go, "Who?" Whenever he comes up among writers, the discussion invariably includes the adjective "underrated," which is a bit weird for someone who's kindasorta won an Emmy. It's absolutely true, though. He's prolific af and everything I've read by him so far is an absolute banger.
Changelog is a short story anthology. It's all cyberpunk, a lot of it set in the same cyberpunk future, spanning from Niger to Nuuk, wildly inventive and beautifully written. There are obvious Black Mirror and Love, Death + Robots (the Emmy was for an episode of that adapted from one of his stories) but the cyberpunk aspect of it is mostly backgrounded to focus on character.
It's hard to pick a favourite because there's not a single weak link here, but the standouts so far are "Animals Like Me," which is about a young gig worker recruited to do motion capture work for increasingly disturbing AI-generated children's animation, "Quandary Aminu vs The Butterfly Man," which is about a low-level gangster targeted by a genetically modified assassin that only lives for about a day and a half but is otherwise nearly unstoppable, and "Tripping Through Time," which is the most hopeful story I have read in forever (positive; I don't normally like hopeful stories).
