Wants to read Stranger in a Strange Land
book
Wants to read Anansi Boys
Rated Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction 6/10
A little too very-short to fully explain what's going on.
Wants to read Snow Crash
Wants to read Die Wasserstoffsonate
Rated Writing and Being 6/10
A series of essays on the writer's responsibility to depict their time and place, through critical review of the authors Naghib Mahfouz, Chinua Achebe, and Amos Oz, ending in Gordimer's description of her own involvement with the anti-apartheid movement. A little academic - the final essay is the most compelling.
Rated I, Claudia 8/10
A clever and fast-reading YA, adapting "I, Claudius" to a California high school. Generally pulls off what it's attempting; as with all adaptations of this type, there are ways it illuminates the original material, ways it stretches the premise delightfully, and ways it stretches the premise clunkily. Recommended if you like Veronica Mars, Megan Abbott's books, or any of those movies/books where it's, like, "here's Shakespeare but with surfers" or whatever. Objectively it has some eye-rolly aspects but I definitely found myself staying up too late or carrying my kindle around the house in order to keep reading, which is a good sign!
Rated The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes 10/10
An exemplary biography of a figure that I, like many, have *heard about* more than I've really *known about*. Carter makes an excellent case for the importance of Keynes through the 20th century and in our own time - it's insightful and grapples with Keynes' contradictions and misfires as much as it does the gravitational impact of his work on the world. A lot of this stuff is abstruse and opaque and Carter is a really good popularizer/explainer, putting into sharper definition a lot of ideas and concepts I'd struggled with. In particular, I think the last couple of chapters are really useful as they define the economic policies of the Clinton and Obama administrations as clearly - and harshly - as I've read in any text. Highly recommend!
Wants to read The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
Wants to read She Who Became the Sun
Rated The Metamorphosis and Other Stories 6/10
Rated The Mothers 8/10
A terrific, sad book, told simply and well. The Mothers of the title are the older women of a Black church in Southern California, who appear only occasionally in person and narrate the book with a collective, weirdly omniscient voice. The title also, though, refers to the absent mothers who haunt the book’s main characters - Nadia, who lost her mother to a suicide, and Aubrey, who fled her home to escape her mother’s abusive boyfriend. It’s a very compassionate story to its characters and a quick, propulsive read.
Rated Children of Time 9/10
Bit disappointed by the end, but I would die for those spiders
Edited 86d ago
Rated Bestseller 8/10
Yet another great one in the series.
Edited 99d ago