Wants to read Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream
book
Wants to read Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Wants to read Interrobang
Edited 32d ago
Rated Autobiography 6/10
My feelings about Morrissey are conflicted, for a lot of reasons, and I wasn't surprised to find this book kind of insufferable. Very little about the process of making music, tons and tons of petty passive-aggressive score-settling that I think is supposed to be "delicious" but is actually kind of sad. Also, there are no chapter breaks; it's like a seven-hour monologue. Still, somehow glad I read it.
Rated Those Who Walk Away 8/10
<div>Ok, so it's a little light on plot — other than "these two guys hate each other" — but yeah of course I'm going to enjoy a Patricia Highsmith book where people make bad decisions in Venice.</div>
Rated Frankenstein: By Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley : Illustrated & Unabridged 8/10
A fascinating book to read for the first time, because it has an enormous pop-cultural footprint that is in many ways independent of and different from the book itself. Basically all of horror and science fiction is downstream of <i>Frankenstein</i>; the book has an interesting structure with embedded narratives and flows quickly despite the elaborate, heightened language of its era. It's composed of a couple of different horror-movie nightmare scenarios. The first, affecting the doctor, is the classic "you've done something terribly wrong and it's putting you and people you love in danger"; the second, narrated by the erudite creature himself, is "you're thrust into a world where everyone seems to hate and fear you and you're not sure why." The first-person narrative style foregrounds the subjective emotional experience, the suspense and grief and self-loathing, rather than the plot, which is actually pretty simple. Although it's about big questions and themes, takes place over a big geographical scale, and is considered a monumental work, it's very intimate, with very few named characters. It's also much more horror-y and not very science-y; absent is the focus on the "how" you usually get in subsequent sci-fi (I was surprised, for instance, that there's no *process* described, and no lightning-and-dials-and-switches "it's alive!" scene). It remains a rewarding read two centuries after it was written.
Rated The Inferno of Dante Alighieri 10/10
Feels weird to give a classic of the Western canon a star rating, but it’s my first time with it and I think the translation and commentary Ciardi offers is very good.<br/><br/>An inspiration to petty people everywhere: you can create something enduring, resonant, widely beloved and taken seriously for centuries and still have it basically be a burn book to settle a bunch of esoteric political and personal scores. <br/><br/>It’s not going to be a surprise that so much of Western culture is downstream of this, from religious imagery to fantasy literature to heavy metal lyrics, but it’s interesting as always to be able to see the well-worn references and images in their original context. And if there’s anything I want to explore in more detail I certainly don’t need to wonder if there’s an explanatory essay I could read. There’s seven centuries’ worth! <br/><br/>Glad I read this, and it’s more engaging and less chore-y than I expected.
Wants to read The Man Who Organized Nature: The Life of Linnaeus
Rated 1979 8/10
<div>Though it was a bit of a slow start, this really starts cooking just before the halfway point, and then I could hardly put it down. Always a good sign when it comes to thrillers. I'll definitely want to read the second installment in this series.</div>
Edited 32d ago
Rated Thinking in Systems, A primer, Donella H. Meadows 8/10
very interesting, though i think a lot of the insights of this book are less striking now than they may have been in the 1990s when Meadows was first writing it. the fact that some of this mode of analysis feels familiar and baked-in or like common sense is a tribute to Meadows and her peers. interesting politics here - it's like an argument made to technocrats from a technocratic-eye-view about the importance of skepticism of technocracy, and while some of it reads conservative she's also explicitly hostile to the Reagan-era ideological paradigm shift. a lot of insights here that feel very relevant today, in an era of both sclerotic, fumbling systems and authoritarian attacks on them.
Rated All the Birds in the Sky 8/10
Earnest, weird, dark, clever, surreal story that mixes sci-fi techno-dystopia and a well-thought-out fantasy magical system. Probably more of a 3 1/2 * than a 4 *, but well worth reading. Lots of great moments, ranging from funny to poignant to gee-whiz speculative; it's a future similarly convincing and vivid as something like "Super Sad True Love Story" or "Her," but with a great paranormal angel and a better, less hackneyed story.
Rated Throne of Glass 8/10
Fun and engaging, if a little too romance-tropey for me to be totally on board. More or less tells a story with a beginning/middle/end but has some of that "we expect you to read this whole series" structural frustration.
Rated Flood 6/10
Enjoyable, but a little bit like an overly-enthusiastic college paper. Left me with TMBG songs in my head for days after.
Wants to read The Goblin Emperor
Rated The Invaders 6/10
Well-done, and nicely balanced on the line between literary-MFA-ish and soapy, but doesn't quite land as hard as it wants to. It's told from the perspective of two unhappy people in a wealthy Connecticut town - a lonely second wife and her college-age stepson. The writing is skillful and there's a lot of plot to stay engaged with but it seems a little self-focused and small-scale, and it's definitely a bummer.
Rated The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction 6/10
Not a lot I didn't know already, but nicely done - efficiently walks through the major points while still having room for a little analysis of what did and didn't work.
Rated A Common Pornography: A Memoir 8/10
Everyone has stories, brief anecdotes relating to our history. Our memories are at once humorous and heartbreaking, some retold again and again, some kept private forever. In <i>A Common Pornography</i>, Kevin Sampsell gathers his stories and assembles them into an atypical memoir, and the results are both intimate and intriguing.<br><br>Sampsell’s descriptions of the people he encounters are perfect in their spareness. He has a way of making a person clear within two sentences that might take other writers two paragraphs. I also appreciate his candor when it comes to more private moments, moments most people would hesitate to share at all, but still had an effect on their lives. From near-wordless encounters with other men to nights spent alone, he details his search for affection in a very real, honest way.<br><br>(Full review can be found at <a href="http://glorifiedloveletters.blogspot.com/2010/04/common-pornography-by-kevin-sampsell.html">Glorified Love Letters</a>.)
Edited 32d ago