Category: Books
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El-Mohtar and Gladstone’s This Is How You Loose the Time War
This Is How You Loose the Time WarAmal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone A wonderful little book imagining a fight / friendship / love affair (?) between two warriors in a war across time. Written by two top notch SF writers it consists essentially of letters our warriors write to each other across time. The whole…
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Nestor’s Breath
Breath: The New Science of a Lost ArtJames Nestor A clear example of book that should have been an article. There’s some good stuff in here on breath work and its (arguable) importance to health as well as heaping helpings of the kind of anecdotal bro science I tend to enjoy, but don’t take too…
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Ross’s Wagnerism
Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of MusicAlex Ross Let’s get something out of the way here first. I do not like Wagner. Even if he wasn’t an anti-Semite (he was, this really isn’t up for debate) his operas would still repulse me – I hate the grandiose and Wagner is nothing if not…
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Delillo’s The Silence
The Silence Don Delillo In recent years, Delillo has turned to short works focused on small groups of people and I’m hear for it. Yes, I loved Underworld and it’s expanses of time and characters, but books like the Silence, focused on the actions of an intimate group of people showcase Delillo’s gift for sketching…
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Mateer’s Aphrodite Made Me Do It
Aphrodite Made Me Do ItTrista Mateer I don’t know what to make of this book. I truly don’t. It made some best of the year poetry lists, but it is very much not my thing. That said, I’m a forty something year old CIS white dude and I’m pretty damn sure I am not the…
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Kaminsky’s Dancing in Odessa
Dancing in Odessa Ilya Kaminsky Another beautiful collection from the talented Illya Kaminsky, this one more focused on the beauty in the ordinary. I like this collection fine, but Kaminsky’s slightly later work, Deaf Republic, which I read last year is a work of true brilliance and really worth reading. If you’re new to Kaminsky…
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Weatherford’s Ghengis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern WorldJack Weatherford Before reading this, I knew nothing, like seriously nothing, about Ghengis Khan and the Mongol empire. I knew stereotypes, about rape and pillage, but that was it. This book was a revelation. A fascinating account of how a small nomadic tribe ended up taking over…
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Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social UpheavalSaidiya Hartman This is probably my book of the year. An incredible use of the archives to tell the stories of the lives of Black women at the turn of the century. Hartman uses criminal records, photographs, memoirs, to show how precarious and wonderful the lives of…
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Lanier’s Dawn of the New Everything
Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality Jaron Lanier I think Jaron Lanier is among the most interesting people in the world. This, his memoir, shows just how fascinating he is. Raised largely by a single father in a house Jaron built himself as a child (yes, really) he has carefully…
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Carroll’s Bullet Journal
The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the FutureRyder Carroll I have been keeping a journal off and on since I was a teenager, this year I started experimenting with using a bullet journal and got this book. In basic, Bullet journaling is a system for journaling that is flexible enough…
Milo and the Calf 