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I'm in for 80, the Booklord, and actually posting in the dang thread each month
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Jan 9, 2018 05:28
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 20:00 |
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Assuming you don't read the index/notes like a normal person, you're further than it seems. My average non-fiction book finishes at 75% or so according to the kindle.
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Jan 12, 2018 03:27
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Franchescanado posted:
This looks sweet. Guy A. Person posted:Bonus challenge: Read something political from/about a country you aren't from and don't currently live in One of my favorite authors to read on foreign politics is Arundhati Roy. She's an Indian novelist, activist and essayist who commonly writes about : rural/village rights, communist and left insurgency, adivasi movements, anti-Muslim violence and oppression, and nuclear proliferation. I've found her writing useful not just for learning more about India but because when I read about these situations that I have zero pre-conceived notions about, I can use my thoughts about them to inform my opinions in cases where I have a lot of ingrained biases. If this sells you on her, a good one to start with is Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy. For what I'm reading in the surprise theme week, I notice that last night I put a first bookmark in The Two-State Delusion, by Padraig O'Malley. thatdarnedbob fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Jan 31, 2018 |
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Jan 31, 2018 20:32
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Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra
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January 1. How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City, by Joan DeJean This book covers urban changes in Paris from the late medieval period to the early modern, with a heavy emphasis on posters, paintings, travel guides, and plays as sources. Joan really provides a delight of visual information to go with the text. You’ll read about the expansion of foot traffic along the Pont Neuf and the new boulevards of the city, as well as how these let Paris become the Mecca of fashion. My favorite theme throughout the book was how crime changed its patterns to complement those of the city itself. (5/5) 2. Dark Pools, by Scott Patterson Scott has written a person and business focused history of the last twenty years of trading, which gets on my nerves. Even in the last stage of the book, a development in policy or a corporate merger must be introduced with a personal biography of some dude involved in the deal. Also, the author relies too much on analogy and metaphor to describe relatively simple financial things, so that I had to turn to other sources to find out what he literally meant. On the other hand, he really does write the various characters in an entertaining way, and I had a decent experience reading this. (3/5) 3. The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism, by David Golumbia An important caveat here: David’s not talking about Right-Wing as in MAGA hats and white nationalism, he’s talking about it in the sense of “government small enough to drown in a bathtub” and other more libertarian-adjacent ideas. It’s a fairly short and focused book that does a great job of pinning the ideas motivating major cryptocurrency thinkers to that libertarian tradition. A major point in here is that many of the motivating ideas of bitcoiners are assumptions from a far-right perspective that are very arguable when explicitly laid out. (4/5) 4. The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy, by Carol Lynn Pearson So the Mormon church back in the 19th century practiced polygamy. That’s inarguable; when Utah began pushing for admission as a state the church relented and issued guidance that polygamy was to be temporarily suspended. The Mormons also preach that their marriages are eternal (this is strictly opposed to the vast majority of Christian teaching), continuing in heaven with each wife and her children bound to her husband in eternity. In modern Mormon society, these facts create the expectation that once they get to the afterlife, people who are monogamous now will find themselves in polygamous marriages. People feel real grief, anguish, of even delight at this possibility. Stories that stand out to me are an unmarried woman whose brother-in-law helpfully offers to marry her in heaven so that she won’t be alone forever, and a woman who expresses to her husband that she’d rather be in hell alone than in heaven with hum and another woman. Carol Pearson is a poet and leader of Mormon women who has spun together many personal testimonies and her own historical and theological analysis to make this amazing book. This is going to be one of my highlights for the year, I am sure. (5/5) 5. The Violent American Century, by John W. Dower Here John contrasts the popular view of “The American Century” (that is, the years 1945 to the present) as one of progress, peace and prosperity with the effects of American foreign policy abroad. It covers both the overt and secret wars America has waged over the years just enough to let curious readers explore on their own later. Overall I’d recommend this book to anyone who needs an inoculation against the popular view of America’s wars, especially a young person. (4/5) 6. Against Apartheid: The Case for Boycotting Israeli Universities, edited by Ashley Dawson and Bill V. Mullen Like a lot of essay collections on a single subject, this book succeeds at presenting a diversity of perspectives but had honestly too much repetition of basic fact. You aren’t going to get “both sides” of the academic boycott, but you will get essays written by Israeli Jews, Palestinian academics, members of the diaspora, and supporters abroad. Most of the essays are informative, well-argued and worth reading. (3.5/5) 7. Njal’s Saga, translated by Robert Cook This book is sick as hell. It’s an epic set 10th century Iceland where the national hobbies are vengeance and lawsuits (also horse fighting). People keep on getting unlawfully killed, and all attempts to make the sides leave well enough alone fall apart. This goes on for several different cycles, with well told fight scenes capped off by action movie-style one liners. The Njal from the title is man who values friendship, family, peace, and the law, but these things come into tragic conflict with each other. You should probably expect to see this on prestige television once all the 20th century fantasy epics get churned out. (5/5) For the Booklord, I'm just going to slot each book into a category once, and do the proportional challenges at the end. 1. Set a goal for number of books or another personal challenge. (7/80) 5. Participate in the TBB BotM thread at least once in 2018 (thread stickied each month at the top of the forum). Njal’s Saga 11. Read something political. The Violent American Century 15. Read something involving history. How Paris Became Paris 17. Read something about religion. The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy
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Feb 3, 2018 00:26
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Loutre posted:Also, requesting my wildcard. Your wildcard is Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions by Valeria Luiselli. Could someone give me a wildcard?
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Feb 3, 2018 01:00
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My February: 8. The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin 9. The Obelisk Gate, by N. K. Jemisin 10. The Stone Sky, by N. K. Jemisin Jemisin has written a fun little series here. The setup is that Father Earth is at war with his children: the land is ravaged regularly by quakes, volcanoes and tsunamis, and sometimes these are so disastrous that the world experiences a six-months-or-longer winter. This is called a Fifth Season when it happens. Fortunately there are people, orogenes, who have powers than can alleviate these disasters. Twists and turns progress from there. The first book has the best pacing, both in its journeys and its revelations. Book 2 goes too slow, and Book 3 hurries things along to conclusion. All three books are best when handling how abuse is inherited, both literally and allegorically. If a science-fantasy on that subject appeals to you, then these are great books. Otherwise they’re just pretty good. (4/5 for The Fifth Season, 3/5 for the sequels) 11. Priestdaddy, by Patricia Lockwood Patricia Lockwood has been best known for her poetry, and she uses her words her to amazing effect. Priestdaddy has been one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, and it’s beautifully written to boot. Her turns of phrase surprise at the same time that they feel time-tested. To explain the title shortly: Her father was a priest, but non-Catholic, which is ok. Then he converted to Catholicism, which lets such converted priests with children become Catholic priests, as long as (I assume) they cease any attempts to multiply. The dude is weird, and so is the rest of her family. A lot of the book is fun, but a lot of it is brutal. There are some moments, when she’s building up to airing some seriously dirty laundry, where I was mouthing “holy poo poo!” Some jokes will work best if you know how funny and filthy her poetry can be, and how raw it can be. My advice is, as soon as she mentions a poem by name, look it up and read it, ok? (5/5) 12. A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America, by Óscar Martínez I first read Martínez’s work a couple of year ago. He begins in a Nation article “There are bodies down there. Not prosecutors, not gang members, not journalists, not policemen, not even the government doubts that in this exact spot, deep below ground level, there are bodies. And now that everybody knows, the question remains: What do we do?”. From there, he tells the Sisyphean story of a man determined to exhume that mass grave in a remote well. This fragment forms one of the chapter of A History of Violence; other chapters deal with police informants, human traffickers, a death-squad assault on a police station, and numerous other intersections of the brutal with the everyday. This isn’t a happy read, but it’s an important one. (5/5) 13. Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth, by Bart Ehrman Ehrman remarks that both believer and nonbelievers hate him for his writings; the believers take issue with how he treats Biblical texts as fallible, falsifiable products of human writers, and the nonbelievers take issue with how seriously he takes religious people and how, as in this case, he maintains that the religious figure Jesus refers back to a historical man. Since I’ve read Ehrman’s work before a lot of what he says here is familiar, but I appreciate the focused nature of this work and how well he handles the argumentation. Importantly this book is suitable for someone’s first critical treatment of the Bible. Ehrman lays out the “secret knowledge” that has been hanging around for decades but doesn’t get mentioned in sermons, like the lost sources for the Bible, the whole forgeries deal, and the clear evidence that even the writers of the New Testament disagreed a lot about religion. He takes that, along with readings of non-Biblical texts, and builds out an argument that even when you dispense with the miraculous and the dogmatic enough evidence remains to convince him that Jesus was a historical person. Maybe you think that’s obvious, or obviously wrong; I’d recommend this book anyway to get familiar with the various pieces of evidence and how they can be used. (5/5) 14. Where Am I Now? by Mara Wilson So it’s Mara Wilson’s first memoir; it’s especially good if you already like her, but unlike the best memoirs certain parts would only hold up to those familiar. The best comes in an extended rumination on her relationship to Matilda, and when she talks about the demands placed on children and women in our media culture. (4/5) 15. The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England, by Ian Mortimer The best thing about Mortimer’s book is that he doesn’t just show you one England. He ranges from 1300 to 1400, showing that the Medieval period wasn’t stagnant or frozen but evolving constantly. Furthermore, he treats both the urban and the rural, the noble and the holy, the free and the unfree, with careful attention and respect. House construction, law and its enforcement, the markets and bandits and traveling fairs all got memorable explanations. A highlight of the book: Mortimer mentions that depictions of torture and execution are particularly valuable not for the acts themselves, but because the victims are nearly always portrayed in undergarments! Undergarments, you see, are not the subject of polite art or letters, and tend not to survive as physical artifacts. (5/5) 16. Leviathan Wakes, by James A. Corey At the end of the month I was a juror in a pretty complex trial, so I needed something brainless to read. This fit the bill perfectly. I’m not going to do a plot outline because Wikipedia exists, but here are the most groan-inducing parts: it’s a space opera with zombies. And gray goo. The gray goo makes the zombies, see. One of the two viewpoint characters (they have alternating chapters! woo!) has hallucinations of a manic pixie dream girl. The other main character hosed a lot in the past but didn’t know he could be loving the only woman in the book, the whole time. Fortunately he realizes his mistake! Oh and very little of the book goes inside either of the viewpoint characters’ heads in a meaningful way: during the middle section the two meet up and spend all their time together, and you’d be hard pressed to determine which of them was the viewpoint without peeking at the chapter heading. This book also wins the award for worst buildup/payoff ratio for a Chekov’s Gun, ever. If you like crummy space opera that’s fine and dandy, you’ll like this book. I’ll read the sequels when I’m feeling masochistic, honest. (2/5) 1. Set a goal for number of books or another personal challenge. (16/80) 4. Read at least one book by an LGBT author. Where Am I Now? 5. Participate in the TBB BotM thread at least once in 2018 (thread stickied each month at the top of the forum). Njal’s Saga 7. Get a recommendation from a friend or loved one. — bonus: Read literally the first in-person book recommendation you get in 2018 (solicited or not) Priestdaddy 10. Read something translated from another language. A History of Violence 11. Read something political. The Violent American Century 15. Read something involving history. How Paris Became Paris 17. Read something about religion. - The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy 18. Read something from a non-traditional perspective. The Fifth Season — bonus: Read something narrated in the 2nd person The Obelisk Gate 22. Read something about the future. Leviathan Wakes
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Mar 14, 2018 18:33
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If the price for the book were lower, or it were available for ILL in my region, maybe. As is I've read enough of their online debates to have an informed enough opinion for someone who's not a New Testament scholar. Further discussion would be inappropriate for this thread I think.
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Mar 15, 2018 04:11
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Guy A. Person posted:2018 Reading Challenge Theme Week #3 - Challenge no. 14: Read a play I also wound up with a copy of Sweat today. Obviously Shakespeare is dope as hell, if all you want to do is get more in tune with our literary and cultural foundations and also read a good play. But sometimes you gotta snag that bonus challenge!
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Mar 21, 2018 04:29
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March 17. Weird Dinosaurs, by John Pickrell Each of the chapters here focuses on a geographic region. You get South America for the Titanosaurs, Alaska and Siberia for Arctic dinosaurs and Australia for its opal fossils, among others. Pickrell spends roughly equal thirds of each chapter on the first expeditions there, contemporary expeditions, and the creatures themselves. If I had an early edit pass on this book, I would’ve taken out the early expeditions (they don’t contribute to the latest finds and interpretations, after all) and expanded the rest. But Pickrell obviously adores these early tidbits, since he spends considerable time recounting even the non-paleontological exploits of one hunter, Franz Baron Nopsca von Felső-Szilvás, in an early chapter. The difficulties of Antarctic expeditions, theorized behavior, improbable fields of footprints, were all fascinating and I would have loved more of them. (3.5/5) 18. Dinosaurs: The Textbook, by Spencer G. Lucas This textbook looks at everything through the lens of fossils; the right choice for paleontology but it’s great for a textbook to such rigor that it never slips and asserts something without the fossil evidence behind that claim. Lucas focuses on skeletal anatomy of the major lineages of dinosaur, though he also has several great chapters on non-skeletal fossils, field practices, and snapshots of the world at various key times of the dinosaurs’ reign. One of the best qualities a textbook can have is a good treatment of current controversies. Lucas reaches that bar easily: for any taxonomic or philosophical dispute, he identifies what the various positions are as well as which one he prefers. The book is a little too old to touch on the recent controversy on the saurischian divide with ornithischians, though I’m sure a seventh edition is coming. (4.5/5) 19. The Oceans: A Deep History, by Eelco J Rohling Rohling focuses this history on how oceans interact with Earth’s changing climate, which makes it a tad epic in scale. For instance, though he deals with continental drift, ocean formation and destruction, and mass extinctions, the most common discussion of marine vertebrates is as a mechanism for transforming carbonate into skeletons. Detailed chemical history, and the scientific evidence behind it, takes up a lot of space, as does analysis of how deepwater is formed and circulated. Suffice to say, this book is often dry and technical. But there are still a lot of gems: I found interesting the snowball Earth and hothouse Earth descriptions, as well as the anoxic deep water chapter. This isn’t a great book to just dive into; be prepared for mental strain. (3/5) 20. The Abrams Guide to American House Styles, by William Morgan, photos by Radek Kurzaj This book has cursed me; when I’m driving now, I’ll judge houses for having an odd number of Greek-style columns, or for their McMansion front facade, or for just a general lack of style. I see good examples too, of course; at least learning about aesthetics in architecture wasn’t ALL bad. The book is predominately photos showing how the various trends in America’s homes have appeared throughout the country, with introductory essays and diagrammed guides for each style. I appreciate the geographic diversity of the chosen houses: many homes here come from Houston, Galveston and Tuscon (cities dear to my heart) instead of just VA, MA and CA as I might have expected. (4/5) 21. Technically Wrong, by Sara Wachter-Boettcher Beep beep! #neo-nazis is here. So reads a push notification from Tumblr, the most hilarious piece in this book’s showcase of algorithmic crimes against humanity. Wachter-Boettcher has written an amazingly entertaining book that does more than just compile the highest-profile of electronic whoopsies. She builds a cogent argument that not only does the tech industry consistently decline to consider the position of the marginal, of the edge cases, but that the simple act of doing so creates an experience that harms everyone. No one is average in everything, so each of us will someday be an edge case that hasn’t been accounted for. A great cautionary tale for anyone who uses or designs for the connected world. (5/5) 22. Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders Phenomenal book, with a lot going on. I’m going to need to do a reread to do this one justice. (5/5) 23. Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes, by Adilifu Nama Nama takes on several topics key to black superheroes, among them the early trend of black supers to just be palette-swaps of white supers, the disturbingly common position of blacks as subordinate to whites even when superpowers are involves, and the use and misuse of black superheroes in films and TV. His literary criticism is top-notch, with well-chosen pages and spreads from comics both big and fringe. He clearly is a fan of many of these characters, even when they are problematic by his own admission, and engages with them with hope and love and fremdschämen. He wrote this in 2011; I hope a second edition will come out post-Black Panther. (4/5) 24. fantomas versus the multinational vampires, by Julio Cortázar This short book is cobbled together from dissimilar sources: a written adventure/conspiracy narrative, vintage black and white images, an actual Fantomas comic book oddly starring Cortázar himself and a tribunal report implicating various Latin American governments in oppression. It’s funny and moving, though it definitely is a product of its time (1975). Memorable parts include Fantomas entering each scene by jumping through windows, and a bizarre montage of espionage and disguise in which corporate and governmental powers are humiliated and bested. (3.5/5) 25. The Hellbound Heart, by Clive Barker If you want a some good gory horror, with some slasher action and BDSM space cults thrown in, read this. The pacing is great (though the plot doesn’t try to surprise you) and the gore is well written. Barker is gross and funny here; for example, the book’s monster grows out of a sad cum-stain that some dude bled onto. (4/5) 26. Mister B. Gone, by Clive Barker So a demon (Mr. B) gets fished out of Hell by some dudes trying to run a 15th century demon-trapping business, and goes on the lam with his savior and unrequited demonic love. He then gets trapped inside a book (the very book you’re holding!) and tries to bargain with you, the reader, to set his book on fire and end his suffering. The concept’s weird, but Mr. B is a great character, full of pettiness and self-pity. Barker again deploys gross-out humor to good effect, and does some interesting world-building, but sadly the conceit of a demon directly addressing the reader gives the whole thing a creepy-pasta feel. (3/5) 27. The Great Transition, by Lester R. Brown, Janet Larsen, J. Matthew Roney and Emily E. Adams This book, on the energy transition away from coal, feels perfunctory. Each chapter covers a different power source, from oil to nuclear and wind, but the vast majority of the material is listings of different projects of that type around the world with estimates of power generation capacity. It’s criminally uninteresting to use all these paragraphs on something that a nice graph could have gotten across. The book is best when it takes on the human and social costs of giant dams, but this is something that Arundhati Roy, for example, does much better. Add in the 2014 publication date that obsoletes much of its content, and this book isn’t worth reading anymore. (2/5) 28. Swearing Is Good for You, by Emma Byrne Byrne has a really good pop-science book on swearing here. To get the reader in the mood, she makes liberal use of “gently caress” and its variations; must’ve been fun. Each chapter deals with a different sub-genre of swear-science. My favorite followed chimpanzees who learned sign language, and came up with their own insults and curses. They were taught taboos about dirty to make their human keepers’ jobs easier; if the chimps flush their own poo poo, you won’t get hit in the face with it. They would then use the ‘dirty’ sign to insult keepers when they were mad, and in one case a chimp called non-signing primates ‘dirty monkeys’. (5/5) 29. Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons and Dragons, by Michael Witwer This is a full birth-to-death biography of Gary, not just the D&D years. Witwer tells it in a series of vignettes, framed by a weird and groan-worthy allegory featuring Gygax as an RPG character. Skip those sections and the rest is a fun, quick read that focuses on Gary’s business dealings and gaming life. (3/5) 30. Protestants, by Alex Ryrie This is definitely a pop history, though it’s a good one. I was surprised by it, because even though he starts a moment before the 95 Theses, Ryrie spends a lot of ink on the modern world, especially in non-European contexts. He gets to Billy Graham on page 300 out of 467! You won’t find this book dragging on, but he does go into enough detail to explain (for example) just what the difference between Reformed and Lutheran Protestants is. Though he is a lay minister in the Church of England, Ryrie manages to avoid making this book a hagiography of Protestants: he covers the religion’s role in the American Civil War, Nazism, and South African Apartheid with only limited slip-ups (while discussing the Nazi’s bowdlerized Bible and its failure to excise all Jewish elements, he remarks that there are just some things Scripture won’t allow itself to say. Yech). (4.5/5) 31. Northern Renaissance Art, by Susie Nash I honestly never thought an art history could be this interesting! Nash focuses on art not as an aesthetic or intellectual thing but as something human: she talks about the economics of its production, the artists’ sales techniques, and how art owners would display and use the pieces. The sections on guild politics and practices were highlights, as were her diversions to the finely specified contracts made for art-to-order. The huge amount of good-quality pictures make this a no brainer (if you’re up for 15th century Burgundian and German art). (5/5) 1. Set a goal for number of books or another personal challenge. (31/80) 4. Read at least one book by an LGBT author. Where Am I Now? 5. Participate in the TBB BotM thread at least once in 2018 (thread stickied each month at the top of the forum). Njal’s Saga 7. Get a recommendation from a friend or loved one. — bonus: Read literally the first in-person book recommendation you get in 2018 (solicited or not) Priestdaddy 8. Read something written before you were born. fantomas versus the multinational vampires 10. Read something translated from another language. A History of Violence — bonus: Read something that isn't in your primary language 11. Read something political. The Violent American Century 15. Read something involving history. How Paris Became Paris 17. Read something about religion. - The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy 18. Read something from a non-traditional perspective. The Fifth Season — bonus: Read something narrated in the 2nd person Mister B. Gone 21. Read something that involves Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Technically Wrong — bonus: Read something about hunger The Hellbound Heart 22. Read something about the future. Leviathan Wakes
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Apr 2, 2018 03:59
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Hm, procrastinating on reading The Gulf may pay off for me!
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Apr 17, 2018 04:15
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 20:00 |
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MockingQuantum posted:I'm looking a bit ahead in my reading list, and I need some suggestions on: Earlier in the year you read Heart of Darkness; you could read King Leopold's Ghost to get more perspective there. Also Max Gladstone's work is intensely political, though also fantasy/satire. You could totally count those books as you read more!
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Apr 25, 2018 17:27
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