Reading

Books: on balance, I am in favor of them. These are most of the ones I've read since 2007 or so. The star ratings correspond more closely to "how worth my time this book felt" rather than "how good this book is."
2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007

2020/12/24 Hyperbole and a Half
Allie Brosh ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 
2020/11/27 The Long Take
Robin Robertson ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 
2020/11/21 The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
Serhii Plokhy ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 
2020/10/30 Agency (Jackpot #2)
William Gibson ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 
2020/10/20 Dare to Speak
Suzanne Nossel ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 
2020/10/12 The Internet of Garbage
Sarah Jeong ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 
2020/10/10 The City We Became
N.K. Jemisin ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 
2020/10/02 Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything
David Bellos ✪ ✪ ✪ 
2020/09/27 Parable of the Sower
Octavia E. Butler ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 
2020/09/24 Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight over Women's Work
Jenny Brown ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 
2020/09/07 The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century
Thant Myint-U ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 
2020/08/20 Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America
Dana Luciano ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 
2020/08/08 Hieronymus Bosch: Garden of Earthly Delights
Hans Belting ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 
2020/08/06 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
Shoshana Zuboff ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 
2020/07/31 Here For It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America; Essays
R. Eric Thomas ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 
2020/07/26 Inventing Human Rights
Lynn Hunt ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 
2020/07/08 The Spook Who Sat by the Door
Sam Greenlee ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 
2020/07/03 Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
Anand Giridharadas ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 
2020/06/29 Learning to Die in the Anthropocene
Roy Scranton ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

I have grown to really appreciate concise, idea-packed writing. This book meets those criteria. It takes an existential view to the global climate crisis, asking us to confront the fact that it might already be too late to save what we have as a precondition to meaningful action. What I...
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2020/06/19 Speak, Memory
Vladimir Nabokov ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 
2020/06/14 Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
Benjamin Alire Sáenz ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 
2020/06/13 Critical Trauma Studies: Understanding Violence, Conflict, and Memory in Everyday Life
eds. Monica J. Capser and Eric Wertheimer ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

I’ve been thinking a lot about individual and collective trauma recently. Given the extremity of our experiences - the pandemic, historic and ongoing U.S. racism and racial violence, the displacements and escalating disasters of the climate crisis, and so on, how can we begin to approach the ways that trauma...
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2020/05/29 Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need
Sasha Costanza-Chock ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

Design Justice is a an extremely useful book. The word ‘design’ has a long history behind it and over the last several decades it has become predominantly associated in most people’s minds with the work of mid-century modern product designers, and more recently with Apple and Silicon Valley-flavored human centered...
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2020/05/20 Captive Prince (Captive Prince #1)
C.S. Pacat ✪ ✪ ✪ 
2020/05/12 Dientes de Dragón
Michael Crichton
translated by Gabriel Dols Gallardo ✪ ✪ ✪ 
2020/05/03 The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political
Judith Butler ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 
2020/04/02 The Sense of Order (Wrightsman Lectures 9)
E.H. Gombrich ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 
A very thoughtful and comprehensive read on the global (!) history and cultural functioning and evolution of decoration and design. As Gombrich says, "the historian is not a critic and should not aspire to be one," but the book did at times become discursive and hard to follow due to its lack of a strong unifying framework. Very worth the time; I will never look at wallpaper or picture frames the same way again.
2020/03/23 White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America
Joan C. Williams ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 
2020/03/23 Despair
Vladimir Nabokov ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 
2020/02/26 Art Attack: A Brief Cultural History of the Avant-Garde
Marc Aronson ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 
2020/01/21 Pnin
Vladimir Nabokov
David Lodge ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 
2020 total: 31