Reading
Books: on balance, I'm for 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 felt" than "how good this is."Haddon, Mark
Halberstam, J. Jack
Hall, Peter Geoffrey
Haraway, Donna
Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
Haraway is someone I turn to to remind me what reality is like. In this book she continues her journey from feminist cyborg to Significant... more >>
Made me think about:
- Learning to Die in the Anthropocene
Haraway, Donna J.
The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness
When Species Meet
Did I secretly read this book to give me air cover to watch animal odd-couple videos? Maybe. Did it reconfigure my model of self in the process? Yes.
Made me think about:
- Intersectionality
- How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
Hardy, Thomas
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
w/ Margaret R. Higonnet, Tim Dolin
The Return of the Native
w/ Alexander Theroux
my favorite book.
Harris, Jonathan Gil
Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England
Made me think about:
- Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
Hartl, Michael
Haskell, David George
The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors
This is a beautifully written book that is worth reading for its aesthetics alone. Haskell deploys words and imagery in a candidly poetic way that most contemporary fiction writers (maybe outside of Latin America?) don't allow themselves to do. I also appreciate his refusal to treat science, culture, and ethics as separate concerns. I was frustrated often by the attendant lack of focus: is this book about trees? Anthropology? Philosophy? Ecology? In the end this book is a very long and beautiful tone poem.. and a bit of a mess.
Made me think about:
- Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture
Haun, Jeremy
Hays,Gregory, (trans.)
The Meditations: A New Translation (Revised)
w/
Marcus Aurelius,
Made me think about:
- The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
- Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
Haysom, Simone
Heinlein, Robert A.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
This novel is deeply racist, gleefully misogynist, and unpleasantly cynical. It's smug, didactic, and thinly plotted. There are a couple of neat concepts buried in here. But my oh my, there's a lot to put up with in exchange. Bleh!
Made me think about:
- Red Mars
Hemingway, Ernest
Herbert, Frank
Hodgkinson, Tom
How to Be Idle
Made me think about:
- How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
Howard, June
Hyra, Derek S.
Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City
This is a thoughtful and important look at gentrification and neighborhood transformation in DC. It suffers badly from trying to pose as ethnography when it is actually more like an anthology of editorial essays. It also suffers from Hyra's insistence on coining phrases like "Cappuccino City" and "living the wire" that aren't, or don't appear to be, well connected to his research and his repeated claims to be advancing whole fields of academic research, such as intersectionality, in short chapters. That being said I would have gladly read an edition of this urgently needed book that was twice as long - especially if the extra page count were filled by quotes from the actual residents he spoke with.
Made me think about:
- Black in Place