Books

Currently Reading

A masterpiece of a character disection by Alasdair Gray. Thoroughly enjoyed the characterisation of the strange main trio. The book contains a meta narrative where a self-published book called Poor Things is found by our author. This places doubts on the contents of most of this novel but this misdirection gives way for many interpretation of the books plots and themes. Incredibly fun and infinitely more interesting than the film (which I watched the night after finishing the book).

Mirror, Mirror is a non-ficiton book looking at the philosophy of the self and looks at how we place ourselves in relation to the social work. The book is particularly interested in narcissistic tendencies and the ethical concerns around these. Not in the popular usage but in an academic sense which includes experiences such as pride or vanity. An interesting survey of ideas across the main phisophical thinkers, using good concrete analogies to introduce his points. The work is presented as a professor's lecture, and luckily very fun and engaging ones at that

A western tale that is as cruel as it is beautiful. McCarthy's descriptions of the southern US and Mexico during the Mexican Indian Wars are intricate. Detailing the beautiful desert scenary like with a paint brush while presenting a tale of some absolutely horrible people. It is a book about immoral men told with a paint strokes of an old master. Very much want to read more from McCarthy, particularly post apocalyptic The Road.

My first dive into the 33 1/3 book series. The series provides a biography of a single album. An overview of the music scene at the time, the inspirations for the album and the production process. This book instead provides a complete overview of the short-lived Slint and the Louisville, Kentucky alternative scene in the late 80s and early 90s. Slint (and most notably the album Spiderland) provided a touchstone for the emerging post-rock genre though there was and still is a large amount of mystery surrounding them. I find it interesting how there was a decent amount of pushback to this new sound within their home scene and only thanks to cheerleaders like Steve Albini, were Slint able to put coalesce into their final form on Spiderland. The author, who was a part of the mid-west scene at the time, gives incredible insight, almost reminiscing on a snapshot of his youth.

A curated history of race science and it's influence on the contructs of race. The misuse of science to reinforce archaic western understanding of race is as old as race itself but has not been eliminated even today. Race science was developed lockstep with slavery and colonialism. In a post renaissance world, science not just religion is required to justify sin. It was sad to recognise that many major research institutions in the western world were some of the largest contributors to these developments of eugenics. Even today, eugenics still exists under names like human biodiversity or human genitic variation. Even under the hands of well-meaning scientists, race will always be a plague on science.

Some of the most incredible prose I've ever read. Unfortunately, the book feels too scizophrenic and scatterbrained. Maybe this is due to the fact it was constructed posthumously but it requires too much brain power to keep a logical throughline in my head.

This is my first time reading Mishima, and now I understand why his writing is so highly praised. The precision with which Mishima dissects the complexities of young love, lust and mortality is incredible. The psuedoautobiographical story feels like a writer that is at war with the world and themselves, in constant anxiety and strife.

The book creates a world of Oxford University that combines the wonder of a dark academia-themed world with the dark realities of the colonial project required for these types of institutions to exist. An atypical work of fantasy that still produces an intimate coming-of-age saga for a young chinese boy with in a paradoxical world.

Surrealist Soviet literature. I'm not really sure what I was expecting going in but I love it. The book is split in two: The first part talks about the devil ariving in Moscow and causing various hijinks. This part seems to stick with a gaggle of writers and artist which seem to be a projection of Bulgakov's social circle at the time. The second part is a far more abstract with a tale of the _Master_ and _Margarita_ that follows a love story and the now humanised devil and his hunchmen.

A novel made of serials that is far greater than the sum of it's parts. It does feel like the vignettes are Asimov spinning up with new ideas about how humans would exist with robots. It's more about the human characters and societies relations to robots than the possible technology itself. I do sometimes find these hard to appreciate in a world so molded by his sci-fi.

An epic. It spans 4 books with a non-linear presentation. It's a book that feels like a magnum opus, a bold expansive world that is somehow Gray's first novel. The novel is focused on two flawed men that seem to be drawn from the author's projection. Strange and sureealist in parts but heart felt and distressingly real in others. A journey through planes of reality and through human emotion.