Davey
@historicaloracle
All my posts have typos
The Homemade God by Rachel Joyce. A book club read, this one was... okay. I think I get what the author was going for but I don't think it was a fully successful effort. There was a stretch of about 100 pages where I was really on board but it was also quite boring and felt kind of sloppy at times
Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes I quite liked this and learned a lot. I particularly appreciated the very long timeframes; normal I guess for archaeologists, but it was really instructive to think about sites occupied on and off over tens of thousands of years
Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James Scott I loved this when it first came out, I've assigned it to students, and I re-read it for my sustainability and environment book club. It's not perfect but I think it holds up and I hope non-historians get something out of it
Wilderness Essays, by John Muir This was a fascinating read (or listen in this case). I'd read a lot more about Muir than his own writing and the essays are very rich and beautifully written. There's a lot to think about here, from Muir's romantic, religious, sort of mystical descriptions...
My first time seeing a raptor or buzzard or anything like that in Cork! None to be found in my neighborhood on the north side but I just spotted one soaring, hanging in the air on the wind, right above the wetlands at Tramore Valley Park
Long ago, a friend very kindly hosted me at her house in London while I did dissertation research. After long days in the archive I'd sit in her garden and marvel at how beautiful her passion flowers were. I tried to grow them in LA but only ever got one bloom. But now, in Cork, I have another.
Evenings and Weekends by Oisín McKenna A book club read, this was one good. A very rich and physical portrait of people in London rapidly aging out of being young. Compelling if a bit romanticized setting and similarly compelling characters. Nicely written with vivid descriptions
The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne This came highly recommended and has extremely good reviews on Storygraph but I found it not really good at all. It's SO long--700 pages!--and the plot both drags on and is highly predictable. The main character undergoes a long string of injustices and...
Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, by Cory Doctorow This was excellent. I've been familiar with Doctorow's concept for a while and was looking forward to this book and it didn't disappoint. Very readable, a good entry point for a general audience.
The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution by Carolyn Merchant This book was incredible, I'd say the best thing I've read all year. I did a whole PhD in environmental history and never read this; I read other books by Merchant but not this one, and this was a real oversight
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paolo Freire This was intense. Easy to get bogged down in the particulars of the situation in 1950s and 60s Brazil, whence the book originates, but overall a lot to chew on about teaching, humanization, and oppression. Well worth the time.
Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan I liked this, original and compelling world-building; a complex and multi-faceted world that meshed well with an equally complex but well-organized plot. Character development takes a back seat but it was fun. I'll consider others in the series but not immediately.
Blue Sisters, by Coco Mellors This was the worst book I've actually finished in a long time. I stuck with it to shit-talk at the next book club. Everything about this book felt superficial and fake: sloppy writing, inexplicable character development, random plot events. Puzzled by its good reviews.
The New Wilderness, by Diane Cook Read this for my environment-sustainability book club. It was good overall, a world not entirely plausible but an interesting depiction of an extreme version of the "trouble with wilderness" that Cronon described. The plot kind of peters out at the end.
The Eye of the Heron, by Ursula Le Guin Another of Le Guin's sort-of sci fi novels where the sci fi is basically that people live on another planet but they bring social relationships with them, rather than technology. In this story, there's a planet spilt between pacifists and an old penal colony
Rocannon's World, by Ursula Le Guin The first of the Hainish novels, this one sat on the shelf of my childhood home and the frankly goofy cover always turned me off. But of course, it's a brilliant story. ULG always writes so richly, builds such depth and feeling into her worlds.
Planet of Exile, by Ursula Le Guin Le Guin--my favorite author ever--is always incredible at world-building, here on a planet with years that are 60 Earth-years. The prose is always rich, real, earthy and otherworldly. And this one's a short, sharp little story, so much packed into 120 pages.
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, by Stieg Larsson The third Millennium novel and I loved it. The writing was clunky at times, the plot and cast kind of bloated; you have to buy Lisbeth Salander being a computer genius and Mikael Blomkvist being an incredible reporter and irresistable to women
Man, you get so much out of a CD. The inserts with lyrics, photos, art, and in this case a kind of social, moral philosophy absolutely rule
Rebuilding the music collection I built as a teen and then abandoned, part 1: one of my favorite albums of all time and arguably the greatest ska-punk album ever. Operation Ivy, self-titled, 1991 (though most of the songs are from Energy, 1989)
1835: The founding of Melbourne and the conquest of Australia, by James Boyce This was unexpectedly good. I got it used, thinking it looked interesting, and I'm delighted at how well it presents a clear, thoughtful (to me at least) explanation of a key moment in Australian and imperial history
The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945, by J R McNeill and Peter Engelke This was a little disappointing. It's more a wide, shallow survey, than a nuanced argument; basically a condensed, updated version of McNeill's older book Something New Under the Sun
The God of the Woods, by Liz Moore A book club read, a thriller instead of the usual more literary fare. I quite liked this. The plot was complex and there were many POVs with a robust structure and a dense narrative. Good pace. Liked the setting, 1970s summer camp and elite society of upstate NY
Howl's Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones This was okay. Some interesting world-building but the plot felt all over the place.
Less is More: How Degrowth will Save the World, by Jason Hickel Loved this. Some of the more historically-minded claims were a bit of a stretch--15th century "golden age," European men needing Husserl to inform them they have bodies--but I think the main point holds: permanent growth is the problem
A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space and Have We Really Thought This Through? Kelly and Zach Weinersmith Quite enjoyed this, the technical first half more than the more legally and institutionally focused second half but I appreciate they tackled the topic and I learned a lot
The Riddle of the Sand, by Erskine Childers I like a nautical yarn and I like a good analog spy story. And I loved the setting of Anglo-German naval rivalry in the Frisian islands c. 1903. But this was quite slow and the plot overly complex in some ways and too simple in others. It was fine overall