Wants to read Happiness
book
Rated Doctor Who: The Holy Terror 8/10
I feel like I've watched/listened to so much Doctor Who that the reveal at the end did not come as much of a surprise, but this was still quite enjoyable. I am always entertained by Frobisher. All hail the big talking bird, etc.
Rated Doctor Who: The Stones of Venice 6/10
The first half was much more interesting than the second. The second more or less spelled out the ending, but there were still 15-20 minutes to get through. Good story, but not outstanding.
Rated Silver Nitrate 8/10
<div>This was really good. Spooky old cinema magic? Yes, please.</div>
Rated They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us 10/10
<div>The day I'm not 5 starring Hanif Abdurraqib, I've probably perished. Anyway, this book, like every single other thing of his I've read, is great. I listened to the audiobook of the newer edition, read by the author, which I recommend.<br><br>I will say that, although I tend to be interested in anything he wants to write about because of the way he writes about it, hearing him talk about the recording of Rumours was a particular treat.</div>
Rated Doctor Who: The Light at the End 10/10
So much fun - the story, the music, all of it.
Wants to read Interrobang
Edited 48d ago
Rated Katabasis 5/10
<div>If this book is meant to replicate the futility of certain sections of hell by being a little bit of a slog to read, then mission accomplished.<br><br>Alice is just SO special, dontcha know, SO SPECIAL. She doesn't need pesky things like FEMINISM or FOOD or NORMAL HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS. She has THE WORK! And her coworker/fellow grad student is just TOO GOOD to be CHRONICALLY ILL! He must HIDE it! <br><br>I don't need my main characters to be likable, but I gotta have some reason to care how it all shakes out for them.<br><br>Look, I really loved Yellowface and Babel, so I was quite surprised that I didn't really like this much. I get that it's supposed to be a tale of not killing yourself for academia and/or terrible "mentors," but it doesn't seem like Alice learns a whole lot. I guess it was innovative in that it was a dude, for once, who got <spoiler>fridged, temporarily, in order to advance her plot, but I didn't care that much.</spoiler><br><br>The magic system and the intellectual rigor were not turn-offs. I get it; it's Cambridge. And the writing itself was 99% perfectly fine. (Writers, please never make me read "quirked a smile" again, though.) It's just that, if we're writing a story about fucked up priorities, I guess I just expected a little more revelation other than <spoiler>"Now I will have an undead boyfriend who is ashamed of his health."</spoiler><br><br>YMMV!</div>
Rated Doctor Who: The Guardian of the Solar System 10/10
As much as I love the Eighth Doctor audio adventures, this (along with its first 2 parts) is the best storyline I've heard from Big Finish... And not just because of my undying love for Jean Marsh. The writing is great, the sound, all of it. Beyond recommend all three for any Doctor Who fan.
Wants to read The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 1
Rated A Dance with Dragons 8/10
a blast, although it suffers a little from the fact that it's (a) interminable thanks to a lot of GRRM's writing quirks (b) overshadowed by the knowledge that even though it's interminable, it still won't actually *end*, and the next book is who knows how far off.<br/><br/>
Really delightful book by a theoretical particle physicist about some of the latest developments in science, especially the Large Hadron Collider in Europe - but sine it's a couple of years old there have been some developments since then. Especially useful as a window into how scientists think about problems. If I had any reservations it's that some of it is really well above my head ore super-technical and I had to skim it - there are certain things about particle physics I'm just never going to really understand with my limited scientific/mathematical background although Randall is very game to try and explain genuinely weird stuff like super-symmetry and very small extra dimensions.
Rated Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion 8/10
Tolentino is a great writer - her project is taking the tools of literary criticism and applying it, deftly and clearly, to non-literary texts: broad cultural trends, institutions, her own life. These essays vary from bright and fun to heavy, but they all come from the same sharp critical eye.
Rated Throne of Glass 8/10
Fun and engaging, if a little too romance-tropey for me to be totally on board. More or less tells a story with a beginning/middle/end but has some of that "we expect you to read this whole series" structural frustration.
Rated Thinking in Systems, A primer, Donella H. Meadows 8/10
very interesting, though i think a lot of the insights of this book are less striking now than they may have been in the 1990s when Meadows was first writing it. the fact that some of this mode of analysis feels familiar and baked-in or like common sense is a tribute to Meadows and her peers. interesting politics here - it's like an argument made to technocrats from a technocratic-eye-view about the importance of skepticism of technocracy, and while some of it reads conservative she's also explicitly hostile to the Reagan-era ideological paradigm shift. a lot of insights here that feel very relevant today, in an era of both sclerotic, fumbling systems and authoritarian attacks on them.
Rated Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity 8/10
Very striking - journalism that reads like a novel. A few years in the lives of families living at the edge of subsistence in a slum in Mumbai, right behind the airport and luxury hotels that symbolize a rising global upper class. Boo, the author, mostly removes herself from the story and narrates from the perspectives of her protagonists as they deal with poverty, corruption, religious conflict and their efforts to carve out a space for themselves. Beautifully done.
Rated The Inferno of Dante Alighieri 10/10
Feels weird to give a classic of the Western canon a star rating, but it’s my first time with it and I think the translation and commentary Ciardi offers is very good.<br/><br/>An inspiration to petty people everywhere: you can create something enduring, resonant, widely beloved and taken seriously for centuries and still have it basically be a burn book to settle a bunch of esoteric political and personal scores. <br/><br/>It’s not going to be a surprise that so much of Western culture is downstream of this, from religious imagery to fantasy literature to heavy metal lyrics, but it’s interesting as always to be able to see the well-worn references and images in their original context. And if there’s anything I want to explore in more detail I certainly don’t need to wonder if there’s an explanatory essay I could read. There’s seven centuries’ worth! <br/><br/>Glad I read this, and it’s more engaging and less chore-y than I expected.
Rated Autobiography 6/10
My feelings about Morrissey are conflicted, for a lot of reasons, and I wasn't surprised to find this book kind of insufferable. Very little about the process of making music, tons and tons of petty passive-aggressive score-settling that I think is supposed to be "delicious" but is actually kind of sad. Also, there are no chapter breaks; it's like a seven-hour monologue. Still, somehow glad I read it.