book
Wants to read The War of the End of the World
Rated The Elements of Style 10/10
Not my first read, and my copy is so old that the bookmark in it is a Blockbuster Video rent-6-get-one-free card. Some of the advice here is dated and all of it is opinionated in a charming-but-cranky way but it’s a delight to read and a good reminder that writing is communication. In an age when so much of the the “written” “content” you come across was not written but “generated,” a stern but encouraging voice telling you to structure, write, to rewrite, and to think about the reader’s experience is refreshing.
Rated A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? 10/10
terrific, and necessary. as part of their eventual tribunals Musk and Bezos will need to do a book report on this.
Rated Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince 10/10
Wants to read Golden Hill: A Novel of Old New York
Rated Persuasion 10/10
the ability to accurately narrate a character’s interior justification at face value and yet still convey the gap between it and the real world is a kind of magic trick, and to also make it funny, a little miracle
Rated Women & Power: A Manifesto 8/10
Two good, brief essays on the titular subject by a terrific historian who uses her knowledge of Ancient Rome to inform her perspective.
Rated Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval 8/10
A remarkable and unusual social history, composed of novelistic vignettes drawn out from scanty archival material about the lives of Black women in the early 20th century. The project here is to center as history the lives of people who are on the margins and whose stories don’t get told in the traditional forms of history - Black, poor, queer, and otherwise in violation of the norms of a heavily policed and stratified era.
Rated Player's Handbook 8/10
I think they did a really good job with this edition - putting the detailed instructions on how the game is actually played up front, for instance. The art is nice and I mostly like the minor changes they’ve made to the game mechanics and how those mechanics are explained.
Rated Sleepless Nights 6/10
Not really my thing, I guess - a sort of flown lyrical amalgamation of remembrances that don’t really hang together.
Wants to read The Left Hand of Darkness
Finished reading Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Rated Crying in H Mart 8/10
A really lovely memoir of the author’s fraught relationship with her Korean-immigrant mother and the Korean food that bonded them. I went in expecting this to be very sad and it is - the subject is very much loss and grief, and the ravages of both cancer and cancer treatment come up in detail. But it’s also very warm and thoughtful, with much of the book focused on how Zauner uses cooking, music, writing, and travel to keep her mother with her. Brief and really well written.