About five years ago, I got fed up with Goodreads and decided that I could just build my own replacement. That turned out to be shockingly easy - the /reading section of my site runs on Jekyll and is free to maintain. For a long time I basically just maintained this as a minimalist equivalent of what I’d had on Goodreads - date that I finished reading the book, rating, nice little cover art images…
Last week I was in Singapore on with the IFES launch of Cyber and Information Resilience Elections Network (CIREN) Asia-Pacific. It was an honor and honestly a lot of fun. CIREN is global initiative, now well into its second year, to increase the ability of election management bodies – AKA EMBs, AKA national election commissions – to prevent, detect, and respond to the cyber and information…
I just finished reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and of course it’s all the things the everyone says: direct, heartbreaking, wise, necessary. One review included at the end of the edition I read says that it is vital reading “for any one who has lost some one or who will someday lose someone,” which I suppose is everybody. And fair enough. Her highly personal, introspective…
Gray was a modern Scottish author who I somehow hadn’t heard of. I appreciated his very short stories in this collection even more than the longer ones, in particular for their combination of whimsy and unstable allegory. His writing draws on folks like Swift or even Aesop, but at the last minute there is always unsettling lack of a simple moral or political message to the story. Except to indict…
A fun read, but. It’s interesting to read about Le Carré’s reception as the deliverer of a more “realistic” spy than James Bond at the time of publication. His anti-hero in this book is edgier but basically just reads like a nihilistic, alcoholic misogynist in largely the same mold through today’s eyes. This novel kind of calls out masculinity, the zero-sum destructiveness of the Cold War, and so…
Beloved is every bit as heart-rending, beautiful, and erudite as I expected. It’s incredibly brilliant from a technical, writerly standpoint. I also appreciated its weaponization of the gothic novel genre for racial justice and black feminist purposes. In the gothic novel of the 18th/19th centuries, we often see captured women whose only power is the power of refusal - to say “no,” to flee -…
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 Otherness to compost-human ecologies, and it does not disappoint!
I appreciated the thoughtful and de-colonizing approach the author took to Bangladesh’s complex cultural and geopolitical histories.
A thoughtful and practical guide to American Buddhist mindfulness and meditation practices
I don’t often re-read books, but this was a good choice. Murakami’s “running novelist” memoir turns out to also be a meditation on aging. This is not something I picked up on when I first read it, even though it wasn’t all that long ago. Murakami discusses his simultaneous growth as a writer and as a runner with a kind of disarming literalness. He avoids grand narratives or grand theories of mind…