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Dec. 22nd, 2019 07:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kradeelavbooks in: latter half of 2019
one of the habits I've actually found myself picking up again is booooooks books books god bless. tbh i have always sempai-admired @queenlua's casual book review posts, so in addition to the more pragmatic goodreads review, I'll mention a few that I thought were notable?
Permanent Record
jesus christ this was such a gutpunch i wasn't quite sobbing like a baby at my goddamn work desk but it was pretty close. was expecting a much dryer 'man with a manifesto' type of screed, or a hacker bro harping on about freedom of speech shit we both care about but in a very sweaty-hoodie-over-cheetos sort of way lol, but what bowled me over was his humanity and humility. the dude breathes a humbleness and a sincerity I wish SJ types had, it's nuts, and this was from a former spook. (i mean, part of my very cynically notes that his training shows that I got that impression after all; so a morbid side of me wonders if he leaves that persona there because it's useful and - agghh this is the kind of emotionally nihilistic onion-layer cynicism i loathe.)
honestly this may have been a subconcious reason why I moved off of social media, the knife-bits for me was also hearing about this dude being raised on the same kind of curiosity-plus-the-old-internet as I was, with a naive trust in strangers that was thank god reciprocated in a good way, that honed street-smarts but also a deep grounded appreciation for what we have in terms of derpy strangers across JP/EN fandoms laffin over an anime and trading fic recs and being friends and just.....
i hate feeling so broken-dreams-and-jaded about this. that there was always a price tag that we didn't know what we were paying for it.
Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence by Rosemary Curb
okay wow picked this one up on a whim, i don't even know how i found it except through a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend's list, and was floored at the very lived-in ... dry, frank, emotionally isolated brutal matter-of-factness. 'we exist'. some of the stories got a little repetitive with the writing style; and i don't normally like anthologies but i was intensely charmed with how they laid out their spiel in the Church / their life back in "the world" where it was relevant, and then had a separate paragraph at the end that gave a summary of where they were twenty, thirty, forty years later down the road. gives me hope, and just on a personal level it's a lot of complicated feelings finally reading about lives that more closely match up my own experience in terms of late awakenings and life kind of sucking but also fumbling your way into eros in the most unexpected of places?
The Dictator's Handbook
sliiightly cheating since i still haven't technically finished yet but it's so goood in a way that's really hard to articulate especially with how academically-dense it can be on the front end. Basically it takes a few steps back in terms of social ... theory, and approaches it from a topic of greed and sociopathic selfishness and the kind of 'how do i stay on top' primitive animal level instinct that we all have, and applies it to CEO's and dictators and makes an incredibly sound set of economic theories based off of that. 'if people think like x in order to control the populations (with these three examples), then y and z happens, which is great if you want to be the next Mussolini but not so much if you're trying to form a thriving democrasy...' kind of surprisingly-black-cheeky humor.
one of the habits I've actually found myself picking up again is booooooks books books god bless. tbh i have always sempai-admired @queenlua's casual book review posts, so in addition to the more pragmatic goodreads review, I'll mention a few that I thought were notable?
Permanent Record
jesus christ this was such a gutpunch i wasn't quite sobbing like a baby at my goddamn work desk but it was pretty close. was expecting a much dryer 'man with a manifesto' type of screed, or a hacker bro harping on about freedom of speech shit we both care about but in a very sweaty-hoodie-over-cheetos sort of way lol, but what bowled me over was his humanity and humility. the dude breathes a humbleness and a sincerity I wish SJ types had, it's nuts, and this was from a former spook. (i mean, part of my very cynically notes that his training shows that I got that impression after all; so a morbid side of me wonders if he leaves that persona there because it's useful and - agghh this is the kind of emotionally nihilistic onion-layer cynicism i loathe.)
honestly this may have been a subconcious reason why I moved off of social media, the knife-bits for me was also hearing about this dude being raised on the same kind of curiosity-plus-the-old-internet as I was, with a naive trust in strangers that was thank god reciprocated in a good way, that honed street-smarts but also a deep grounded appreciation for what we have in terms of derpy strangers across JP/EN fandoms laffin over an anime and trading fic recs and being friends and just.....
i hate feeling so broken-dreams-and-jaded about this. that there was always a price tag that we didn't know what we were paying for it.
Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence by Rosemary Curb
okay wow picked this one up on a whim, i don't even know how i found it except through a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend's list, and was floored at the very lived-in ... dry, frank, emotionally isolated brutal matter-of-factness. 'we exist'. some of the stories got a little repetitive with the writing style; and i don't normally like anthologies but i was intensely charmed with how they laid out their spiel in the Church / their life back in "the world" where it was relevant, and then had a separate paragraph at the end that gave a summary of where they were twenty, thirty, forty years later down the road. gives me hope, and just on a personal level it's a lot of complicated feelings finally reading about lives that more closely match up my own experience in terms of late awakenings and life kind of sucking but also fumbling your way into eros in the most unexpected of places?
The Dictator's Handbook
sliiightly cheating since i still haven't technically finished yet but it's so goood in a way that's really hard to articulate especially with how academically-dense it can be on the front end. Basically it takes a few steps back in terms of social ... theory, and approaches it from a topic of greed and sociopathic selfishness and the kind of 'how do i stay on top' primitive animal level instinct that we all have, and applies it to CEO's and dictators and makes an incredibly sound set of economic theories based off of that. 'if people think like x in order to control the populations (with these three examples), then y and z happens, which is great if you want to be the next Mussolini but not so much if you're trying to form a thriving democrasy...' kind of surprisingly-black-cheeky humor.
