|
User
Reviews 4
Approval 87%
Soundoffs 167
Album Ratings 1841
Objectivity 56%
Last Active 10-31-22 8:43 am
Joined 08-02-17
Review Comments 6,098
| Book List
give me recs for books I'll buy and probably won't read | | 1 |  | The Flashbulb
Soundtrack to a Vacant Life
Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, 1994.
this has been on my bookshelf for a couple years now, and have unfortunately never gotten around to it. It examines the psychological impact war has on the human psyche, comparing soldiers in Homer's Illiad with personal accounts of Vietnam veterans who suffer from PTSD. as a classics historian, it's often hella easy to disconnect yourself with the personal experiences of those of the past. however, when presented with the stark reality of war, esp in the ancient context of phalanx formation using weaponry meant to kill your opponent up close and personal, how can events affect the mind? | | 2 |  | Sigur Ros
( )
Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-eye View of the World, 2001.
juxtaposes 4 types of human desires reflected in ways we selectively grow, breed, and genetically engineer plants. the tulip and beauty, marijuana and intoxication, the apple and sweetness, the potato and control. | | 3 |  | Fall of Efrafa
Inle
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 1938.
Orwell's personal experience and observations in fighting Fascism during the Spanish Civil War | | 4 |  | Jesu
Everyday I Get Closer to the Light from Which I Came
Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 1933.
a psychoanalytic exploration of how fascists came into power in Germany due to a symptom of increased sexual repression. | | 5 |  | Jack Rose
Kensington Blues
Laurent Binet, HHhH: A Novel, 2010.
a blend of historical truth, personal memory, and imagination, recounting the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by 2 Czech soldiers during WWII | | 6 |  | Brian Eno
Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks
Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, 1976.
a study of popular culture in the 16th century of a dude accused of heresy during the Inquisition, using its trial records to illustrate the religious and social conflicts of society the main character lived in.
mention: Davis' The Return of Martin Guerre, a similar emic study of a trial case on human identity | | 7 |  | Paysage d'Hiver
Winterkälte
Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World, 2010.
I've always been interested in the theory of just how caffeine and stimulants jump-started the Enlightenment period, but never got around to studying it.
mention: Mintz' Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. | | 8 |  | Burial
Kindred
Jonathan Spence, The Death of Woman Wang, 1998.
" Life in the northeastern county of T’an-ch’eng emerges here as an endless cycle of floods, plagues, crop failures, banditry, and heavy taxation. Against this turbulent background a tenacious tax collector, an irascible farmer, and an unhappy wife act out a poignant drama at whose climax the wife, having run away from her husband, returns to him, only to die at his hands." | | 9 |  | Sweet Trip
Velocity : Design : Comfort
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 2010.
discusses race-related issues AA and poc face in the U.S. "Though the conventional point of view holds that systemic racial discrimination mostly ended with the civil rights movement reforms of the 1960s, Alexander posits that the U.S. criminal justice system uses the War on Drugs as a primary tool for enforcing traditional, as well as new modes of discrimination and oppression." thus, mass incarceration a new form of Jim Crow | | 10 |  | Malfet
The Way to Avalon
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 1990.
post-structuralist examination of the conception that sex is a natural given category and gender is an acquired cultural-social category | | 11 |  | Sade
The Best Of Sade
Bernadette J. Brooten, Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism, 1996.
my undergrad study focused primarily on cultural history of the ancient Mediterranean, my thesis on the diachronic evolution of pederasty from Greece to Rome, and having a case study of Philip II of Macedon and Alexander the Great's homoeroticism published, I was lead to believe that female homoeroticism didn't have a space due to lack of evidence aside from Sappho and, maybe, Sulpicia. this, however, isn't necessarily the case: "Whereas pre-Roman-period Greek and Latin literature contains very few references to female homoeroticism, the awareness of sexual relations between women increases dramatically in the Roman period, as a detailed study of astrological texts, Greek love spells, Greek medical writings, ancient dream interpretation, and other sources reveal." | | 12 |  | Superheaven
Jar
2 books assigned before the end of the semester: Edward Said's Orientalism and Michel Foucault's Discipline & Punish. | |
kevbogz
11.07.20 | music list are my favorite albums from my favorite artists.
tell me about what books you've been reading. if you haven't been keeping up, what about some favorite books you've read in the past? | unclereich
11.07.20 | im reading eichmann in jerusalem | kevbogz
11.07.20 | haven't read Breakfast at Tiffany's, but I did live up the street from a restaurant that had the same name when I was in SF. I think fiction is cool, but I've usually just stuck to fantasy/sci-fi like Tolkein and Herbert
how's the read Unc? it sounds super interesting, as does her Origins of Totalitarianism | davezillaMP3
11.07.20 | "The Poppy War" R.F KUNG
a fantasy reimagining of the Chinese-Japanese conflict during/before WWII and Mao's rise to power. that is the short version (I cannot really talk much more about the book as it would be spoilers, even my emotions on how the book makes me feel is kinda a spoiler)
"Jade City" Fonda Lee
(Maifa mixed in with magic and martial arts)
"The emporors soul" Brandon Sanderson (its a novella so its like a 2-4 hour read, but the work building and narrative is so good. Like this dude did better world-building and character development in 175 pages then what most novels do over 1000+ page series)
and if you want easy-reading non-fiction
"Spark Joy" Marie Kondo (been doing a lot of that organizing and tidying stuff as of late) | unclereich
11.07.20 | @kev she is a master at crafting sentences. it is very much what you would expect of a philosopher but I have enjoyed it for testing some of my preconceived notions about the content of which she is exploring. it is worthwhile for anyone who enjoys 20th century philosophy and especially ww2 history(I read more ww2 history than I care to admit) | budgie
11.07.20 | still my favorite books are mark mazower's dark continent: europe in the 20th century and adrian goldsworthy's the punic wars | Lord(e)Po)))ts
11.07.20 | Peep everybody poops | kevbogz
11.07.20 | those all sound real cool Dave. I wanna ask, if u had to pick only 1, which would be your favorite, but it sounds like The Poppy War is it. tbh if I had to pick 1 it'd be that too.
@unc im actually like 40 pages into Foucault's Discipline and Punishment. so far he's only talked about public execution/corporal punishment, and torture as a means of criminal investigation, but has dished out some nuggets about the evolution of the judicial system to focus less and less on the body, and more on the "soul." idk just how much it fits with Eichmann just yet, but i would honestly love to finish this and skim Eichmann to see if there are any parallels. I wonder, too, just how much the banal, conscious-less "I was just doing what my superiors told me" fits into Reich's sexual repression theory:
"As children, members of the (German) proletariat learned from their parents to suppress nearly all sexual desire and - instead - expend the repressed energy into authoritarian idealism. Hence, in adults, any rebellious and sexual impulses experienced would cause fundamental anxiety and - therefore, instead - social control is used to reduce anxiety. Fear of revolt, as well as fear of sexuality, were thus "anchored" in the 'character structure' of the masses (the majority). This influenced the irrationality of the 'people' and allowed (irrational) 'populistic' ideology to flourish." while idk if I buy it, I guess it doesn't really matter, I do think it sounds like a pretty interesting, if comical, theory.
@budg I actually went to a Goldsworthy conference back in like 2018. dude is a natural scholar and genuinely enjoys ancient history and discussing it | CruelDouglas
11.07.20 | If you can find it, W.E.B. DuBois's Black Reconstruction In America is an essential read. | CruelDouglas
11.07.20 | For fiction though, my favourite books I've read recently are Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by William H. Gass, The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock, and right now I'm loving Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. | CruelDouglas
11.07.20 | I've been getting a lot of Vietnam War books recently, currently hoping to get copies of Pete Hamill's Vietnam: The Real War and Caroline Page's US Propaganda During the Vietnam War 1965-73 | unclereich
11.07.20 | right now I'm loving Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
what an utterly amazing book that is. joyce has a way of writing that I have yet to encounter again. that book really shaped my college career for the better | CruelDouglas
11.07.20 | One thing I love about Joyce in any of his works is that you can really feel his love of language with everything he did. From Dubliners to Finnegans Wake, there is something so surreally masterful and beautiful about how he wrote, but at the same time his writing could be so cheeky and playful. Just a pure love of the word and all it could do. | budgie
11.07.20 | "dude is a natural scholar and genuinely enjoys ancient history and discussing it"
no way!! he's like the coolest dude. i've watched some discussions with him, would be awesome to ask him some questions | zakalwe
11.07.20 | I bet 10 is riveting. | Sinternet
11.07.20 | have u read the shock doctrine | davezillaMP3
11.07.20 | @Kevbogz yeah, it would be the best between the two novels (it is a trilogy, but I have only read the first book so far so if you only wanna read book one book you can totally do that! Jade City is great but does not have the same impact that the poppy war has.) | ReturnToRock
11.07.20 | For 2, What A Plant Knows by Daniel Chamowitz.
For 3, literally everything else he wrote, especially Down And Out In Paris And London. | TheAntichrist
11.07.20 | stephen king's rose madder | EyesWideShut
11.07.20 | @CruelDouglas I read The Devil All The Time a couple years back, p nasty book lol but I kinda got tired of the nonstop grotesque characters after awhile.
I had my eye on Butcher's Crossing by John Edward Williams, looks good. | americanohno
11.07.20 | the coolest thing about Foucault is how he said AIDS wasnt real then died of AIDS. | Winesburgohio
11.07.20 | 5 is an absolute cracker, strongly recommended. i adore Foucault but Discipline and Punish isn't one of his more accessible works be warned in advance. i'd go History of Sexuality first if you can | DocSportello
11.07.20 | Moby Dick and Ulysses if you haven't read them yet
Faith Healer by Brian Friel
| Supercoolguy64
11.07.20 | Yo where’s goosebumps | kevbogz
11.07.20 | love all the recs boys, excited for thanksgiving break I can start compiling a bigger list. a lot of these sound super interesting and right up my alley
"5 is an absolute cracker, strongly recommended. i adore Foucault but Discipline and Punish isn't one of his more accessible works be warned in advance. i'd go History of Sexuality first if you can"
yeah I'm like half way thru and have to constantly re-read because my eyes glaze tf over. the primary sources he uses from executions are dope tho. | kevbogz
11.07.20 | I've actually sat on Ulysses for years now cuz I'm intimidated by its length. it's one of those "I know I'm not gonna finish this" books, which is weird because it's supposed to mirror Homer's Odyssey? | kevbogz
11.07.20 | kiss me then | budgie
11.07.20 | poor kev has to deal with whitesuprem spam | kevbogz
11.07.20 | 11.07.20
[Delete] | Winesburgohio
11.08.20 | all claims about Ulysses' difficulty are completely over-stated. once you get into it it's a really brisk, enthralling, frequently hilarious read | kevbogz
11.08.20 | fuck yeah, that's good to know. I just have a tendency of getting half way thru a book and calling it, like Paradise Lost. but Paradise Lost is high fluff English and that def didn't help | CruelDouglas
11.08.20 | The only Joyce that's truly hard to tackle is Finnegans Wake, if only for the fact that it's hard to grasp any narrative strings. As a piece of writing it's still very enthralling to see what he's done with the language.
@EyesWideShut: see, the thing I like about The Devil All the Time is how it mirrors its very bleak and disturbing elements with extremely tender and beautiful moments lf compassion and longing by its good characters, or the moments of sadness felt by them in turn. It's a book that I feel is truly empathetic of the way people work, which is rare for a story that has such dark subject matter. Usually dark stories are just constantly grim all the time in order to be edgy, but The Devil All the Time actually knows and dives into some really beautiful trains of thought and heartbreaking moments. | kevbogz
11.08.20 | I'm not familiar with The Devil All the Time, but I did read Nausea and a lot of Bukowski in high school and based my entire junior year personality off of them because I'm gay | CruelDouglas
11.08.20 | I think everyone read a lot of Bukowski in high school, forever doomed to haunt our bookshelves for eternity as we shudder when we walk by and think of how, at one point in time, we thought the height of poetry was an old alcoholic dude who abused women | kevbogz
11.08.20 | yeah pretty fucking shitty. I injured my back on the job while I was deep in Bukowski and was hella doped up on painkillers and thought it was a good idea to stick n poke "Don't Try" on my ankle. lmaooooo | DocSportello
11.09.20 | To echo Winesburg re: Ulysses . . . it really does get a bad rap, and the first three chapters are the most difficult (technically chapter 14 is, but you get the hang of it by then), but for the most part it's incredibly fun and funny. the parallels to the odyssey are pretty overblown/irrelevant tbh. i'd suggest trying to read a chapter a day. read the shmoop/sparknotes alongside it (it's okay to do so!) until you get the hang of it, and try not to decide if you'll stop until chapter 7 ("Aeolus", the news-headline one)
but it's a delight. a one of a kind novel. it balances frighteningly pertinent critiques of xenophobic fury and individual/national identity with an extended parody (or embracing?) of cheap smut fiction, and then there's a 100+ page psychoanalytic stage-play featuring Shakespeare, The End of the World, the protagonist as antichrist, and that at one point seems to anticipate the Internet age. and that's just like a fraction of it | kevbogz
11.10.20 | speaking of James Joyce: https://www.wired.com/2008/06/mp3-sweet-trip/ |
|
