Once in a while, you find a book that follows a different pattern. It doesn’t exactly “break all the rules”, but neither does it follow one of the popular narrative structures. This is the art house vs the summer blockbuster; an artist’s personal vision vs the Pontiac Aztec. The Southern Reach trilogy is no Aztec.
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2025-08-14
The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer
2025-08-14
The Intuitive Body by Wendy Palmer
The Intuitive Body is an explanation of Wendy Palmer’s techniques and practices for embodiment. These are an amalgamation of several physical and spiritual traditions filtered through her own experience. The result is a healthy helping of California Aikido with some Buddhism-flavored sauce.
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2025-08-04
Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer
The study of history is a peculiar paradox. One would think that the past is known; after all, we were there. This is technically true, but reality is not so straightforward. Even if humanity recorded every event and every thought, there would inevitably be gaps. The simple distance that grows with every passing day means that records are lost, context is forgotten, cultural norms drift, and interpreting what records do survive becomes more treacherous. Our efforts to interpret the past inevitably become part of the past which inexorably drifts into the mist. In “Inventing the Renaissance”, Ada Palmer presents a history of the Renaissance while unpacking some of the baggage around the Renaissance and histories thereof.
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2025-08-04
Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green
John Green has gone down a rabbit-hole in his distinctive self-aware, obsessive-compulsive sort of way. This slender volume contains histories of Tuberculosis at different scales, from the grand sweeps of civilization to the individual, and the view is alternately bleak and inspiring (bleakspiring?). While technically a writer, Green could be described as a musician of the heart. This is a story of a disease, medicine, culture, but mostly a story of humanity, our mistakes, our struggles, our drive to do better. This is an important story, told skillfully and succinctly. I think the more people who know it, the better off we will all be.
2025-06-13
Escape from Manus Prison by Jaivet Ealom
I am not qualified to author immigration policy. However, I am not convinced that those who are writing immigration policy are any better at it than I would be. I know the view is different from the top, and balancing the inordinate number of competing interests is nigh-impossible (heavy head, crown, etc). However, in many cases there seems to be a complete absence of basic human kindness. And again, I know that national policy is sometimes a numbers game; adjusting conditions so that there is less overall suffering even if some people still do suffer. I can hear the argument forming already, “to speak of kindness at such a scale is naive”. To which I say, read this book. There is no world in which this sort of suffering is necessary. And to enable, to facilitate, to engineer such suffering is immoral.
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2025-05-26
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
This is a fairly basic time-travel story told through correspondence. There is nothing especially novel about it and nothing in particular to recommend it. It is fairly abstract. The grand sweeps of a cosmic struggle are portrayed through vague poetic gestures. The interesting things happen at a great distance, and what happens in the foreground feels shallow and repetitious. It is not poetic enough to stand on language alone, and there is not much plot to speak of, so it just orbits itself for a while, like a montage, building to its inevitable conclusion.
2025-05-26
Beaverland by Leila Philip
Leila Philip gives us a brief history of beavers in the United States. For those of you who have not yet heard, beavers were a kind of a big deal before the white man nearly wiped them out to make a buck. They are still a big deal, environmentally speaking, but these days they occupy more of a subculture in the popular consciousness. In any case, Philip provides a personal tour of some beaver-relevant sights and figures: modern trapping, Johann Jacob Astor, Dorothy Richards, Grey Owl, indigenous stories and traditions, a little genocide (no tour of US history is complete without it), and some effluvial geomorphology.
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2025-05-26
The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
Oh, Annabelle… I have rarely been so worried to pick up a book because I fear what I may be forced to witness. But this is no grand calamity. This is a human story of human tragedies on an unavoidably relatable human scale. There is so much sadness packed between these pages, so many people trying to reach other. You observe these characters from within their own heads; they are immediately comprehensible and sympathetic, and you just want to stop them from hurting themselves. You just want to reach out and help them. They’re so close. But how can you reach them when they can’t reach each other? It’s kind of amazing.
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2025-05-15
Notes From a Small Island by Bill Bryson
Bill Bryson partakes of that particular style of travel wherein one checks into a hotel and then just goes for a walk with minimal, if any, guidance. Passing judgement on any place that rates as a city or even a large town based solely on what you encounter within walking distance of wherever your lodgings happen to be strikes me as miraculous. It also sounds, to me, like an entirely unpleasant way to see a place, but Bryson is a seasoned traveler, and I will defer to his experience. The tour that is the subject of this book is a rather unusual one, so perhaps I am being unfair in my judgement.
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