Library
This library is a record of books that I’ve read, with a written response to each. There are no ratings here. I limit recommendations, and I do not write with the aim of reviewing. A book might make me think about something else, I may engage extensively with one passage, or I might evaluate the argument of the text as a whole. The texture of my responses will shift depending on the text.
One caveat: the write-ups from before 2024 read more like book reviews, because that’s what they were. Most started life on Goodreads, a few in graduate seminars, back before this site existed.
Some of my responses are short (perhaps a few paragraphs) while others may be entire essays. The amount written is a reflection not of the quality of the book, but of my own thinking.
My books are listed in reverse-chronological order by when I completed them. Each entry is listed in full bibliographic form, with a short annotation below. Some of these I own, others I do not.
2024
Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. Reprint ed. New York: Ballantine Books, 2012.
The diagnosis outlived its examples, still relevant, which is itself the alarming part.
Abbott, Edwin A. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. New York: Penguin Books, 2020.
A “math book” whose dimensional puzzle delivers a Victorian satire of arbitrary hierarchy.
About as good as the format allows; Parmenides, Empedocles, and Heraclitus still feel like live options.
Mismarketed; a Nobel laureate’s memoir whose account of metaphor and unconscious steeping made me feel less stupid.
Beckman, Milo. Math Without Numbers. New York: Dutton, 2021.
A gentle lure that left me wanting more rigor; the keeper is its quiet Platonism and my resistance.
Westerhoff, Jan. Reality: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Answers honestly that we don’t know; the vertigo of questioning is good company, not pathology.
Each scene dwarfs the one before; “you are bugs” inverted into something closer to awe than despair.
Easy to dismiss as platitude until the closing lines, which gave me chills: choose what to worship.
Reduces to “stop being rigid”; Le Guin’s version is the one I’d hand someone.
Rovelli, Carlo. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. New York: Riverhead Books, 2016.
Lovely prose, but the physicalist account of mind is offered as settled when it’s vibes.
Watts, Alan. What Is Tao?. Novato: New World Library, 2010.
Thinking you’ve grasped Daoism proves you haven’t; the comprehension I chase comes by stopping the chase.
The dark-forest answer to Fermi is one of the bleakest, most generative ideas in SF.
Wark, McKenzie. A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.
The vectoralist class scheme is the salvageable idea; I left feeling under-rewarded for the effort.
Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de. Le Petit Prince. Paris: Gallimard, 2012.
A rebuke to adult seriousness, a touchstone I return to precisely to be mocked by it.
“Folding Beijing” is the one I keep; a literature reorganizing genre concerns around a different social ground.
My first DFW: he wants you to examine your own preconceptions, not adopt his.
Frase, Peter. Four Futures: Life After Capitalism. London: Verso, 2016.
Four post-capitalist scenarios; rentism reads most likely, exterminism non-hypothetical.
Filiu, Jean-Pierre. Gaza: A History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Informative but oddly inert: notes accreted into sequence rather than narrative.
Jadaliyya pieces that now read like dispatches from another world; the anonymous Syrian dissident’s defiance is what stays.
A Candide for the Palestinian condition that sustains its comic momentum where Hašek’s Švejk flags.
Siken, Richard. Crush. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
Poems on power, masculinity, and loneliness from a gay vantage, read mainly as the staircase to War of the Foxes.
Darwish, Mahmoud. In the Presence of Absence. Brooklyn: Archipelago, 2011.
A self-elegy whose marvel is a writer composing his own absence while still present.
The title novella reads like Steinbeck until its ending detonates; symbol carries political argument without stating it.
Colquhoun, Matt. Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher. London: Repeater Books, 2020.
The first book on Fisher, strongest where Colquhoun writes his own grief.
The six-declarations frame has power and a cost: everyday Palestinian life is left mostly off the page.
Essays on Gaza’s collapse; Jamal’s “Let Me Dream” is where the abstraction becomes a person.
Storr, Anthony. Freud: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Freud as system-builder, not just clinician: a philosopher despite his protests, and that’s where his durability lies.
Alareer’s students’ stories, given terrible new weight by his killing; humor works where reportage would flatten.
Darwish, Mahmoud. Mural. London: Verso, 2009.
Poetry as the one home exile can’t confiscate; it vindicated a thought I hadn’t trusted.
Thinner and more online than promised, missing Fisher’s core; I kept the Marcuse–Fisher link on capital and desire.
Palestinian SF imagining 2048; Ghalayini’s introduction gave as much as the strong, uneven stories themselves.
Macfarlane, Robert. The Wild Places. Reprint ed. New York: Penguin Books, 2008.
The gift isn’t the answer but the attention: a way of looking I don’t otherwise practice.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. New York: International Publishers, 1948.
Unconvinced by the prescriptions, but the diagnosis could have been written today.
The Parable of the Law is the crux; I read my own life in it.
Persuasive until the last chapter’s too-vague “conscious realism”; what remains is the inescapable Kantian cul-de-sac.
Uneven and organized against its own arc, but the Acid Communism intro is the prize.
The Apollonian/Dionysian split is the keeper; useful to watch a thinker get something wrong in motion.
Camus, Albert. The Stranger. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
Precise on the human condition, but I’ll take the existentialist diagnosis without the absurdist resignation.
Tanner, Michael. Nietzsche: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Less introduction than argument with other scholars, but the wit is the thing: philosophical comedy I wish were common.
Most valuable as the seedbed: every later idea here before it learned to move.
Wells, Martha. All Systems Red. Murderbot Diaries, 1. New York: Tor Books, 2017.
Social anxiety rendered as an SF premise; the wish to do the job and be left alone is the appeal.
Tolle, Eckhart. A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose. New York: Plume, 2006.
The Power of Now repackaged and duller; it only confirmed the earlier book had already said it.
Miéville, China. Perdido Street Station. New Crobuzon, 1. Reprint ed. London: Pan Books, 2011.
Miéville’s invention is staggering; it grants a permission about form I’m not sure I’d grant myself.
Reframes breakdown as disintegration; it mapped onto what I was going through.
The mindfulness core is sound and ancient; the syncretism works only as long as it stays figurative.
Robinson, Dave and Judy Groves. Introducing Philosophy: A Graphic Guide. London: Icon Books, 2014.
So compressed the ideas barely cohere, and wholly Western; useful only as a map of what it omits.
Fisher, Mark. Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures. London: Repeater Books, 2020.
His last, most hopeful lectures: imagining the outside was the whole project.
Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books, 2016.
The eerie half is stronger, and the application that stuck is to capitalism itself.
Chambers, Becky. To Be Taught, If Fortunate. London: Hodderscape, 2019.
Alien specifics, recognizable responses: quiet evidence for a shared human substrate.
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Reprint ed. New York: Vintage Books, 2018.
The refusal of consolation is itself a fidelity; the technical first half is a slog.
Hauntology, mourning futures we failed to take, is the durable idea.
Gibson, William. Neuromancer. Sprawl Trilogy, 1. Reprint ed. New York: Ace Books, 2018.
Read through Fisher, capitalism is the arrived “unnamable Thing,” and the tragedy is that no one even fights it.
The prompts have real value, but the framework privatizes mental health; my objection is political.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. Winchester: Zer0 Books, 2009.
Reorganized more of my thinking than any theory before or since; under the despair, buried optimism.
Zimmer, Carl, ed. The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023. New York: Mariner Books, 2023.
Climate and pandemic dominate; science writing works as a record of what a year was afraid of.
Singer, Peter. Marx: A Very Short Introduction. Revised ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
A clean refresher, strongest on Marx’s formation; communist states’ failure doesn’t touch his force as a critic of capital.
He may be the writer who best registers the modern condition of being permanently on trial.
Can’t decide what it is; a clear case of how a missing thesis sinks good material.
Robertson, Ritchie. Kafka: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
The law-and-guilt chapters reframe Kafka around institutional power; the fiction becomes legible in a new way.
Gibran, Kahlil. The Prophet. Reprint ed. Ballingslöv: Wisehouse Classics, 2016.
Aphoristic wisdom that wears Christian symbolism but leans east; go slowly or the density passes through unregistered.
Milne, A. A. The House at Pooh Corner. Winnie-the-Pooh, 2. New York: Puffin Books, 1992.
The warmth is structural, not sentimental; Milne means it.
Eagleton, Terry. How to Read Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
Worth it for the demonstration of close attention more than the argument.
Gorman, Amanda. Call Us What We Carry. New York: Viking, 2021.
Its real subject is how collective trauma gets forgotten; it pulled Covid back from the blank spot.
Milne, A. A. Winnie-the-Pooh. Winnie-the-Pooh, 1. New York: Dutton, 1988.
Milne’s whimsy, care, and zaniness hold up; some children’s books are written past the children.
Kaur, Rupi. milk and honey. Toronto: Self-Published, 2014.
Weak verse, real emotional charge; it forced the question whether I undervalue poetry aiming at feeling over craft.
Liu, Ken. The Paper Menagerie: and Other Stories. New York: Saga Press, 2016.
Striking how naturally the speculative frame carries the weight of inheritance and loss.
Absurd over-engineering whose real lesson is method; the xkcd energy that shaped me, intact.
Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.
Beautiful lines I couldn’t assemble into a whole; perhaps the opacity is the point.
Internal-alchemy metaphysics, the opposite of the Daodejing’s simplicity; useful mainly as the contrast clarifying what Daoism is for.
Miéville, China. The City and the City. London: Pan Books, 2011.
The mystery resolves limply, but the conceit is one of the best literalizations of ideology I’ve read.
The simplicity critics call simplistic is the actual argument; the rare primer whose form matches its content.
An interesting constraint whose forced vagueness drains the cosmos of its emotional weight.
The one durable change: keeping my phone in grayscale, which loosened its grip more than I expected.
Intertextuality as generosity rather than gatekeeping; the principle I want to carry into teaching.
What the sky would actually look like from other worlds; dull until it isn’t, the reward in the detail.
Gay, Ross. Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015.
Mostly didn’t land, but the recurring figs taught me more about how I read than about Gay.
Chambers, Becky. A Prayer for the Crown-Shy. Monk & Robot, 2. New York: Tor.com, 2022.
Turns the first book’s permission into practice; theology in a minor key, grace without a god.
I’ve kept the false/true anxiety distinction; my true anxiety pulls toward reading and writing, away from society.
Chiang, Ted. Stories of Your Life: and Others. Reprint ed. New York: Vintage Books, 2010.
The clearest case I know of form determining consciousness; “Hell Is the Absence of God” lodged deeper.
Chambers, Becky. A Psalm for the Wild-Built. Monk & Robot, 1. New York: Tor.com, 2021.
Its wager that purpose is not owed was the exact permission I needed.
Manai, Yamen. La marche de l'incertitude. Tunis: Elyzad, 2008.
Less the plot than the reminder that reading in a second language re-sensitizes you to prose itself.