Things I am Reading
Jan. 9th, 2021 07:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anorthite "H is for Hawk", Helen Macdonald --> (temporarily) abandoned. The author is miserable, T.H.White is miserable, T.H. White's hawk is miserable. This depressed tripartite requires the reader to act as stable fourth pillar; the reader is also sort of miserable at the moment, and so unable to serve. Macdonald may have felt pressure to beef up the emotional journey component of the narrative here, but I want more hawk minutia. Will return at a happier moment.
"Nothing is True and Everything is Possible", Peter Pomerantsev --> completed. Huh. This guy has made a name for himself as a sort of specialist soothsayer on the spread of Russian political surrealism into Western "post-truth" politics, and this book seems likely have been structured so as to avoid retreads of previous subject matter. Surkov is such an enormous and diabolical character, and so compellingly sprung straight from the Russian literary tradition, that the other weird cults and case-by-case Orwellianisms discussed can't possibly compete. The documentary where I heard about Pomerantsev, "HyperNormalisation" (Curtis 2016), was, imo, a much better format choice and wove in better accessory content. The narrative has to centre around Surkov, not only because he is the architect, but because it's necessary to explore his existence solely as a character of his own creation in order to tell the story at all.
"I'll Be Gone in the Dark", Michelle McNamara --> completed. Unfortunately, even though this book is intended as a broader statement on the injustice of cold cases and the ecosystem of researchers addicted to them, I reread because the huge amounts of sensory and temporal detail make this book truly scary. Since this fear is both not the author's ultimate intent and not capable of contributing much to society, I felt guilty for rubbernecking, but I also had a really freaky dream about someone crawling around on the fire escape outside my bedroom window, which did even things out a bit.
Reading right now: "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", Edward Gibbon
"The Rise of Rome", Anthony Everitt
"Against Interpretation", Susan Sontag
"Nervous People and Other Satires", Mikhail Zoshchenko
"Nothing is True and Everything is Possible", Peter Pomerantsev --> completed. Huh. This guy has made a name for himself as a sort of specialist soothsayer on the spread of Russian political surrealism into Western "post-truth" politics, and this book seems likely have been structured so as to avoid retreads of previous subject matter. Surkov is such an enormous and diabolical character, and so compellingly sprung straight from the Russian literary tradition, that the other weird cults and case-by-case Orwellianisms discussed can't possibly compete. The documentary where I heard about Pomerantsev, "HyperNormalisation" (Curtis 2016), was, imo, a much better format choice and wove in better accessory content. The narrative has to centre around Surkov, not only because he is the architect, but because it's necessary to explore his existence solely as a character of his own creation in order to tell the story at all.
"I'll Be Gone in the Dark", Michelle McNamara --> completed. Unfortunately, even though this book is intended as a broader statement on the injustice of cold cases and the ecosystem of researchers addicted to them, I reread because the huge amounts of sensory and temporal detail make this book truly scary. Since this fear is both not the author's ultimate intent and not capable of contributing much to society, I felt guilty for rubbernecking, but I also had a really freaky dream about someone crawling around on the fire escape outside my bedroom window, which did even things out a bit.
Reading right now: "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", Edward Gibbon
"The Rise of Rome", Anthony Everitt
"Against Interpretation", Susan Sontag
"Nervous People and Other Satires", Mikhail Zoshchenko
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