anorthite

Finalllllly sitting down at a ridiculous hour after letting the Read and Want to Discuss stack pile up to insurmountable heights for months. Now I can't remember all the really *important* and *insightful* things I wanted to say. This is genuinely a dismal selection of books and I did read more but then had an enormous slump in every possible way, so here we are. Next time I will be sure to write about more cheerful topics like geology, divine retribution, and maps.

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STILL no "things I am reading pt. insanity" has been produced, will be complaining to management. Hence no "year in review" for 1) not like the others reasons, 2) I don't have energy, 3) it would be deranged. Spoiler alert though: all the books I've read recently have been like ... tantalizing glimpses at the Subject I want but not enough of the real thing. Cue endless moaning about how nobody has written the perfect book/is rotating the same cube in their mind that I am rotating.

Anyway, this book is in essence about the way we in secular modernity are seeking elements of of Durkheim's sacred in our own lives, and so it's pretty appropriate that I read it in pretty much the most non-substance-affiliated altered mindset possible, which was: all in one day, starting at 5 am when the dog woke me up, and finishing on a 6 hr road-trip with a migraine while listening to Mahler.

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 After taking nearly three quarters of an hour to boot up my computer and rage quitting the AT&T account sign in page, I'm here in my happy place where technology has not proceeded past HTML and CSS.

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note --> --> omg I should do this for music except for the fact that I'm a Terrible person when it comes with having a sense of time and remembering to do stuff.

Things I am reading roundup by a things I am reading delinquent.

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 "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