Beats me. You're all welcome to join a book club for Tom McCarty's C over at The Weblog. We just finished a The Flame Alphabet but I didn't quite cover myself in glory. Hoping to do better on this one.
I read a good critical take on Better Angels but I can't dig it up.
I almost double-posted but apparently there's a new genie that says this when you do: Too many comments have been submitted from you in a short period of time. Please try again in a short while.
it would be cool if there was one of those for conversations
That error message has been around for a while. It doesn't necessarily prevent double-posting in all circumstances.
This is only tangentially on topic, but I've just finished the BBC adaptation of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and I can recommend it almost without qualification. I love the original and was deeply sceptical regarding its suitability for television, but the casting was perfect and the editing down judicious. The only thing I can say against it is that there's no way to capture the footnotation of the original, but that's a nitpick.
I'm still reading Discworld novels. I've been going at about one a month. Knowing me, I'm guessing I give up at about ten or so. Somebody said that it didn't get good until book three, but I think that was somebody who, despite ample evidence, underestimated how much I liked stupid puns.
4. I'm only a couple of episodes in, but I wholeheartedly agree. I'm really impressed with the adaptation and with the casting, especially for the two leads.
I also love the BBC Wolf Hall. It teetered a bit in I think the fourth episode, but overall it does a a great job of adapting a massive couple of books into a very watchable show that is pretty faithful to the tone of the original.
We are on vacation and the children are boarding at my parents'. We're having so much sex this week. Now I understand the generous impulse of my second inaugural address.
A reading group would be good but Pinker would just stir up too much acrimony - can I suggest one of the best books on politics and history I have read recently, Anatol Lieven's "Pakistan: A Hard Country"? (Going through a bit of a Pakistan phase; current reading is "The Malakand Field Force", which, blimey, definitely a period piece.)
Or we could join in Moby's Discworld project when he reaches "Guards! Guards!" or so.
I have no time to read bloody anything at all, or to play guitar. But I'd be happy to join in a reading group.
I didn't like Tom McCarty's C, though. Which felt derivate of lots of other things, and a bit shite.
7 is the opposite of me. Jammies is home to go into work for a few days and I'm solo-parenting at my parents' house. Originally it was a way to extend our vacation, but right now it feels like a disaster.
Unpleasant, but a much lower risk of assassination.
I liked "Better Angels".
I am reading novels again for the first time in years. I am trying not to jinx it by trying anything too long or too difficult. Renata Adler's Speedboat is good.
Books are natural, books are fun,
books are best when they're one-on-one
Sort of on topic: Just this morning I was asked to commit peer review for the first time in over ten years. Hopefully, I'll be able to find a conflict of interest with one of the authors.
1: I'm still rereading Flame Alphabet and would love to talk about it if you're reading too. I missed the book club timing because I do most of my reading at lunch and that one is not compatible with an appetite.
And I'd be in for just about any sort of reading group here. I haven't really delved into Discworld, so even that.
Just be sure not to volunteer for the first chapter of a Discworld book.
I've really fallen off in my reading of Serious Fiction (tm) as I've gotten older. I used to read lots of it, but these days my reading is either nonfiction, genre stuff, or stuff from the 19th century. I picked up a used copy of The Recognitions about a year ago, and while I enjoy it when I'm actually reading it, I'll put it down and not pick it back up for a month or two.
I blame the internet. And Obama.
I just looked at who the editor is. I can't really say no.
My serious reading has fallen off, like everyone else's, because of the internet. I do have a really high-quality google-doc full of books that I am planning to read someday, though. I find that when reading the internet, one can keep the google doc open and add the books with almost no interruption to internetting.
I would like to read some books from the Charleston syllabus that was going around last week - I mean, I've read a few, but I'd especially like to read some Leon Litwick and Black Reconstruction.
Honestly, I sneak theory into the SF book group that I run, so we've managed to get through some stuff on Afro-pessimism, a little Eve Sedgewick and a few other things, but that's the only way I make sure I read anything difficult now.
At the moment I'm in the process of re-reading Eichman in Jerusalem because I realized that my memory of it (I read it almost twenty years ago) really did not match up with the recent articles over at CT. What I really need is a book about the book, since I feel like I'm not able to situate it really well in the popular US understanding of the Holocaust and Israel, both of which as far as I know have changed really, really dramatically since the sixties.
I followed what I perceived as the consensus and started with Guards! Guards!. Before that I read Seraphina and Shadow Scales, so I should be an expert on dragons now, but, sadly, this seems to be yet another topic on which the experts disagree. These were all very enjoyable books.
I thought I might be having too much fun, so I started Knausgaard's My Struggle.
Just this morning I was asked to commit peer review
Aiding and a-vetting, is it?
I read his account of his traveling around the U.S. and I think that's about enough of him for me. Not that it wasn't interesting reading, but a long article was more than enough.
Cabinet is a great magazine, but it's 15 years old at this point. (I had a subscription in the mid-'00s.)
If I start in on The Black Jacobins, is anyone interested? I only read about two serious pieces of non-fiction a year, so I'll probably wrap up sometime in November.
I won't say outright that I won't participate but it would be a rare book I'd read along with others and discuss. It amazes me sometimes that I was an English major and graduate student, because the fundamental practice is so uncongenial to me and always was. A couple of months ago lurid mentioned how much she disliked it also, in terms I instantly recognized.
I benefited, particularly as an undergrad from the process for sure, but feel the returns diminished rapidly at some point. My wife on the other hand loves the practice and her book club is very important to her.
My wife gave me Worldly philosopher : the odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman, by Jeremy Adelman about two months ago. An intellectual biography, it is an outstanding book of its kind especially for a longtime fan of Hirschman like me. That in turn led me to Adelman's collection of what he considers Hirschman's most significant essays, The essential Hirschman. Many of those are new to me, not collected in the half dozen of Hirschman's books I've owned.
Those in turn have, by a process Hirschman might have called backward linkages, greatly lengthened my reading list with books I may or may not have heard of but now want very much to read. Chains of linked books identified in this way make up most of my reading and I add links and branches for years, leaving many open indefinitely. In principle I could compose a family tree of most of the books I've read in my life showing the linkages, often just a reference in passing in one to another.
The total number of unlinked "accidentals" on my chart would still be significant, but they've represented a diminishing proportion over time.
17: Can't you just invent a conflict of interest and have the whole thing go away? You just need one that no one will look into in any more detail.
"Dear [Editor's name]: I was delighted to receive your request for review. However I cannot in good conscience accept this request due to the recent conflict between myself and [author you like least] at the [deeply horrifying sexual perversion] group that meets each year at the [large professional organization]'s annual conference. I hope you understand. Yours in Science, Moby"
As long as the sexual perversion is horrifying enough that the editor won't want to ask anyone about it or be personally intrigued by the idea that there's a group for that they'll probably just adjust their opinions of you and that author accordingly and move on. If the conference you picked is large enough they might put you on a list of people not to send papers to in order to avoid learning anything like that again.
We could read Transformative Experience together!
30: But what if Editor replies, "You're into that too??? How exciting!!! Can't wait to see you at the next conference! Wink, wink!"
30: [Editor] is also in attendance at every conference I go to. And is an author on about 50% of the papers I'm an author on.
They don't, of course, list the names of the authors on the paper they want you to review. If you are close to them, you'll know. I'm not sure I could make a correct guess in this case. If I guess wrong, they'll know I'm lying.
'My contributions to an eclectic web magazine are really taking up my available time this year. Maybe next year.'
Well those are reasons to pick a really horrifying one. If it's bad enough the editor will almost certainly not want to ever talk about the fact that you admitted going to a group like that, and you'll get one of those "we're pretending that never happened right? right." situations.
Also I suppose you could claim to know who one of the authors was without specifying exactly who, and maybe toss in that you were discussing it at that group before telling them that there was some big fight afterwards (or whatever, I mean, because you'd have to vary what happened as a result of what kind of group it was in the first place). This would also have the effect of making the editor leery of any of the authors on the paper, which could be useful to you if it turns out you don't really like them after all because it would be really funny.
That's what I'm going to do, as I mentioned in 22.
Can't you just invent a conflict of interest and have the whole thing go away? You just need one that no one will look into in any more detail.
"The lead author is my bastard son. BUT HE MUST NEVER KNOW."
It's Elsevier, but still I'm going to do it.
If I start in on The Black Jacobins, is anyone interested? I only read about two serious pieces of non-fiction a year
Got a bio of CLR James queued.
Try to read two serious academic nonfiction a week, only managed 32 so far this year, even if a couple were doorstoppers.
backward linkages, greatly lengthened my reading list with books
One of my main sources is bibliographies, or actually cites and foot/endnotes. So used to academic books, I am uncomfortable reading anything serious that doesn't look like that, including blog comments. It's not that I need proof or evidence or authority or anything, it is that I see reading and writing and scholarship as a communal collaborative activity.
Don't much like Hirschman.
Boo Elsevier. I signed that pledge years ago saying I wouldn't review or publish with them. It's never come up, but back then I thought I'd try to be a good pseudo-academic. Now it feels like signing was a cheap way to feel smug about academic publishing.
Elsevier doesn't publish their journal.
As far as I know. I'm not going to google that from work.
|| What chumps! says CJ Roberts in today's episode of angry dissents from the right. And speaking of angry dissents, if the Court is affirming a dismissal for failure to state a claim, and you think the case should have been dismissed for lack of standing, shouldn't you be concurring in the judgment, rather than dissenting? |>
They don't, of course, list the names of the authors on the paper they want you to review
One subfield's "of course" is another's "bizarrely".
|| Welcome to Groundhog Day says Scalia in an angry concurrence. Why? Ask the nearest hippie. |>
The review is like Oedipus after the episode with the dress pins. Double blind.
My reading has really slowed down relative to last year, and my productivity hasn't increased as much. Oh well.
|| It's too bad that neither Kagan nor Sotomayor would sign on to Breyer's 'fuck this shit' dissent, though. |>
28. Black Jacobins sounds interesting. I'd add it to what I'm reading, and I'd talk some. Probably too thin an audience for here though.
I don't have definite ideas for a good forum, maybe others do. I'd prefer open to closed. Goodreads supports online groups, maybe either that or a google+ community would work.
My 14 yo kid is reading my copy of Independent People. I'm setting up in a new place and most of my books are in boxes, I'm not reading any fiction now.
IMO reviewing is a public service. The issue I run into with weak papers is that the authors are unwilling to do additional work especially if the extra work shows the result or method as less fabulous than the first draft. Then it's up to the editor to mediate or enforce.
IMO reviewing is a public service.
Exactly. That's why my first instinct is to see if I can get out of it.
I read a few books a week as a singleton, but TV eats enough hours as a couple that I rarely complete multiple novels in a week--even YA, unless we get in some Sunday afternoon reading.
I go through cycles of reading fiction, getting bored of fiction/wanting to learn something new, delving into non-fiction for a few books, then coming back to fiction again. I'm currently nearing the end of a fiction phase.
If we do a group reading of 50 Shades of Grey I'll totally participate.
58: 100% down with that too. Although probably the only way I would read 50 Shades is in a book club here or maybe out loud with friends in a situation where you can add commentary as you read. An ex and I had a very pleasant road trip where we read Dan Brown like that.
I'm way behind on any reading that isn't either work related or blogs/twitter (the latter of which I feel I'm spending way to much time reading). I've slowly been making my way through Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy as bedtime reading (about a third of the way through the second book). It's very good.
I bounced off the first one of those hard. The narrator was several stories underground on the disturbingly biomorphic/organic spiral staircase as she realized that the other member of the research team was controlling her and her companion through post-hypnotic suggestion (this is maybe a little garbled? But close), and I couldn't care even a little.
I'm not sure what I wanted from it that I wasn't getting. That summary sounds like the sort of thing that should have been engaging, but I found it entirely not.
Fifty Shades is, from what little I've read, hilarious.
There's a bit where Grey pulls the narrator's earlobes and she says "it was so sexual". Mmm, earlobe-tugging.
Do they get around to the thing with the cup?
|| Really, though, Thomas' dissent in the redistricting case is a classic of the genre: 'you came to the right result for the wrong reason, but I'm dissenting rather than concurring because I don't want the stats to make it look like I agree with you, and I write separately just to emphasize what a bunch of hypocrites you all are, pretending to care about citizen initiatives, when you routinely ignore or overturn them as, eg, in the case of marriage inequality.' No one would believe it if you wrote this as fiction. |>
We just finished a The Flame Alphabet but I didn't quite cover myself in glory.
I *could not* read The Flame Alphabet and I'm not exactly sure why. Just intense dislike and I stopped about 50 pages in.
I liked but didn't love Authority, but will continue because I'm curious. I needed more answers, I think.
I use Goodreads groups a lot, and I enjoy it, but mainly for light reading and discussion of genre (SFF) fiction.
61: Those books all read to me as super-duper Ballard influenced, so it's not surprising that you came away feeling that "engagement" wasn't on the menu.
Huh. But Ballard himself, I did find engaging, back in the day. Or, that's not the right word, but nothing like the total failure to care enough to turn more pages VanderMeer inspired in me; reading Ballard was something that I did, as entertainment.
This sounds like a criticism of the books, but it's not, really: I didn't form any kind of judgment that the first one was badly written in any particular way, just that I had no interest at all in what was on the next page.
I would definitely read 31.
I feel as if I've read FSoG because I could not stop reading someone on the internet's very funny chapter summaries, for all three books. Can't find her right now.
18: Thorn, I'm giving myself an amnesty on the Marcus (I originally wrote TFA but that was confusing) so I can get into C with everyone else, which is a bit easier going. But you should check out the discussion -- there's some good stuff, and Pat will probably gab you up about it if you drop into comments.
Yeah, I may buy C and just read all the posts and comments without finishing the first one. I did read a bit of the blog this morning.
71? ok
Reading Rosa Briadotti, cause she's good for me
Reading a book on the discourse of Japanese Marxists/JCP historians, mostly 1945-1955, very nearly month-by-month, as they fit theory with the Occupying Army, the Cold War, China next door,, and local political conditions. Most of them had been laying low, in prison, in exile. A whole lot died...miss Tosaka Jun and Miki Kiyoshi.
But the David Pavon Cuellar on Lacan is such a fucking hoot. Need to read a couple more books to see if the Marxian subtext in Lacan is as strong as Cuellar claims.
For y'all,enjoy:
As noted above, the real subject is only the enunciating workforce of his unconscious. He is the proletarianized force that does the work of the signifying structure for his structural position. Correlatively, this real structure is the Other who articulates the discourse that is only expressed by the real subject.The enunciation of a discourse can be divided between its articulation by the real structure of a language, as the enunciating work system of the unconscious, and its expression by the real subject, as the enunciating workforce of the structure. Logically, this enunciating workforce cannot be the subject matter of the resulting enunciated discourse.
Now, between the culture and the cultural identity, there is a flagrant contradiction, but also an attempt at a compromise and reconciliation. The revolutionary tries to come to an arrangement and acts in concert with his counter-revolutionary culture. To this end, he undertakes a sort of dialogue that is, in reality, a monologue of the culture with itself, or, more precisely, a monologue of the structure with one of the structural positions that compose it
Actually, as 'the unconscious', the Lacanian Other 'is politics' (Lacan, 1966-1967, 10.05.67). In the structure, it is what 'links men' and 'opposes them' as signifiers (ibid.). As the living unconscious Other, the political thing results from the personification and animation of the signifying social structure through those who desire and negotiate their symbolic recognition in the structure. That involves a personal action that is unconsciously executed, by the structure, through its structural positions, or political positioning, such as that of the revolutionary.
When Lacan states that 'the unconscious is politics', he thereby 'situates the unconscious in a trans-individual dimension' (Miller, 2003, p. 112). In this dimension, the unconscious can be regarded, at first sight, as a 'relation' (ibid.). It can be regarded as a social interaction or a dialogue between internalized individual subjects. However, on second thoughts, we have already understood that this dialogue represents, rather, a monologue of the structure, since the internalized individual subjects are nothing more than positions that belong to the same signifying social structure.
You're welcome. Will help if you choose this for the group reading.
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I can't remember if I learned about it here, but if I didn't, the word bears spreading: ekranoplan simulator forthcoming!
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I have been in the habit of buying what little fiction I consume these days based on authors whose Twitter presence I like. It turns out this is a non-optimal way of selecting books.
I'm currently bogged down in Everyth!ng I Ne/ver T0ld Y0u, which so far seems to be checking all the boxes on the bingo card of MFA-d-to-death first novel. If I read one more adorably observational sentence I'm going to scream.
Also, thanks, Frowner, for the link to the complete Charleston Syllabus. I kept seeing bits and pieces float by on Twitter and knew that someone must be compiling them.
Late, but I'll mention a book to skip. Stephenson's Seveneves. It is as if he set out to do a book that was nearly all tell and no show. Reading his note at the end, the story he really wanted to tell was the last part. All the rest was world building material. Oh and this just bugged me (semi-cryptic minor SPOILER): Orion?
Since I actually did manage to read Piketty, I'd be in for the CLR James. I guess I would otherwise, but I actually think I'll read it.
I've been taking recommendations from right here - Wages of Destruction just arrived, for my upcoming vacation.
nosflow, I would totally do a Transformative Experience ragging group.
76: just finished it and I agree but don't follow the Orion reference. Can you be less cryptic?
Have any of you gotten back into reading? I am not into reading, and I'm pretty sure that I used to be a reader, possibly even a good one. Parents of children older than 2, do you get it back?
If you want a book I just reviewed one: http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2015/06/21/the-affinities-facebook-that-doesnt-suck-and-the-consequences/
Unfogged is totally an app that finds the people you can best fail to get things done with...
76: yes. The problems of scarcity that novel blithely passes over is startling, for one thing.
83. If you need lots of heavy-lift off of Earth and you have no reason to care for the environment, then Project Orion is the way to go. Hell, it also gets you to cis-lunar orbit (or beyond). But he doesn't use it or even address it. Such a SciFi thing that I kept waiting for the shoe to drop.
At the start of the book I began to wonder if it was all going to be inner monologuing mixed with the omniscient narrator. Where's the dialog. He did bring some in, but man, what a clunky book. And I love As you know Bob usually.
I liked The Affinities. For quite a bit of it I was thinking it was well-written fan service. (Fans are Slans.) But he wrapped it up by making it more ambiguous.