http://jamesjbrownjr.net
English professor
Teaches and studies rhetoric and digital studies
Director of the Rutgers-Camden Digital Studies Center (DiSC): http://digitalstudies.camden.rutgers.edu
China Miéville's brilliant reading of the modern world's most controversial and enduring political document: the …
A book about how to read
Baloraziorik ez
A book about how to read, and a wonderful demonstration of the method. This is about the Manifesto, it's history, its debates, its import, but it's also just about how to read generously and rigorously:
“The only reasonable way to read the Manifesto - or anything - is to be as flexible as the text itself.”
“We should strive to read as generously as possible - and to read ruthlessly beyond that generosity’s limits.”
One of the best books I've read, full stop. It made me want to dig back into Miéville's fiction, especially since The City and The City is another favorite of mine.
In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving …
meditative time travel novel
Baloraziorik ez
This started slow for me, but I did eventually get into it. It could easily be staged as a play, and I think the time travel piece is somewhat interesting (though, the author does try to get around the inevitable plot holes of a time travel story with a series of unexplained "rules").
What if the world broke and the only written evidence was authored by a self-absorbed, retired school teacher who took pride in his prize-winning poultry?
This book is really interesting. Published in 1939, it has lots to say about the coming war and colonialism.
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike--either free and equal …
An account of how unimaginative we seem to be at the moment
Baloraziorik ez
How else could we organize ourselves? How did we lose "the ability freely to recreate ourselves by recreating our relations with one another"?
This book gets into the weeds of anthropology and archaeology, but it's "zoom out" moments are really interesting. The Rousseau/Hobbes debate leaves out much and, they argue, makes everything much more boring than in actually is, given the actual data available about previous social arrangements.
How did we get stuck? We have forgotten that social organization have been a matter of play, tinkering, and sometimes is even dependent on things like seasonal changes. It feels like we are in the least playful and least imaginative epoch, succumbing to the ideology of Thatcher's "There is no alternative."
One interesting set of arguments in the book is about scale. Received wisdom says that structures of domination are tied to population scaling up. Larger, more dense populations means complexity, which …
How else could we organize ourselves? How did we lose "the ability freely to recreate ourselves by recreating our relations with one another"?
This book gets into the weeds of anthropology and archaeology, but it's "zoom out" moments are really interesting. The Rousseau/Hobbes debate leaves out much and, they argue, makes everything much more boring than in actually is, given the actual data available about previous social arrangements.
How did we get stuck? We have forgotten that social organization have been a matter of play, tinkering, and sometimes is even dependent on things like seasonal changes. It feels like we are in the least playful and least imaginative epoch, succumbing to the ideology of Thatcher's "There is no alternative."
One interesting set of arguments in the book is about scale. Received wisdom says that structures of domination are tied to population scaling up. Larger, more dense populations means complexity, which means hierarchy, and hierarchy becomes "chains of command," and thus the origins of the state. Thus, once populations grow, certain freedoms are left to the side. But the book questions this kind of story by pointing to any number of non-linear movements between systems of social organization that do not follow this pattern. This is the trick of the book - to tell the received story and then show how that story cannot account for a mountain of evidence that contradicts it. For instance, Bureacracy did not emerge in large communities to manage massive amounts of information but insted first emerged in small communities.
I almost wish there was a "pamphlet" version of this argument, one that left much of the anthropological record deep in footnotes (or just referred to this book) and hit all the high notes and "big" arguments.
The afterword by Donna Tartt in the Overlook Press edition taught me that this book was taught in Honors English classes and then fell out of favor (probably due to the John Wayne film based on it).
Welcome to Grouse County, somewhere in the Midwest, where the towns are small but the …
Amazing Portrait of the U.S. Midwest
Baloraziorik ez
Edukiari buruzko abisua
mentions a large plot point toward the end of the novel
A pretty amazing picture of midwestern life. Beautifully written. There was a pretty intense depiction of preeclampsia and the death of a child, but it was done in a way that most books can't pull off. It didn't feel exploitative (still tough to read, especially if you've had any personal experience with traumatic pregnancies), and I appreciated the way it handled the couple's difficulties dealing with it while also not making it the centerpiece of the novel.
Beginning in 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work …
Pandemic novel about generational strife
Baloraziorik ez
I didn't expect this pandemic/space travel novel to be so much about children who are disappointing their parents.
This felt more like an interconnected collection of short stories in the same world than a novel. In that sense, it was similar to Rion Amilcar Scott's The World Doesn't Require you.
When We Cease to Understand the World, but a novel
Baloraziorik ez
If you liked Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World, then you'll like this.
I can't imagine the amount of research into mathematics and physics that McCarthy had to do in order to write both this and The Passenger.
A final note: There is significant overlap in the worldview of Alicia and No Country For Old Men's Anton Chigurh, which really has me wondering about the worldview of Cormac McCarthy...because that worldview is pretty bleak.
The story of the inner and outer life of Anna, a young writer, single mother …
what gets left out
Baloraziorik ez
Not so sure what to say about this one or what to think about it. It's long, and at times tedious, but it's also really interesting. It offers a picture of both the cynicism and hope embedded in socialist and communist circles during the middle 20th Century. It also is very focused on the act of "naming"...and how that act pins things down, "buttons them up," and sometimes even gives relief.
A novel about the process of writing a novel, about translating experience into something else, and about how that act of translation will always leave something out.
In this exhilarating novel, two friends--often in love, but never lovers--come together as creative partners …
If-then
Baloraziorik ez
At it's best moments, this book does a really great job of being both about games and evoking the if-then logic of games and game decision points. It also has interesting stuff about game engines (how they shape and constrain creation) and collaboration (the Jobs+Woz dynamic of a salesperson and a designer). It also feels like it was written for late Gen-X or early Millenials - references to Donkey Kong, Oregon Trail, Everquest, etc.
I think I would've liked it more if it were shorter...I liked the first half much better than the second, and some of that is because the latter half ends up pulling in mass shootings and 9-11 in a way that didn't feel like it connected with the core of the novel.
I should add that I listened to this, and I do think reading it would provide even more of that if-then logic. It's hard …
At it's best moments, this book does a really great job of being both about games and evoking the if-then logic of games and game decision points. It also has interesting stuff about game engines (how they shape and constrain creation) and collaboration (the Jobs+Woz dynamic of a salesperson and a designer). It also feels like it was written for late Gen-X or early Millenials - references to Donkey Kong, Oregon Trail, Everquest, etc.
I think I would've liked it more if it were shorter...I liked the first half much better than the second, and some of that is because the latter half ends up pulling in mass shootings and 9-11 in a way that didn't feel like it connected with the core of the novel.
I should add that I listened to this, and I do think reading it would provide even more of that if-then logic. It's hard to pay close attention to structure (the book does some interesting stuff with chapter titles and branching logics at one point that doesn't translate as well in an audiobook).
"How to salvage the ‘techno social’...without falling back into offline romanticism?"
Baloraziorik ez
Lovink writes like Adorno - a steady march of aphorisms, arranged in paragraphs. This is worth reading for a set of observations about how to reimagine the internet after platforms:
"The proposition here is a renewed notion of social networks with an emphasis on caring, tools for intergenerational computation that serve problem-resolution on all levels of the stack of crises. This is embedded thinking in which the question no longer is what we can do with the never-ending stream of downloadable apps that come and go from TikTok, Ethereum, Dall-E, Zoom and Clubhouse to BeReal and their hidden extractivism agendas. Let’s stop building Web3 solutions for problems that do not exist and launch tools that decolonize, redistribute value, conspire and organize." (48)
Told entirely through clever and captivating Slack messages, …
Laughed out loud the entire time.
Baloraziorik ez
This is the funniest book I've ever read. If you spend any work time on Slack (or just on the internet in general), it's worth a read. I laughed out loud, something I never do when reading.
I'm including books that I read for research here, meaning that I'm including books that I skim or "read around" in. This was one of those books.
This is an interesting guide for organizing, and it's pretty specifically focused on the interpersonal dimensions of organizing. My main focus at the moment is the infrastructure of organizing, and that gets less attention in this book.
One thing that occurred to me while reading this book (a really obvious point that probably is more about my own gaps in knowledge than the book itself) was that organizing tends to begin from specific issues or campaigns and then spiders outward to question of infrastructure, sustainability, and eventually broader structural change. Organizing tends to be inductive, and I guess I'd never really thought about that prior to reading Mann's description of campaigns like the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union. What began as a specific …
I'm including books that I read for research here, meaning that I'm including books that I skim or "read around" in. This was one of those books.
This is an interesting guide for organizing, and it's pretty specifically focused on the interpersonal dimensions of organizing. My main focus at the moment is the infrastructure of organizing, and that gets less attention in this book.
One thing that occurred to me while reading this book (a really obvious point that probably is more about my own gaps in knowledge than the book itself) was that organizing tends to begin from specific issues or campaigns and then spiders outward to question of infrastructure, sustainability, and eventually broader structural change. Organizing tends to be inductive, and I guess I'd never really thought about that prior to reading Mann's description of campaigns like the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union. What began as a specific campaign and set of demands eventually became a broader organizing space and effort.